Wealth next in firing line as Royal Commission sets cracking pace

The Australian 11:58am March 5, 2018

Richard Gluyas

The Hayne royal commission’s first round of public hearings starts on Tuesday next week but the game has already moved on.

The word on the street is that the commission’s dreaded notices to produce documents have started to fall like autumn leaves on the nation’s wealth and superannuation businesses.

If consumer lending is the focus of the March 13-23 hearings, it looks like wealth is next in the firing line.

There are early indications that a second round of hearings has been slotted in for April.

Hayne, assisted by senior counsel assisting Rowena Orr and Michael Hodge, has set a cracking early pace, as exhausted legal teams struggle to keep up with the ceaseless churn of documents retrieved from the major banks’ vast data bases.

One bank has already ripped through one million documents — sorting, analysing and assessing them for relevance before releasing batches to the commission.

The industry is on notice that Hayne has zero tolerance for missed deadlines, and will give short shrift to misguided applications for confidentiality.

The commissioner slammed Commonwealth Bank on Friday for making “general assertions” that the veil of secrecy between the bank and ASIC over remediation programs should be preserved.

“Why the particular communications should be treated in this way is not explained,” he said.

“Arguments framed in this fashion are unhelpful and unpersuasive.”

Hayne must complete an interim report by no later than September 30 and a final report by February 1 next year.

He clearly has every intention of meeting his own deadline.