ANZ chairman David Gonski and his directors made swift exits from the Brisbane Convention Centre at the end of a marathon annual meeting yesterday, leaving shareholders and bank victims marooned over tea and scones. It was the second year in a row that ANZ's board has bailed on post-meeting engagement with shareholders, which made for a "poor look" given the bank's sliding financial performance and rich portfolio of remediation casework. The brisk departures followed a gruelling five hour meeting in which Gonski was forced to confront awkward interrogation from shareholders over the bank's progress - or lack thereof - in remediating longstanding customer grievances. Chief executive Shayne Elliott revealed during the meeting that the remediation program was likely to take several years to complete, with the bank having resolved only around one third of the 3.4 million "problem accounts". "No one is proud of the fact we need to remediate mistakes of the past but we are learning from our failures and strengthening the bank as a result," he promised shareholders. "We're teaching our people about what went wrong and how it affected our customers to ensure we don't make these mistakes again," he said.   However, many shareholders grilled Gonski on the slowness of the bank to address and resolve major complaints that involved life-changing actions against customers. Queensland shareholder Craig Caulfield said he had reached an agreement to resolve a dispute with ANZ in 2017 but told the meeting the bank had failed to comply with an important condition of the settlement. "I've still got great respect for ANZ staff overall especially their customer service teams," he said. "I have a separate view of their remediation and investigations teams, who are hopeless." Elliott also tried to pacify shareholders' concerns that ANZ might be one of the next banks in the firing line of Austrac following the monster civil claims brought against Westpac and CBA for non-compliance with anti-money laundering laws. "There has also been considerable shareholder interest in the role banks play in  the prevention of financial crime," he said. "We take this role incredibly seriously and have been proactively reviewing the systems and processes we use to transfer money to ensure we are reporting the  information required by our regulators. "I can confirm to shareholders today that while this review remains ongoing, we have not identified any material issues. "We are also not aware of any impending litigation from Austrac." Gonski gave little comfort to shareholders concerned about the decline in the bank's financial performance, indicating that the difficult trading environment would persist for some time. ANZ's net earnings fell by 7 per cent in 2019 and shareholders lost the benefit of full imputation on the final dividend. "We do expect challenging trading conditions for all banks to continue well into the foreseeable future," he told the meeting. "Competition will remain intense. "Regulation continues to rise