Fairfax and the ABC continue the drumbeat of inquiry into the very senior levels of our regulators today:
One of the Reserve Bank’s most senior officials has been accused of ordering an employee not to put in writing information about alleged corruption at the central bank’s currency printing companies.
Note Printing Australia executive Danny Reid has made a detailed statement provided to federal police in which he accuses the RBA’s Europe boss, Bob Rankin, of directing him to never ”use email, fax or hard copies” to provide information about the company’s allegedly corrupt overseas activities.
The request was made in 2009, when the Australian Federal Police were searching for information as part of an international bribery inquiry that resulted in NPA and its sister company Securency being charged in 2011.
Some of the information about the corruption alleged by Mr Reid, which he sought to relay to bank officials, was not passed to the police until this year, when Fairfax Media uncovered it and passed it on to them.
The information provided by Mr Reid included documents regarding a secret 1998 Baghdad trip by two NPA employees to meet former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s brother-in-law in breach of United Nations sanctions.
And from the AFR:
A former veteran lawyer at the Australian Securities and Investments and Commission, Gary Donovan, has delivered a scathing assessment of ASIC’s failure to investigate possible corporate offences flowing from the scandal.
…Mr Donovan, who left ASIC in 2011 after almost a decade, said the corporate regulator “had an obligation to investigate” these former directors and the agency’s failure to do so was part of a systemic problem .
“We have got ASIC swimming in such a vast sea of responsibilities I think the evidence is, once again, it is very difficult for ASIC to focus on its core responsibilities or even to identify what its core responsibilities are,” he said.
Australia has some of the thinnest rules governing the movement of officials between government and business in the world. Nor do we generally prosecute white collar crime. Now you know why.
