ANZ spindoctor Paul Edwards has seen plenty of action in more than 10 years as the bank’s mouthpiece – losing $500 million on Russian bonds, bank employees held hostage in Afghanistan, John McFarlane jamming on his guitar and regular belly-aching about outrageous fee gouging are just some examples.

None of that goes near the bedlam that has unfolded with the Opes Prime fiasco. However, if Edwards’ new boss Mike Smith can survive taking a real bullet during his time with HSBC in Argentina, surely he’ll come through the Opes Prime fiasco OK.

Smith seems to have realised the folly of his first reaction to the Opes mess when he told a conference call with analysts on April 7 that ANZ institutional banking boss Peter Hodgson had been appointed to conduct a review of the bank’s securities lending business.

Given that the same Peter Hodgson spent the previous three years as ANZ’s chief risk officer and currently chairs the credit committee, it wasn’t surprising that he was quickly sidelined in the wider review that was announced on April 14.

Hodgson is the most likely senior executive to be fired over Opes Prime, not the person who should have been leading the review.

The appointment of David Crawford as an independent outside reviewer looked OK on the surface, but Crawford actually has some pretty big conflicts of interest himself, as is explained here.

The great challenge for Edwards now is to create the impression ANZ is doing enough to ward off a formal APRA probe, like what NAB copped after its foreign exchange fiasco. That won’t be easy.

Making matters worse, today Crikey can reveal a new ANZ blunder for Edwards to mop up. It goes like this:

On December 31 last year, E-Trade, ANZ’s 100% owned online stockbroking outfit, unilaterally closed 500 accounts which had been dormant for seven years without even writing to the victims.

Crikey has spoken to one victim who had more than $30,000 disappear without warning. The way the law works with unclaimed monies, banks can confiscate the cash for three months before handing it over to the government.

When our victim first complained to the bank in mid-March, they refused to pay him the missing interest, although that was finally rectified yesterday.

So here we have a major bank seizing about $800 million worth of shares held by Opes Prime clients without warning and flogging them off based on the fine print of contracts that most victims hadn’t comprehended.

At the same time, the bank’s stockbroking arm was literally seizing the cash held by 500 clients in its stockbroking division, pocketing the interest for itself for three months and then handing it over to the government without so much as a letter or a courtesy call.

Our complainant was the first to alert the bank to the problem. He’s now been sorted, but what about the other 499 victims?

We’ve emailed Paul Edwards about this but hadn’t received a reply before our publishing deadline.

Go here for a Ron Barassi video and all the “save Owen Hegarty” audio from yesterday’s Oxiana AGM.