ASIC Double Standards
Cooper v Visard
Conflict of Interests ?

As another ASIC public relations exercise gets underway with the usual background emphasizing ASIC’s role as the nations corporate watchdog, it is becoming increasingly clear there is a pattern that exposes ASIC as protecting its own as the status quo while spending disproportionate amounts of its growing budget chasing small fish.The comparison is worth explaining. Brad Cooper was involved in some FAI activity that included some bribery and documents forgery among a few other less than ethical. He is not a lawyer nor and accountant/ auditor and not a member of any of these groups of professions and associated organizations such as the Society of Company Directors and so on. His abuses probably got him about $1 or $2 million if that. He got 8 years jail time and is banned from holding company directorships when he is released.Steve Vizard was on the board of directors of Telstra and engaged in insider trading in addition to various other violations of company law. His insider trading was not a one off event and none really knows how much he banked from it. Surprise, surprise, Vizard is a lawyer and card carrying member of Australia’s legal profession. He never got any jail time and some tricky legal sidesteps meant he was banned from holding company directorships for 5 or 6 years. ASIC has a history of avoiding dragging any of their own into courts where these professions could get exposed in the public domain. One of the big failures they are still struggling with after 5 or 6 years is One.Tel because the board included James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch, the sons of Australia’s 2 media oligarchs, and this explains why it rarely gets any media coverage. So much for freedom of the media in Australia! There are others belonging to or associated with the network of protected professions so ASIC’s priority is to find a way to avoid the courts again. They will succeed in doing this of course because the current government or the shadow labor government would not want to drag the Packers and Murdoch into court. We have no doubt we will be correct but come back in another 5 or 10 years time when ASIC is still more than likely working on an equitable “solution”.There are many other examples of this pattern of double standards but it keeps over 1400 ASIC bureaucrats and many lawyers and accountants / auditors busy and funded out of ASIC’s growing budget.True to type and form this bureaucracy has quietly grown from about 300 bureaucrats 12 years ago with a budget of $150 million to 1400 currently with a budget of $450 million. This means they must pounce on anything that can make them money also to fund this burgeoning bureaucracy. Which means more fines and more compliance costs for business. With this new budget expect the bureaucrats to grow by another 100 to 200 and so on for ever.One of the latest valuable corporate failures for ASIC has been Westpoint Group which attracted over 4,000 investors and their pension funds. They have now lost around $350 million and probably can’t expect to ever see their money again.ASIC has used this prominent failure to promote the possibility to the mealy mouthed politicians looking to promote themselves, that if ASIC had bigger budgets they would be able to protect these “mums and dads” from these less than ethical business failures.Naturally enough being a bureaucracy operating true to the 2 laws of Australian bureaucracy (see below) they got another $355 million out of Howard and his cabinet of lawyers. This will mean more bureaucracy, more lawyers and accountants/auditors with their snouts in a bigger trough. But as usual the original ASIC with its original budget was supposed to solve the problem. It hasn’t and nor will ASIC now because the problem is more fundamental than even ASIC appears to comprehend. But what the heck, if the corporate failures and investor abuse were to stop there would be 1400 plus bureaucrats out of work and that has never happened to any bureaucracy in Australia, Ever!No doubt they will continue to save all of us from corporate failures and will cook up more imaginative solutions that will grow their empire. Like Centrelink and the rest of Australia’s army of little Hitler’s, empires and budgets must be protected and grown at all costs.Meanwhile the labor party mafias contribution to the never ending corporate failures solution is for their spokeswoman for corporate governance Penny Wong to state that the budget increase is long overdue because all the “mums and dads” must be protected. Penny Wong is a labor party lawyer and it is a case of, “what else could she say?” As mentioned the Aussie law profession gets protected and also gets its snout into the expanded trough. It’s doubtful she, like most of the rest of these mealy-mouthed politicians will ever figure out the fundamental problem, which includes Aussie lawyers among other things.
So the abuse of Aussie investors can be expected to continue and ASIC (and a few name changes later) will continue to grow and become an empire like the ATO and Centrelink and others and will never ever tolerate being downsized and so on. But at least it will be another employer that Howard and his cabinet of lawyers will be able to claim as more brilliant job creation. However and as one example, the 4,000 Westpoint investors who have lost their self-funded pensions will all now need to go to Centrelink for financial support and so they create more jobs in Centrelink and on and on it goes.
Two laws of Aussie bureaucracy:
Never under any circumstances give back one dollar of any budget once achieved; and do anything and everything possible to increase that budget. The empires must grow at any cost.