Loan applications falsified
As a minor Westpac shareholder I was amazed today to read in the Sydney Morning Herald that Westpac is reported to have paid $7.6m in compensation to customers for the fraudulent conduct of its subsidiary RAMS, by falsifying loan application details.
Over a decade ago I discovered that a Westpac bank manager had done that to farmers applying for a loan to purchase a property that had been recommended to them by that bank manager.
In another case decades ago Westpac allowed a young widow with young children to guarantee her brother’s business loan with a mortgage over her home. She had no financial or business knowledge at all. When the brother’s business failed Westpac sold up her home leaving her homeless.
Bank theft exempt from prosecution??
Why is the Federal Government not currently prosecuting the Westpac directors for fraud and breach of Corporations law. Why is Westpac allowed to hold a banking licence at all when its customers could easily be spread around other banks?
Ordinary thieves go to gaol
SMH also reports today on a mother and teens breaking into shops and stealing up to $150,000. That family could end up in gaol for far less criminality than Westpac directors who share glass of wine around the boardroom table ridiculing the customers whose lives they have ruined.
We Australian bank customers do not have to put up with it
Bank directors are elected and paid handsomely to direct the bank’s operations in a way that is honest and helpful to customers. That responsibility requires them to ensure the design, application and monitoring of systems to do that. That’s their job!! We customers and shareholders do not have to put up with this sort of dishonesty, incompetence and neglect of duty. The responsibility for favouring dishonest bank directors lies with our federal Members of Parliament and their political parties.
It is up to the voters!
We need to remove our bank customer hats and put on our Voter hats and ask our MPs to have the bank directors prosecute3d and gaoled for their many offences against customers. The idea of regulatory authorities sitting down and working with banks to get their systems right is just nonsense. The authorities have been conned into believing it is IT or systems that is at fault. It is not. The banks were doing this long before our kind politicians removed the regulations to allow banks to rob their customers.
Gaol for directors
It is like Ned Kelly in reverse but Ned had more justification than the bank directors do for highway robbery. Big Bank Billions have been earned on the back of fraudulently lending money to people who could never afford the loans, then robbing them blind with penalty interest rates for years, before selling them up. Gaol is the most appropriate place for Westpac directors right now. That might wake up the directors of the other banks who also make their profits and fees by directing staff to entrap customers in unaffordable loans.