Catherine Livingstone one torrid day at the Hayne royal commission
Something may be up at Commonwealth Bank. Who’s behind Tony Boyd’s AFR scoop this morning on a board brawl at the bank? The AFR’s Tony Boyd has the scoop, drawing on a candid email by Andrew Mohl, now a former CBA director.
"I have spoken with several other directors and executives who have no such memory” of one of the more strident sections of evidence by CBA chair Catherine Livingstone at the banking royal commission back in 2018, Mohl - once CEO of AMP - informed preferred board mates and a small number of executives.
Mohl sent this email around on Friday, November 23, 2018 Boyd reported.
High-minded and defensive on one morning on her second day as a witness, Livingstone told Hayne she’d challenged management at a board meeting in Perth in late 2016 over CBA's handling of AUSTRAC and anti-money laundering matters.
The absence of the briefest reference to this topic in the board minutes whipped up a cynical counsel-assisting Rowena Orr. The topic has drawn near zero scrutiny since. So who benefits from pushing this to the fore now?
Livingstone told the AFR she stood by her statements to the royal commission.
Even so, Peter Speed, a director of Sydney law firm Speed & Stracey Lawyers will lead an independent external review, the AFR reports.
In his email Mohl wrote that he had no recollection of Livingstone challenging "management at the October 2016 meeting in relation to the AML/CTF reports contained in the standard regulatory report received by the board".
And he says he had no "memory of Catherine's concerns that 'management did not have the capacity to respond to what was, clearly, an escalating, significant and serious systemic control challenge' at this meeting.”
Catherine Livingstone’s term as CommBank chair is probably soon up anyway, but a hatchet job of this calibre is a rare thing among industry elites and it won’t be lost on some readers that a woman is singled out for a bruising, but then, she is chair.
Best guess: squabbling over the choice (and gender too) of the next chair of the CommBank board looks a likely motive, the leaker’s agenda aimed at easing Livingstone out early.
To give the next bloke in line the job, say. Or maybe Livingstone is holding out for one of the women that make up half the CBA board as her successor and top shelf choices on offer.