THE fallout over Commonwealth Bank’s
financial planning scandal continues to embroil the bank as new
revelations show the bank secretly recorded one of its customers as it
tried to “harass” him from appearing in a TV interview.
Last night, Nine’s A Current Affair
aired an interview with 79-year old Michael Murphy
whose $125,000 investment with CBA subsidiary Financial Wisdom was
decimated to just $9000. He had earlier settled with the bank for about a
quarter of what he lost.
About two weeks ago, Mr Murphy reached
out to the Nine program to tell the story of what happened to him. But
then, out of the blue, Mr Murphy received a phone call from his case
officer, Financial Wisdom’s head of risk management.
She recorded the conversations without his consent as she tried to convince him to pull out of the interview. A Current Affair
reporter Dan Nolan listened to the recordings and said he heard the CBA
representative offer to “look after” him and said the bank was “happy”
to reopen his file.
In a second call, during which more than two
minutes of the call was mysteriously not recorded, Mr Murphy claimed the
CBA representative asked him how much it would take for him to
“withdrawal from A Current Affair?” He interpreted that to mean a financial inducement to not go ahead with his interview.
Mr Murphy named his price and she told him she would call back later.
But the best she could offer was that his case was now lodged with CBA’s Open Advice Review Program,
the initiative announced by the bank earlier this month to look at
cases of financial mismanagement and fraud between 2003 and 2012.
Mr Murphy said he would only pull out of the interview if CBA gave him a concrete offer.
A Current Affair recreated this exchange
:
CBA: “I thought you emailed them not to go
ahead with that interview until we’ve discussed further? If you tell
them you don’t want to proceed with the program, they won’t proceed.”
MURPHY: “I need a good reason not to proceed. I need an offer from you.”
CBA:
“Things don’t move that quickly. We will reopen your file and look at
it again and I will be back in touch with you today. If you don’t want
to proceed with that interview, you are perfectly within your rights to
tell them.”
The calls pressuring him to hold off the interview continued. Mr Murphy told A Current Affair: “It was just harassment and it went on all day, continually getting calls. ‘Have you called ACA yet? Have you pulled out of ACA yet?’”
A Current Affair said CBA denied the staff member offered a
monetary inducement but acknowledged it had recorded the calls without
Mr Murphy’s permission.
According to the Office of the Australian
Information Commissioner, organisations must tell people at the
beginning of the conversation if a call is to be recorded or monitored.
The
exchange between Mr Murphy and CBA appears to put it at odds with CBA
chief executive Ian Narev’s public pledge to be more open and
transparent and less defensive as the bank sought to move forward and
regain customers’ trust.
CBA financial planners were found to have committed acts of fraud and financial mismanagement
against 1100 customers over a number of years. The problem came to
light when CBA employee Jeff Morris blew the whistle to ASIC. However it
took a long time for the financial regulator to launch an
investigation, which was the subject of a Senate Inquiry. CBA has, so
far, paid $52 million in compensation to victims.
CBA announced the Open Advice Review Program in response to calls for a Royal Commission into the bank’s activities.
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