Hello and welcome to another Emlex podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, Emlex's senior correspondent,

coming to you from our offices in Sydney, Australia, where winter seems to have

kicked into full swing once and for all. Cartels are something readers of Emlex's antitrust

coverage will be more than familiar with, but recent accusations that one of Australia's largest

banks and a group of international investment banks had taken part in a criminal

cartel has added fuel to an already very bright fire.

Banks in Australia have come under the spotlight in recent weeks for a wide range of regulatory

reasons and it hasn't been a pretty sight.

Joining me to discuss the latest cartel developments is James Panicki, Emlex's Australasian

managing editor.

Hello James.

Hello, Laurel.

The first thing to clarify here, James, is that the charges now faced by these banks

and six executives are criminal charges.

So the offences alleged are criminal offences, and that's newsworthy because criminal cartel offences are a relatively new development in Australia.

Yes, that's right.

So criminal competition law offences have been on the books since 2009, but it has taken a while for criminal investigations to percolate through the system.

And officials at Australia's

competition regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission or ACC, talk quite openly

about some initial setbacks in their criminal cartel investigations, criminal cartel investigations

as distinct from civil cartel investigations obviously there have been

plenty of those but the a triple c ended up having to establish a special unit to work specifically

...