‘I Read The News Today, Oh Boy?’

8th of August, 2017

It was the Beatles who sang “I read the news today, oh boy” – so have you? CBA are all over it.

Money laundering! Can you believe it? It’s hard to imagine after all the bad press they had re their financial planning and insurance division that things could get any worse?

But now we hear that the CBA has facilitated the transfer of millions of dollars for a wide web of criminal syndicates. These foreign criminals and drug traffickers launder literally millions through Australias biggest and highly regulated bank – the Commonwealth Bank.

AUSTRAC (the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre has alleged in excess of 50,000 contraventions since 2012 of Australias Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006.

Interestingly enough, it is thought that the CBA’s rollout of its new Intelligent Deposit Machines (IDMs), similar to ATMs but they can accept cash and cheque deposits (think technological gains here), expediated the problem with in excess of $1 billion a month being deposited into these machines.

You see it looks like someone just “forgot” to add that little bit of code for these machines to inform AUSTRAC of suspicious transactions and those over $10,000. Just goes to show how our reliance on technology needs to be carefully considered!

100’s of other CBA accounts have been used for “cuckoo smurfing”! <‘The term ‘cuckoo smurfing’ originated in Europe because of similarities between this typology and the activities of the cuckoo bird. Cuckoo birds lay their eggs in the nests of other species of birds which then unwittingly take care of the eggs believing them to be their own. In a similar manner, the perpetrators of this money laundering typology seek to transfer wealth through the bank accounts of innocent third parties.’ AUSTRAC http://www.austrac.gov.au/typologies-2008-methodologies >

Other breaches include accounts opened by foreign nationals on holiday visas for the sole purpose of laundering millions of dollars back overseas.

Its all BAD NEWS FOR THE CBA – no matter where you look!

Or is it??..

We often talk about Front Page News Headlines and the opportunity they can provide for the astute investor who has their investing emotions under wraps! We actually think that seeing CBA in the news for all the wrong reasons is the markets way of taunting us to see what our investing fortitude is made of.

Always remember that the markets will try and get participants to do exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. To play on their emotions.

Remember March 2009? Lehman’s was bust, the banks in trouble and the financial system was going to collapse….

Yet this was also the bottom of the markets, the most profitable time to take action.

So have a good think about what CBA in the news could actually mean to you…

Cheers & Good Trading

Jeremy & Ian

8^th August 2017