Macquarie group ASIC -Kandal Nothing new in Australian business

It is difficult to keep an eye on the scandals that currently have the elite of the Australian business. Yesterday, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission announced that Macquarie Securities is suing for more than a decade of false reports for “repeated and systemic misleading behavior”. The number of sales is in several hundred million and could exceed a billion.

For those who remember, in the global financial crisis, calls to the temporary ban on short sales pictures (essentially the bond of shares in the hope that their price would decrease), but the Rudd government decided instead to make the report mandatory. Macquarie Securities has not extensively reported its short business in the 15 years since then. What was the total value of these business? We don't know, but it is considerably – potentially enormous. And how much have investors lost or won? We don't know that either.

The ASIC chairman Joe Longo did not draw his blows and phrases such as “repeated systemic failure”, “serious neglect”, “disregard for operational controls and technological governance”, “continuous concerns”, “self -suffering” and “Hubris” -not only using Macquarie's value papers, but the entire makquarium group.

Let's add this to the list:

• Only last month, the Prudential Regulator beat another additional investment requirement on anxiety because of concerns regarding non -financial risk management. That was that third Additional investment requirements have been imposed in the past six years. ASIC continues to examine a bond trade from 2023. There was also the indictment of dead.
• It is the failure of the large banks to repay millions of fees to millions of income recipients that are held on inappropriate high fairy accounts.
• There is the Australian competition and the persecution of Coles and Woolworths by the consumer commission for false discounts. This is followed by the ACCC supreme for ghost flights that the Gouging airline settled. Then there is Austrac's case about money laundering against the BASKET -Gambling operator Star Casino, which has not been forgotten that it still has great governance and cultural problems after the government of NSW has allowed to continue operating.
• This is before we come to the scandals via mineral resources that are exposed to transactions with a related party and tax deviation. After the company's stock price was picked up of around $ 10, it is still a fraction of its level in early 2024. And the chef of the boss chef of the business scandal, the dirty events at Wisetech, where the countless scandals around LinkedIn Lecher Richard White saw the independent directors of the board and independent directors from Ensign and Mass.
• And let's not forget the scandal for sexual harassment in nine entertainment or the “humiliating, soul-inserting” seven network (and for fun we could do the Dick-Pic, which also did not throw in a scandal).

This is the cream of Corporate Australia – the Big Banks, the Duopoly, ShareMarket Darling, the Monopolist airline, prominent resource companies and large media companies. They are guided by managers who like to teach the rest of us about how desperately we follow their urge and “reform” the economy (inevitably by reducing wages and conditions, increasing GST and reducing corporate tax).

But like that Financial review Anthony Macdonald today had another spectacular example of the disclosure of a bad market by a locally listed company.

It is a special question for the greatest superfunds of Australia who have almost no capacity for local investment and pump our pension savings in overseas in search of risk -like, high -ranking investments. Of course, many of these funds – from the cream of the labor movement as well as employer and business top bodies – have their own scandals in terms of poor customer service, since they do not cope with the transition from the accumulation and investment in the capital in the payment of an aging population.

In view of the probability of six years of work rule, is there a respected personality under Australian business, which the Albanese government would like to invite, for example, to a summit via tax policy in order to satisfy our rotating tax reform needs? Who would be the current equivalent of Bob White in the Hawke -era, the CEO of the Bank of NSW, now Westpac, and who played a key role in the bridging shops and the unions at the time?

Only the CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, Matt Comyn, who remembers CBA's own scandals in the recent past, has to take part in public order from the company elite, including a massive fine for money laundering.

You would not select anyone from the Macquarie board -and remarkably not even the former RBA governor Glenn Stevens, who has been in the Macquarie board since 2018, and since the beginning of 2022 in the Macquarie board and the company chairman since the beginning of 2022. Right, Stevens has expressed frustration last week about poor conformity, but that was only after Asic the company had repeatedly repeated other problems. Stevens knew that the regulatory authority had far more serious fees.

If the company sector continues to be the rest of us under the lecture and able to take a seat with imperfection and credibility at the guideline square, he has to massively raise his game.