Banking Bad: How Greed and Broken Governance Conspired to Break Our Trust in Corporate Australia by Adele Ferguson

Part One
What goes on in the shadows
Four decades of misconduct, malpractice and misinformation

Chapter 1
Caught in a trap
The foreign currency loans scandal
IT WAS A BLISTERING afternoon in January 1985 when John ‘Wacka’
Williams went to see his bank manager at the local CBA branch in Inverell,
a small town on the Macintyre River in northern NSW.
At 4 pm on the dot, palms sweating, wearing smart casual clothes, the
thirty-year-old sheep farmer nervously walked into the bank for the
appointment he’d made with the manager, Neville Dunbar, to ask for a loan.
He needed $200,000 to help him through the drought that had stricken
NSW in 1982, the worst dry spell in two decades, which had left him and
his brother Peter struggling to pay the bills.
John Williams was known to most of his friends and family as ‘Wacka’
– a nickname his father, Reg, had given him when he was a toddler. In
1979, Wacka and Peter had sold the family’s fifth-generation farm in
Jamestown, South Australia, and moved to Inverell because the land was
cheaper. They’d bought adjoining farms spanning 7000 acres of undulating
countryside.
‘It was tough,’ recalls Wacka. ‘We had a debt of $180,000 and the
standard variable interest rates at the time were 15 per cent. We weren’t
making enough money to repay the existing farm loan we had with the bank
as well as other living expenses, so we had to borrow more money to meet
the interest payments and pay other debts.’
As he sat down with Dunbar, Wacka didn’t realise he was about to be
sold a pup. During the meeting, the discussion turned to the benefits of
foreign currency loans – in this case one in Swiss francs – which were then

Banking Bad: How Greed and Broken Governance Conspired to Break Our Trust in Corporate Australia by Adele Ferguson