Briefs: ANZ to defend its tax payments, Management changes at AMMB, investor concern over the housin

Banking Day staff
  • ANZ is one of the Australian corporations that has been asked to detail its tax affairs to a Senate inquiry into corporate tax payments. The bank has attracted the attention of the Senate Standing Committee on Economics, according to a report in The Australian, because of its "low tax appetite". ANZ said in its submission that its tax rate was lower than the standard 30 per cent because almost one-third of its profits were earned (and taxed) outside Australia.
  • Ashok Ramamurthy, the ANZ nominee as managing director of Malaysia's AMMB Holdings, will soon leave the bank holding company to return to Australia. Mandy Jean Simpson, the chief financial officer (also from ANZ) may also be leaving the group along with a handful of other senior executives, local media reported. ANZ holds a one quarter stake in the Malaysian banking group.
  • A survey of institutional investors by Morgij Analytics detected a mild negative bias toward the Australian housing and financial system. Taken in the latter part of 2014 the survey showed respondents "were very concerned about the aftermath of the mining/gas investment boom and fall in prices and the impact this is going to have on government revenue, the budget deficit and unemployment." Morgij also found that, while "Australia may have relatively low government debt, respondents were concerned about Australian household mortgage debt [and] the vulnerability for the system arising from this debt needing to be continually passed down to new buyers and homeowners."
  • Visa said last week that its Visa Checkout service had more than 240 financial institution partners across the United States, Canada and Australia. Visa chief executive Charles Scharf told an investor call last week that this "accounts for almost 50 per cent of our global ecommerce volume... To date we have over three million registered users and consumers can now use Visa Checkout to shop at over 110 ecommerce retailers representing over US$42 billion in addressable volume."
  • Bank of China may be looking to sell its Hong Kong subsidiary Nanyang Commercial Bank in a bid to stop cannibalising the Chinese business of its parent, Reuters reported. Nanyang could fetch about US$6 billion, Reuters speculated, or 1.5 times its book value. One potential buyer named by the news service is Cinda Asset Management.