Comment: White collars and red faces at the yellow bank
The allegations of straight-out bribery of key executives at Commonwealth Bank by a desperate technology provider, if proven, take governance shortcomings at CBA to a new low.
There has been much talk about poor behaviour by big banks, but most of that has been centred on a system that allowed wrongly incentivised and conflicted wealth advisers to flourish. In other words, behaviour by those near the bottom of the totem poles, even if on a well-paid patch of territory.
This latest scandal is a whole different affair, reaching high into the hierarchy of the most important part of Australia's largest bank. The technology department was at the time under the leadership of chief information officer Michael Harte.
No frontline seller of product with a yellow and black square, Harte was a close confidante of the bank's CEO Ian Narev (and, indeed, the rest of the C-suite, given the central role technology has played at every bank).
While there is no suggestion whatsoever that Harte was being paid off - at his pay scale it would have been unthinkable anyway - the allegations could suggest, firstly, that his normally sure-footed leadership of the IT team failed him on this very crucial deal. Secondly, it seems there was no-one else at the bank looking either.
One of the accused, Keith Hunter, was CBA's head of IT service delivery reporting directly to Harte on matters of procurement, a topic close to Harte's own heart. Harte also had a strong interest in the increasing use of cloud computing, and the increased attention being paid by regulators to the use of third party storage of data by our banks.
So who else was watching Hunter and his fellow accused, Jon Waldron, the bank's general manager of IT engineering?
At the time the ServiceMesh deal was signed in 2012, Harte was heading towards the finish line on CBA's $1 billion-plus core banking upgrade.
What Harte was also saying at the time - very publicly - was that his strategy for keeping costs in line by maintaining a competitive tension between suppliers was working. So it is surprising that the allegedly uncontested awarding of a contract to a firm that had been a start-up in 2009 and needed a fresh cash injection in 2011 apparently did not warrant further attention. Especially given the claims of $100 million in savings through the use of cloud technology.
The other big player drawn into this morass is giant US tech firm CSC, which bought ServiceMesh in 2013 - after ServiceMesh had signed up and locked in CBA as a major client.
No doubt that deal was done in good faith, but CSC's CEO Mike Lawrie must be wondering how far his own country's implacable Foreign Corrupt Practices Act might swing against him in this instance.
Incidentally, ServiceMesh's only other major client at the time was Visa in the US, where Hunter had worked for a decade, finishing as head of global operations prior to joining CBA.
This story has plenty more life in it.