A perfectly understandable reaction when this isn't the first example of corporate malfeasance and greed you've ever seen. There's a low bar of proof in the court of public opinion.
Look, I don't want to get in the way of another good old conspiracy theory rant. However, it's worth noting that AML legislation (in Aus and elsewhere) includes a whole raft of criminal penalties, including fines and imprisonment. This particular Westpac case has now been investigated for nearly a year and not one criminal charge has been laid against anyone from Westpac (let alone any conviction). You can draw fom that what you want. Maybe the police and prosecutors are all in on the malfeasance too...
So I'd guess they were intentionally making sure that they didn't "know" that it was happening.... i.e. deliberately turning a blind eye. Presumably they've made more than $1.3B profit from money laundering.
You say "I'd guess..." and "Presumably...". Just guessing about things you don't actually know and then making sweeping allegations that people deliberately turned a blind eye to criminal activity - that's not a great. Kinda Trumpian really.
Presumably you have definitive information on this then.
A perfectly understandable reaction when this isn't the first example of corporate malfeasance and greed you've ever seen. There's a low bar of proof in the court of public opinion.
Look, I don't want to get in the way of another good old conspiracy theory rant. However, it's worth noting that AML legislation (in Aus and elsewhere) includes a whole raft of criminal penalties, including fines and imprisonment. This particular Westpac case has now been investigated for nearly a year and not one criminal charge has been laid against anyone from Westpac (let alone any conviction). You can draw fom that what you want. Maybe the police and prosecutors are all in on the malfeasance too...
So, why the fine then?
Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21
It was a civil penalty agreed between AUSTRAC and Westpac due to their systems and procedures failing to detect and report approx. 23 million transactions over 5 years that breech AML/CFT laws.
23 million transactions in that timeframe is a tiny amount. An individual bank like Westpac would have done biilions of electronic transactions and there would have been many trillions of them in the global finacial markets. However, even for 23 milion, believe it or not, there isn't a group of people sitting in some room checking them all. It's all done with software systems. In this case, those systems didn't catch transactions that they should have and as a cosequence, Westpac didn't report them to the regulators and police. They were legally required to do that, so they receive a penalty. However, there has been no suggestion that any person or people, in any way, knowingly let this happen. If there had been, then there would have been criminal charges.
Here's an anlogy. With electronic cash deposits into bank accounts (ATM etc), you can only do it above a certain threshold with lots of ID etc. That stops gangs etc depositing illegal funds. So the systems detect and stop electronic deposits above that thereshold. Well and good. So then the gangs etc start depositing repeatedly just below the thereshold. Now technically that's legal, but the pattern indicates illegal activity. So now, the bank's systems must detect and report that activity - otherwise they get fined.
So the crimnals get more sophisticated and then the banks' systems must get more sophisticated. And so on and so on... It's an electronic game of whack-a-mole, a little bit like with computer viruses, malware etc.
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