Westpac rejects claim ‘whistleblower’ was mistreated

Lindsay Maxsted has rejected claims former financial crime executive Amanda Wood was a whistleblower who was mistreated.

Westpac’s interim CEO Peter King at the AGM in Sydney on Thusday. Picture: AAP

Westpac has rejected strongly suggestions that a whistleblower is responsible for some of the damning allegations surrounding the bank’s multiple transgressions of anti-money-laundering legislation.

At the Westpac annual meeting on Thursday, chairman Lindsay Maxsted contested the portrayal of Amanda Wood, a former financial crime executive, as a whistleblower.

In response to a shareholder question, he said it was “incorrect reporting” to say that Ms Wood had been punished and demoted after commenting internally that an Austrac civil penalty action was likely.

It was also wrong to say that the bank discouraged staff from speaking up on issues of concern.

“Far, far from it,” the chairman said. “(This is not) an episode of a whistleblower being treated poorly.”

From May 2017 to May 2019, Ms Wood was Westpac money laundering reporting officer — the bank’s focal point for interaction with Austrac over anti-money- laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws.

After leading the response to Austrac’s investigation for 10 months and regularly briefing the board’s compliance committee, Ms Wood was told last May that the bank wanted an MLRO with more international experience.

She knocked back a different job on the same pay with less responsibility, instead accepting a redundancy and starting up an AML consultancy business.

Earlier this month, Ms Wood said in a media interview that Westpac lacked an ethical culture, and that there was internal backlash against her after she raised red flags about compliance and warned that the bank was likely to incur an Austrac civil penalty.

Mr Maxsted denied Ms Wood, who has been described as a whistleblower by Labor MP Andrew Leigh, was fired.

“We were trying to strengthen the organisation in terms of capability,” he said.

Independent expert Promontory Financial Group is looking into executive and staff accountability for Westpac’s compliance disaster.

Ground zero for the most serious charges of facilitating child exploitation in The Philippines is the LitePay product, which links 12 of the bank’s customers to suspicious payments.

Promontory’s first priority has been to look at the proximity of key Westpac players to LitePay.

When the product was launched in August 2016, it was equipped with detection monitoring scenarios issued by Austrac at the time. In December of the same year, Austrac issued updated scenarios but Westpac persisted with the same monitoring standards.

The bank already had the 12 customers under monitoring processes before it received Austrac’s statement of claim last month, and had failed suspicious matter reports to each of them in response to alerts from the existing detection scenarios and other processes.

However, if the updated scenarios had been added, it would have triggered more suspicious matter reports.