The corporate watchdog has lost its key (and fairly recently-hired) attack dog with the resignation of Daniel Crennan, the deputy chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Crennan was the person brought in to chase and nail the corporate crooks down in court.
His resignation from his ASIC role comes after the revelation he claimed and was paid A$70,000 in relocation expenses with disregard for the entitlements set down in rulings of the Remuneration Tribunal.
As Banking Day cheekily said yesterday, senior staff clerks won’t always know what they’re doing and the under-investment in people, scrutiny and production models on the HR side in this affair is palpable. But that’s not the worst of it, no way.
The deputy chair’s resignation comes as his boss, ASIC chair James Shipton, stood aside last Friday pending an investigation into how his own illegitimate expense claim of $118,000 for tax advice from a Big Four accounting firm wandered its way uncritically toward payment.
This is nothing by big bank misconduct standards and regrettably Shipton and Crennan, implicated via inaction as endorsers of clubby choices by APRA chief Wayne Byres, are examples of a general failure of culture and governance.
The acting ASIC chair needs to engineer immediate intervention on matters the taxpayer entrusted APRA and Byres to work out.
To start with, shove straight into the public domain the ANZ self-assessments submitted to APRA two years ago (yep, two) that have been outrageously suppressed ever since. The time for subtlety in the release of this hidden history has long passed.
The fact is, the hoo-ha over ASIC cack-handedness is so exaggerated, it’s clear-cut vested interests are seeking payback against ASIC, the conduct regulator, for doing a decent job for once at sanctioning lawless conduct by banks.
The business newspaper campaign for ASIC reform is hollow and will remain so until a robust proposal for far, far more self-regulation by the banking and finance industry arrives in Scott Morrison’s inbox.
The Shipton/ Crennan affair is all so ho-hum and ham-fisted and in Banking Day’s opinion the market and the public and the parliament are obviously under-informed with regard to the context and the scale of the apparent carelessness of ASIC’s deputy chair and chair. What do allegations of astonishingly unseemly conduct look like in the recent history of a large Australian bank? APRA and ANZ know the answer. Fix it Duck!
Crennan’s exit adds to the pressure for greater scrutiny of the use of taxpayer funds by public institutions that are supposed to act in the public interest.
Several points about internal controls need to be made here because none of this happens without the consent or involvement of other parties. Crennan and Shipton are the front men that must bear the brunt of those decisions to allow the expenses because they are the beneficiaries.
Neither Crennan nor Shipton would have been reimbursed or paid allowances if somebody, somewhere did not allow or sign off on the expenses. They reap the rewards of the largesse but there are people who should have been asking pertinent question