From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours…

Has Dasher become a PR man? Bluenotes isn’t singing about the royal commission. Plus, the ASIC lets off some steam at … the overweight?

PR man Sam? What was former Labor Senator Sam Dastyari doing speaking at a conference for CBA PR staff in Sydney yesterday? A tipster tells us that Dasher was spotted by lunchtime diners striding into the CBA event at a luxe hotel in Woollomoollo — which would have roughly coincided with Rowena Orr savaging the financial advice industry (including CBA’s own licensees) down in Melbourne. Perhaps he was offering the CBA spinners some advice on coping with a scandal? 

Bluenotes not singing. While we’re on the subject of the commission, back in January ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott gave the process his strong backing on bluenotes, the ANZ’s in-house media, comment and discussion website. The story was in fact an unedited copy of a letter sent to all ANZ staff: 

Commissioner Hayne asked us to answer some very specific questions — basically to identify any instances of misconduct by ANZ in the past ten years or situations where our conduct fell short of community standards or expectations, to explain why we think these failings happened and what we have done to fix them and stop them from happening again …

Although many of the issues in our submission are known and have been or are being fixed — seeing them all in one document is confronting. Of course, it would be easy to lay the blame on a few bad apples or to say that these are largely historical technical glitches resulting from large complex IT systems. That would be wrong.

Since then? Well, nothing. Bluenotes‘ reporting on the banking royal commission began and ended with that. No updates, no commentary, not a single word more. That is a significant omission from a website that calls itself “a forum for insights, opinion, research and news about the economy, financial services, investment and society”. It’s not as though the commission has been silent on ANZ. On April 20, The Australian Financial Review reported:

Darren Whereat from ANZ took the stand. He was there to answer questions about two advisers; they failed numerous audits, took years to be suspended, and clients are still waiting to be remediated. In an egregious case, an ANZ adviser put a client into a new super fund with the benefit of saving $240 a year. But it cost her $7000 in fees, including an ongoing annual service fee of $3790 for this ‘advice’. In case of the bad advisers at both Westpac and ANZ, the banks failed to warn other firms of their concerns. All these advisers are still in the advice business.

The website claims “while the perspectives have been shaped by ANZ’s business strategy and the experience of its management, bluenotes aims to maintain a dialogue that extends beyond the bank. Based on what is not on the bluenotes homepage about the Royal Commission and the events reported elsewhere, that promise of “a dialogue” is very uneven at best — and self-serving at worst.

ASIC goes off. Either ASIC has had a stressful few weeks or it’s just finished holding its tongue. Either way, things probably just got heavy for whoever handles ASIC Media’s Twitter account after some prime opinions on obesity were tweeted about a Four Corners story on the sugar industry.

Litecoin for Lattecoin. Artee cafe, at the southern end of Lygon Street, has long been known as the canteen for the staff of Kim Il-Carr, Socialist Left supremo and whizz-bang technology enthusiast (Senator Kim Carr is currently making the difficult transition from Telex to fax). Perhaps in honour of coffee-card holder No. 1, the cafe has recently announced that it will accept bitcoin and litecoin. Woo-hoo! Soon, alphawave bands will allow you to order coffee by just thinking about it from your desk. Sadly dogecoin remains inadmissible. Such progress! So future!

 

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