As part of the research for the new book “When Banks Go Bad” I went to the westpac Annual General Meeting last week.

As a shareholder I had the opportunity to speak and direct questions to the directors. So as you can imagine I wasn’t going to miss that opportunity. I attempted to take a constructive approach and find out just where the board stands on a couple of issues.

The reality is that allthough the non executive board memebers are paid over $500,000 per year for maybe the equivalent of two days a week work they know very little about what is going on in operational areas of the bank.

They rely on management reports and the occasional guided tour through offices and bank branches to keep on top of whats going on.

So I took the opportunity to educate them a little on Penalty Fees, Mortgage Errors and in particular what I have termed Burgergate. I’m going to post seperatly about Burgergate because it’s such a big one and because I’ve specifically brought this case to the attention of Westpac’s board.

The first think that I’d like to point out is that in this case Westpac have been accused in Federal Parliament of Fraud, Breaches of the Privacy Act, and Obtaining Money by Deception, yet the CEO claims to have no knowledge of the allegations in Parliament. I would think for an 8 Million Dollar a year pay packet she should have known about such serious criminal allegations made in parliament and I told the board this at the meeting.

As you can imagine it attracted a bit of attention and I had a conversation with CEO Gail Kelly after the AGM who in the meantime had been quickly briefed by the corporate spin doctors. Management appently claims they didn’t tell the board because there was “nothing in the claims”. From there I was taken to meet with Jane Counsel the Senior Media Relations Manager.

Ms Counsel states they have a letter from the Privacy Commission saying that the allegations in parliament are incorrect and that there would be no investigation. She has undertaken to give me a copy of this letter, but despite attempting to contact her 3 times now to follow up on this, there is no letter and no reply to my emails or phone calls.

This may just turn out to the case we have been waiting for to open this issue right up.

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