Commonwealth Bank Of Australia Essay

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The Commonwealth Bank is accused of breaching the money laundering laws. The Bank is one of the biggest and leading in the financial sector. The allegations tend to show that the bank’s compliance system failed to detect the alleged breaches. The allegations are serious because they have created a public relations issue that has drawn attention and interest of different stakeholders and publics. Some of the consequences evident as a result of this issue are that investors have dumped the bank’s shares leading to falling in price by about 4%. From a public relations perspective, this is an issue that has to be addressed immediately in order to protect or repair the bank’s reputation and image from damage. The discussion in the report shows that …show more content…

However, recently, CBA was accused of engaging or facilitating money laundering activities contrary to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act (Roddan, 2017). The bank allowed anonymous deposits of huge cash suspected to be from syndicated criminal groups including terrorists (Yeates, 2017a). As a result of this, the AUSTRAC commenced legal actions against the bank for over 53,000 contraventions of the Act. The allegations and legal action are going to destroy or damage the bank’s reputation and image because, already, some investors have abandoned the bank after learning the legal action against it (Yeates, 2017b). The reputation problem that CBA faces frames the discussion in this paper, which will include defining concepts of stakeholders, publics and issues; the public relations issue CBA is facing; publics this issue is creating; and the mutual significance of organisation, publics and …show more content…

CBA is accused of failing to report over 53,000 transactions for more than $10,000 as required by the law (Yeates, 2017a). The bank is also accused of failing to undertake a proper anti-money laundering risk assessment in 2012 when it was rolling its ATMs. The bank’s compliance system failed to detect or report all breaches of the regulations as it would be expected for a bank of a status of CBA (Ryan, 2017a). These are issues of concern and the bank must have a strategic response to them given that they are receiving negative coverage in the media, thus damaging the bank’s reputation among stakeholders (Liu & Fraustino, 2014). A reputational damage is likely to have far-reaching adversarial consequences including loss of customers, investors, the financial cost in terms of fines, and loss of shareholder value as evidenced by the declining share value (Holtzhausen & Roberts, 2009). This media report provides a discussion how the public relations issue that CBA is facing creates publics and the mutual significance of organisation, publics and issue in relations to the scenario at the

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