Going after the big banks is an exercise in risk/reward, like all IMF's investments - the risk is that they fight and you end up spending millions only to come up with zero (as happened with the penalties case), and the reward is very large as the claim values are enormous.
The issue with the bank penalties case was that it wasn't settled law - it had been the case for hundreds of years that most bank penalty charges were considered legally valid, and IMF were trying to fight that precedent.
The CBA/money laundering case seems much more solid to my legally lay mind. CBA has a legal obligation imposed on it by APRA and other regulatory institutions to monitor all its transactions and know its clients to avoid accidental money laundering, and they unquestionably failed to do that. This is why banks spend obscene amounts of money on compliance (their internal compliance divisions are enormous) - to avoid these failures.
The CBA board knew about these failures years before they came to public light, and didn't keep the market informed. When they did finally inform the market, the stock tanked significantly which suggested the anti money laundering breaches was something material the market should have been informed of a long time before, pursuant to the ASX listing rules.
Seems like a much better risk-weighted gamble than trying to overturn centuries of law in favor bank penalty charges.
IMF Price at posting:
$1.93 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
