Banking royal commission: Blowtorch on big banks following deadline failure

BIG Aussie financial institutions have risked the wrath of the silks overseeing the banking royal commission, saying they will fail to meet a critical deadline to hand over information.

SOME of Australia’s biggest financial institutions are on notice after warning they will not meet a key deadline to hand over information for the banking royal commission.

And commissioner Kenneth Hayne QC has warned banks and other financial services companies against trying to gag whistleblowers.

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In the opening public hearing today, Mr Hayne said he had written to big banks and other major financial companies in December.

They were asked to provide information including examples of misconduct or situations where conduct had fallen short of community expectations over the past 10 years.

Former High Court judge Kenneth Hayne QC is leading the royal commission into misconduct in the Australian financial services industry.

They had until January 29 to provide their responses, but Mr Hayne said today that he was not satisfied with the amount of detail some of the institutions provided.

On February 2, he wrote to some of the “large respondents” requesting more information, with a deadline of 4pm tomorrow, February 13.

Some but not all had replied to say they could not meet that deadline, Mr Hayne said.

Their inability to provide such information in the required time frame “is itself a matter to which further attention will have to be given”, he said.

Anna Bligh is chief executive of the banking industry lobby group, the Australian Bankers’ Association. Picture: Kym Smith

Mr Hayne did not reveal today whether the big banks — the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ and National Australia Bank — were among the institutions in question.

But the banks were among those asked in December to provide information to the commission, and have been the subject of a series of scandals in recent years about poor conduct.

The public hearing in Melbourne today was the first for the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.

Starting at 10am, it went for about an hour as Mr Hayne, the commissioner, and Rowena Orr QC, the senior counsel assisting, outlined how the event would unfold.

The major banks are among the institutions in the spotlight as part of the royal commission.

Among key dates, an interim report is due to be handed to the government by September 30, with a final report due next February 1.

Mr Hayne also backflipped on a warning against financial services victims or whistleblowers breaching gag orders in submissions to the inquiry.

The commission last week advised that submissions should not include material that breached nondisclosure or non-disparagement clauses in deals settling their disputes with the industry.

However, Mr Hayne warned today that any institution that tried to enforce a gag clause against a person giving a submission faced “immediate consequences”.

Ms Orr also released some of the early figures after the commission called for public submissions.

Macca’s perspective.

So far, more than 385 submissions have been made by consumers using the commission’s online form.

The number of submissions was increasing every week, Ms Orr said.

Almost half relate to the banking industry, with the next biggest category covering the superannuation sector, at 18 per cent.

Queensland accounts for the biggest number of responses, at 110, followed by Victoria, with 106, and New South Wales at 95.

People from South Australia and Tasmania have made the least submissions, at 17 and fewer than 10 respectively.