Perhaps there’s some hope for RBA accountability after all, from Banking Day:
Some perspective and planning is possible following an under-reported ruling of Justice Jane Hollingworth in the Supreme Court of Victoria last month that surveyed the trials and tribulations of the Securency and Note Printing Australia affair.
Fourteen people await trial on matters relating to financial flows from Securency – at the time a business under the wing of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Note Printing, Securency, and a number of their former employees or agents, have been charged with various offences, including conspiring to bribe foreign officials. Some of them have also been charged with false accounting in relation to payments made in connection with foreign agents.
The offences are alleged to have occurred in order to secure banknote printing contracts with central banks in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Nepal, at various dates between late 1999 and early 2004.
The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions began proceedings in late 2013 and over the first half of 2014. In some cases, the accused had been committed to stand trial for the relevant charges. In other cases, the CDPP exercised his power to directly indict, after the accused had been discharged by the magistrate at committal.
The committal proceedings ran for 112 sitting days, over a period of more than two years.
The AFP disclosure material contains more than 80 million documents. The prosecution briefs for the committal hearings comprised more than 80 lever arch folders of documents, which had been extracted from the AFP disclosure material.
Little of this material may enter the public domain any time soon, one reason being the complexity of preparing the trials.
Wrangles over quarantining sensitive information also impeded the case but, as reported above, this squabble is over for now.
Here is Wikileaks from last year. The original gag order even prevented reference to itself which was pretty draconian stuff.
Let the public floggings begin.
