Next month marks the first anniversary of the promotion of Tony D’Aloisio to the chairmanship of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and his presentation of a mission statement, loftily entitled “ASIC’s priorities for the next 12 months”, to the Senate standing committee on economics.
Before taking the ASIC chair for a four-year term, D’Aloisio was CEO of the Australian Stock Exchange. In other words, from managing the casino he became the gaming room’s top regulator.
He told senators:
Our vision is that through our efforts and the efforts of our broad range of stakeholders, we will not only maintain but improve business integrity in Australia and, when benchmarked against global best practice, Australia’s position will be at the top.
This sweeping claim was accompanied by a personal commitment to “benchmarking”. It was his managerial style, he said, to develop “scorecards to measure and report on outcomes achieved.”
You be the judge. With your scorecards ready and your pens poised, here are some of the guarantees he gave the good senators in Canberra in May 2007:
- For retail investors – in particular “baby boomer” retirees and the generations following them – to develop initiatives to assist them to better manage and protect their investments and wealth.
- We are also seeing more sophisticated products aimed at retail investors such as derivatives, warrants, contracts for difference (CFDs), margin loans and hybrids. These developments have led us to reassess how we can work to better assist this retail sector.
- For all investors, to continue to maintain and improve confidence and integrity in Australia’s capital markets with new investigative and other techniques in the area of insider trading and market manipulation.
- ASIC’s approach and priorities in the next 12 months are to build on ASIC’s success to date with a new set of priorities on operational effectiveness, improving results in areas of market manipulation and insider trading, assisting retail investors, facilitating capital flows and reducing red tape.
Then along came Allco, MFS, ABC Learning, Centro, Opes Prime, Tricom, Lift and the scandalous lending policies of the major banks, notably ANZ, to blur D’Aloisio’s vision thing.
So here’s an opportunity for Crikey subscribers to give the ASIC chairman a score of 1 to 10 on his success at the helm of the business regulator and give brief (but printable) reasons for your score.
Send your completed scorecards to boss@crikey.com.au
I was unaware of Mr D’Aloisio’s previous life, until I read your article. His original appointment was quite inappropriate. Like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. -5 out of 10.
D’Aloisio is another market fetishist, who believes the law and the underpinning ethics should always be subservient to making a buck. The stock market always has had a life of its own and is run for the benefit of the financial sector, not for the benefit of the share holders or the wider global society to which we belong. We always knew the run of the market would end and we knew that it would be the Financial Engineers who would end it. As Chief Engineer, D’Aloisio is now in mop-up mode. He is more like a cleaner or undertaker than a regulator.
The damage was not done by the people who actually create wealth, the miners, the manufacturers and the other people who make things it was done byt the same old shower.
I would prefer to give D’Aloisio zero out of ten, but for some reason the scale is one to ten. So one it will have to be. Of course Dollar Sweetie is implicated in this and has received his punishment. It will make a jolly good read!
Geez Crikey, Like the other “Regulators Of Last Resort” do we know if he actually made appearances at the office? 0 out of 10.