All of that is relevant to banking but irrelevant to a court....

All of that is relevant to banking but irrelevant to a court. But what will save WBC from a trillion dollar fine is the criminal law principle of totality. The court will say that the fine must match the criminality and not be “crushing,” So it need not be 23m/53000 times $700m.

However, the notion I see again and again on HC, which no doubt reflects the view of many, is that child exploitation facilitation is not a big deal. Even the business minded Weekend Australian can see how enormous this issue is. It’s not just the fine. In fact the much bigger problem is the loss of reputation. Just look at p1 of that paper today.

And the idea that WBC knew nothing is based on guesswork. The evidence shows the bank knew some customers were pedophiles, that the Phillipines is a child exploitation centre, that video viewing is conducted by small payments and that none of these customers had relatives in the Phillipines. No more is required to show the bank just didn’t care and that can be crippling. The view that it will blow over quickly is exactly what caused this problem.

It beggars belief that anyone could think transmitting money to allow children to be raped and then killed is not such a big problem.