La Norda would serve better sharpening ASIC"s claws

Finally, two years after the wholesale destruction of billions of dollars in Investor funds by once respected patrons of the arts and more recently, the bizarre accounts of American cowboys walking away with vast sums of Australian superannuation savings, a faint glimmer of hope emerged that there was to be a renewed focus on corporate miscreants.

Alas, it was not to be. La Norda's new federal role instead is to be restricted to knife-wielding gangs, the ethnic background of which no doubt would reflect those same very groups both sides of politics have targeted as imperilling the moral fibre of this great nation.

What a waste! Imagine if all this new energy to crack down on crime was devoted to an area that actually mattered.

Imagine the effect she would have on our dozing corporate crime agency, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, should she be appointed to replace Tony D'Aloisio, the man who has implemented a series of impressive reforms to processes within the organisation while successfully ignoring the central function of the body - actually doing something about corporate crime.

As difficult as it is to conceive after the tumultuous market meltdowns in 2008 and last year, not one charge has been laid against anyone of any significance from those heady days.

You have to admit, that takes some doing - or not, as the case may be.

Instead, all the Investigations and examinations have been left to liquidators and receivers of the still-smoking corporate ruins.

In recent months, there has been an entertaining procession of winged former high flyers sauntering through the foyer of the Federal Court building in Phillip Street and the Supreme Court in Taylor Square, delivering what euphemistically is referred to as evidence to exasperated liquidators.

There was the ever-grinning Eddy Groves and his ongoing ABC circus of family squabbles.

Who could forget his ex-wife Le Neve sobbing that she had no idea good old Eddy had signed all those documents without her knowledge even though several bankers from different banks testified to the contrary? Or her brother, Frank Zullo - who profited immensely from maintenance contracts with ABC's childcare centres - now incensed at the financing arrangements that have left Eddy ensconced on Frank's Gold Coast hinterland estate?

A fellow Gold Coaster, the polo playing MFS founder Michael King, has yet to appear although many of his sidekicks have been put through the mill, identifying the pitfalls of building a corporate empire on the shifting dunes behind Surfers Paradise.

The collapse of MFS and its Gold Coast cousin City Pacific followed a series of property group implosions like Westpoint, Fincorp and Bridgecorp, collapses ASIC presumably still is busy considering.

In the past fortnight we have seen the portly figure of one Philip Green, the former chief executive of the aptly named Babcock & Brown, struggle to recall for the liquidators even details about his own employment contract, which presumably he wrote himself.

The exact quantity of cash destroyed by Green remains a subject of some debate. Creditors are owed somewhere north of

$3 billion. But in its final 12 months, Babcock & Brown managed to lose $5.3 billion, an all-time record although not the kind one ordinarily would boast about.

Statistics, however, easily can be manipulated. And if you take the number of issued shares in the company and multiply it by either the $5 share price at which they were issued, or the $34 peak they attained at the height of the madness in 2007, you could conceivably concoct a figure that would cause even Phil to turn green. Who could forget the indefatigable Phil continually hammering home his prediction through 2008 - as the company was burning through billions - that it would notch up a $750 million profit?

Or that during this period, Green actively was lobbying ASIC to come down hard on those making ''false statements'' about his company's finances?

For once the regulator jumped, instigating the infamous ''Project Mint'' which during an entire year nabbed just one person, a stockbroker who ironically was banned for sending an email to his mates about Macquarie Group that turned out to be true.

As a personal disclosure, I should note here for posterity that Phil Green once spent two hours on the phone to me emphatically denying that anyone within Babcock & Brown had margin loans that could in any way negatively affect the company. Oddly enough, in the past few weeks, we've learned Green had $15 million in assets trapped within the teetering stockbroking firm of Tricom but that this did not influence his decision to authorise a $35 million B&B lifeline to the beleaguered broker.

Tricom, of course, played a central role in the collapse of Allco Equity, the financial engineer run by David Coe that attempted to take out Qantas.

Coe found himself before a liquidators' hearing earlier this year where he distinguished himself by uttering the word ''privilege'' before any of the meaningless answers that followed. Those hearings have yet to conclude and we await with bated breath whether Sir Rod Eddington eventually will find himself in the witness box to answer questions over his role in approving some of the collapsed high-flyer's more interesting transactions.

But the truly frightening case right now is the bizarre tale of Trio, the Albury-based funds manager with links to shady characters from the Caribbean to Hong Kong, all apparently controlled by a mysterious American, Jack W. Flader.

In what is shaping up to be one of Australia's biggest frauds, $123 million of superannuation funds have gone missing in what appears to be a devilishly simple thimble-and-pea shuffle. Again it is a liquidator conducting the investigations and the public hearings.

Still, after the court debacles recently presided over by ASIC - including the One.tel case against Jodee Rich - the regulator clearly has decided to stick to what it does best.