Proportional Penalties In Finance

That's right. So the the government and officials um, you know, are of the view that the penalties um under the legislation are insufficient. For example, with this case here, we had, as I said before, billions transacted uh without being properly checked. The maximum penalty for that type of breach under the act was only thirteen million dollars. Now ASB and the Reserve Bank agreed that ASB would pay about half of that, so six point seven million dollars. That is chump change for a bank like ASB. You know, it's about point two percent of its annual profit. You know, you could argue that that is just ASB could just see that as a cost of doing business, you know. Six but six million dollars could be much less than the cost of investing in systems to comply with the law. So the government is um aware of this issue, not necessarily because of this case, but more broadly. For example, in 2024, um in Australia, Sky City Adelaide was fined 67 million Australian dollars for breaches of money laundering rules. Sky City New Zealand was only fined four million. Uh pretty big difference, and they reckon that the the issues were comparable. So government has said later this year it'll introduce a bill to parliament to increase the penalties.