2017-08-07
Greens spokesperson for Treasury, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, is calling on the Board of Commonwealth Bank to consider the position of Ian Narev today, and to cancel all senior executive bonuses in their meeting prior to the release of the annual financial results.
Senator Whish-Wilson said, “If the Board of Commbank wants to start to rebuild trust in their organisation they need to make sure that no senior executive with any oversight of this alleged money laundering scandal gets paid one single cent in bonuses this year.
“The Board also needs to make a statement about the future of Ian Narev. Today it is reported that Mr Narev ruled out any cultural problem at the heart of this latest scandal, instead blaming it on a single coding error.
“A coding error does not explain allegations about the company being slow to deal with regulator requests or explain delays in dealing with serious concerns raised by staff. If you keep denying there are cultural issues, you will never deal with them.
“A few years ago it was reported that Commbank was tying bonuses of branch managers to the uptake of the digital services including intelligent deposit machines that we now know are central to this alleged money laundering scandal (reports here and here).
“If the pay of staff was tied to customers using these machines, then of course, this is going to make it hard for concerns about their use to get aired. This goes to the heart of the cultural problems in the banking sector,” he concluded.
Media Release Treasury