Page 4713 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 7 December 1994
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evidence under discovery. The Commonwealth Bank refused to release certain documents, claiming that they were irrelevant or that it was information that would have been well known by the Riggs. The company was later put into liquidation and the Riggs were evicted from their business premises.
What began as a well-founded dream of overseas exports, greater employment and increased profits became a long-term campaign for justice. In a letter to the Rigg partnership in February 1989, Mr D.F. Alston, senior manager of the CBA, wrote:
I refer to letters of demand dated 15 March 1988 and advise that demand includes the amount of $750,000 ... which is the amount of a Bill drawn by AT & DA Rigg for which you are personally liable.
This amount was erroneously debited to account Tony Rigg Welding and Manufacturing Pty Ltd on 23 December 1987 and reversed from that account today.
"Today" was in February 1989. It took a long while for the bank to correct its "mistake". It would appear that, by the action of drawing on the operating funds of the Rigg company, - a company that the Commonwealth Bank appeared to have no legal call on - the CBA had helped to cripple the business. The property, Building World, was later sold by the bank at far less than its valuation. Mr Rigg said that this was done without the required public advertising being made. That is a hard thing to prove. If you do not have something, it is hard to prove that it is not there; it is just not there.
Madam Speaker, this is not an isolated case. I have personally spoken to dozens of people who have been caught up in unethical actions by banks, and I have heard of hundreds more. In this Assembly on 15 December 1993 I presented detailed evidence of corrupt actions by some officers of the State Bank of New South Wales. In that case governments and other authorities who have a duty to act on that evidence have not been seen to have done so. It was mentioned recently in the Financial Times that the ANZ Bank was forced to return to its customers $52m which it had charged for withholding tax. The point is that the bank had not been paying withholding tax. How many other banks have done similar things? If your company is paying bank fees when it should not and your company goes down the chute, who is responsible?
Former New South Wales Democrat Senator Paul McLean presented 80 fully documented cases of appalling corruption within the banking industry to the Federal banking inquiry in 1991. With the assistance of two barristers, Senator McLean gave detailed and damning evidence to the inquiry. He had about 1,000 cases in all, but picked out 80. The bizarre response of the committee chairman, Stephen Martin, was to say to the media that McLean should either put up or shut up. This was after the evidence had been presented. I believe that thousands of farmers, business owners and bank customers from Perth to Penrith and Townsville to Tasmania thought that Martin had sold us out, but that certainly did not appear to be the case with the Federal Labor Party, who must
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