Banks royal commission Rowena Orr slams CBA for figures, not facts

Counsel assisting the royal commission, Rowena Orr QC, has blasted CBA for swamping the inquiry with spreadsheets.

Senior counsel Rowena Orr

Counsel assisting the financial services royal commission, Rowena Orr, QC, has blasted Australia’s biggest bank, CBA, for swamping the inquiry with spreadsheets rather than coming clean about misconduct over the past 10 years.

Ms Orr also slammed NAB for its submission, which she said “did not grapple” with commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s request for a full confession of misconduct and conduct falling short of community standards and expectations.

Westpac last night also admitted it still needed to provide more information, she said.

Ms Orr this morning opened its first full public hearing by running through the main issues to be examined in the coming fortnight — home loans, car loans, credit cards, add-on insurance, overdrafts and account administration errors.

She said CBA’s first submission to the royal commission was at a “high level” and failed to disclose the full extent of misconduct or conduct that fell below community expectations, “as a number of other entities had done”.

A second submission last month was “not in a form that made it possible to understand the scale” of CBA’s issues, she said.

It contained “a large volume of spreadsheets containing ‘all details of compliance incidents” that had been lodged since 1 January 2013.”

However, these “compliance incidents” included potential problems as well as actually ones, she said.

She also took aim at CBA for including just eight paragraphs about problems at its mortgage broker, Aussie Home Loans, in its submission.

“Aussie acknowledged no misconduct in the past 10 years,” she said.

However, in response to a second request for information the CBA produced a spreadsheet outlining misconduct by Aussie over the past five years, including seven events of irresponsible lending and eight incidents relating to homeloans “including falsification of documents”.

Ms Orr said that since 2010, the banks have had to pay back almost $730m to compensate customers hurt by misconduct or shoddy behaviour in consumer credit areas including home loans, credit cards and car loans.

NAB’s network of mortgage introducers, who bring potential home loan borrowers to the bank in return for a commission, is to be the first area probed by the commission.