Shayne’s no stranger to danger

Illustration: Rod Clement.

ANZ boss Shayne Elliott has survived an extraordinary array of scandals. But will the $6.2 million man be able to dodge ACCC boss Rod Sims?

Like Tom Cruise ’s Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, danger has never been far from Elliott during his 2½ years in charge of the $77 billion, Melbourne-headquartered bank.

But somehow the 54-year-old Kiwi-accented vegan dodges whatever laser alarm system, Indian billionaire couple or Twitter-triggered defamation case presents itself.

Just as remarkably, Elliott — the self-appointed “most agile banker in Australia” — has become the progressive face of Big Four banking. Hats off to ANZ’s media team for that achievement.

The latest threat to tribal leader Elliott is the criminal cartel charges by Sims’ ACCC against the bank’s treasurer Rick Moscati over ANZ’s $2.5bn capital raising in August 2015.

The ACCC has also charged a who’s who of Australian investment banking who advised ANZ on the placement. More on them soon.

As has become customary in ANZ banking scandals, Elliott is not far away.

In 2015 Moscati — who has since been promoted to be Elliott’s chief risk officer — was, as ANZ’s treasurer, a direct report to Elliott, who was then chief financial officer.

Melbourne-based Elliott and Moscati were in constant communication in those two roles, together overseeing then CEO Mike Smith ’s balance sheet.

In its comments to date, the bank has backed Moscati entirely.

To be clear, the ACCC didn’t lay any charges against Elliott. Margin Call isn’t suggesting that Elliott has done anything wrong (or unagile).

But ANZ chair David Gonski would hardly need his friend and former AMP chair Catherine Brenner to tell him these are febrile times in the Australian banking sector.

A step ahead

Elliott’s talent for being a step from scandal is without peer.

As head of ANZ’s institutional bank Elliott survived hiring “colourful” investment banker Steve Bellotti as the Hong Kong-loving head of ANZ’s global markets division.

Court proceedings launched by disgruntled employees later portrayed the division — then part of Elliott’s empire — as an incubator of a drugs-and-stripper-loving culture. That matter was settled out of court.

It’s far from the “new way of working” at ANZ that Elliott loves prattling about in the gentler pastures of the financial press.

Then there was the protracted brawl Elliott oversaw with customers Pankaj and Radhika Oswal, the flamboyant billionaire Indian tycoons, over a dispute about the wind up and sale of their Australian fertiliser business.

ANZ settled the matter on undisclosed terms and took an additional pre-tax charge of $145 million to its accounts. The bank denied that an employee ever put Pankaj in a headlock.

Elliott is also tied up in a South East Asian scandal.

Before he was CEO, Elliott was a director of Malaysia’s controversial AmBank, in which ANZ has a 24 per cent stake. Selling that is one of the thornier challenges for Elliott’s successor as CFO, former investment banker Michelle Jablko (whose hiring, we would be remiss to forget, was followed by defamation proceedings that threatened to engulf Elliott — once again, the boss escaped, this time through an undisclosed settlement).

The AmBank scandal isn’t done yet. The shock election loss by the now former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak — who is alleged to have siphoned $900 million into his personal bank accounts with AmBank — has elevated the scandal into something far more dangerous than the Oswals or even Angus Aitken.

ANZ remains embroiled in the controversy with a class action now pursuing it for the lost Malaysian funds.

Shayne “Houdini” Elliott is no longer on the board.

Cash converter

Expect crazy brave Rod Sims to be thumping on Treasurer Scott Morrison ’s door for a cash advance now the competition watchdog has struck at the apex of investment banking.

ScoMo’s $700 million penalty from Matt Comyn ’s CBA for breaching terror financing and anti-money laundering laws might, at least in part, be straight out the door to the ACCC and Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions, which has laid charges alleging criminal conduct against some of the market’s most senior bankers.

Deutsche Bank, ANZ and Citigroup all deny wrongdoing. The threatened criminal charges could see some of this market’s most senior bankers go to jail, so expect the land’s leading barristers and lawyers to be engaged in the legal fight of the year.

It’s great news for real estate agents in Mosman and Toorak.

For the Germans, veteran ECM banker Michael Richardson (now at Merrills) was last night charged over ANZ’s capital raising, along with the former head of DB down under, Michael Ormaechea, 54.

A trio from Citi are charged: former boss Stephen Roberts, 61 (hell of a way to see in retirement), managing director John McLean and global head of foreign exchange Itay Tuchman, 39.

Last night their banking peers were reeling over the charges relating to what many describe as market standard practise.

Several remarked that the action by the regulator could kill the market for underwritten raisings at least until the matter is resolved.

But they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Nope, not me

So who blew the whistle on the cover up of the $739 million shortfall on ANZ’s $2.5 billion raising?

All eyes are on the investment bank in ANZ’s trio of advisers that hasn’t been charged: JPMorgan.

Its rivals would love the market to believe the leading broker dumped its key client ANZ to save its bacon.

Ridiculous. That would sound the death knell for the American banking giant’s equity capital markets operation in Oz, something local boss Paul Uren (who was co-head of investment banking at the time of the ANZ raising) wouldn’t jump to eagerly.

Andrew Best, an almost
30-year JPMorgan investment banking veteran who also played a key role in the deal team, is still at JPMorgan and would feel the same way.

So who dunnit?

But what about former JPMorgan operatives, particularly those that have left the bank since the fateful raising?

Nothing ridiculous about asking that question.

It wasn’t the investment bank’s former Australian vice chairman Grant Dempsey. He is now at ANZ advising on strategy.

Strike him off the suspects’ list.

What about Richard Galvin, who took over as head of ECM at JPMorgan locally in
mid-2015, just ahead of the ANZ raising in August?

Galvin’s tenure in the top job lasted just a year, before he was replaced by his former junior Jabe Jerram.

As Margin Call revealed back in 2016, Galvin’s was not a happy ending. A year later he emerged at the British Virgin Islands-domiciled fintech fundie Digital Asset Capital Management as its boss.

Galvin did not respond to contact from Margin Call.

Before Galvin, the head of ECM at JPM was David Gray, who’d been a straight shooter in the gig for six years. He moved to a senior advisory role weeks ahead of the ANZ deal.

By the end of 2015 Gray left to establish his own boutique operation Insight Capital Advisors, which he appears to run from home.

We think that’s called semi-retirement. Gray could not be contacted for comment.

We’re not suggesting it was Galvin or Gray. But you can bet they are watching keenly.