Our most august institution is in the brown stuff, or more to the point, aught to be. From the AFR:
Suitcases stuffed with cash were allegedly used to bribe former Indonesian president Suharto to approve contracts to buy the Reserve Bank of Australia’s plastic banknotes, according to a sworn witness statement made by a Jakarta middleman.
Radius Christanto, who worked as a lobbyist and agent for allegedly corrupt RBA currency firms Securency and Note Printing Australia between 1998 and 2009, has also claimed in his federal police witness statement that he gave a shoebox full of US dollars to a relative of a senior Chinese Communist Party member.
This is the first time the RBA firms – charged in 2011 with foreign bribery offences in Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal and Vietnam – have been linked to alleged corruption in China.
…Mr Christanto’s police statement also contains details of his work for Securency in China, which included a $US150,000 payment to a lobbyist called “Mr Kuok”, who claimed to be “family of a senior [Communist] party member” and could provide an introduction to a senior government minister. “I withdrew the money in Chinese Yuan and then bought US dollars and gave those in a box the size of a shoe box,” his police statement says.
…Mr Christanto told police the then head of the Chinese Government’s banknote printer, Gu Daoming, told him and two Securency executives personally that the small contract “was only a small step and if everything went well there would be larger contracts’’.
Can you imagine the furor and magnitude of inquiry of this transpired at the US Federal Reserve?
