The fall and fall of Ken Henry

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From top policy doyen, how did it come to this? Via Domain comes secret minutes of NAB meetings five months out from the royal commission:

…The EY team needed to know what [Ken] Henry thought so it could help the bank prepare a report, required by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), that would assess NAB’s performance on risk management and culture.

Startlingly, the chairman said he was “confident” the bank was still selling products that would trigger compensation for customers in the future. Confidential minutes of the interview said he “highlighted an example of SMSF [self managed super fund] borrowing to invest in managed funds”.

…Underlining the whistleblower’s concern was that much of what was discovered in that review, including what Dr Henry and others said in meetings with EY, did not make it into EY’s draft report.

…They lay out NAB’s failure to tackle long-standing issues in its wealth management division, new anti-money laundering breaches and an internal rating of its financial crime risk as “excessive” and “not effective”.

At the time of the review last year, NAB’s own risk ratings for compliance had been “red” on its internal traffic light system for at least 20 months, operational risk had been “amber” for 35 months and regulatory risk had been “amber” for 26 months, according to leaked internal NAB reports.

The reports go much further than Henry’s royal commission admission that the compliance rating had been red for a long time.

Jeez, Ken.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.