In the Red Purple

I'm starting to go off waking up to AM in the morning. Especially after this report on the HIH Royal Comission by finance reporter Stephen Long. Here's a potted version:

At times the hearings into HIH's collapse became an unseemly squabble between the culprits to apportion blame. Some claim the purchase of FAI from Rodney Adler was the straw that broke the camel's back. Rodney Adler said: "It's got nothing to do with me."

...

Justice Neville Owen's report tells a story of a company killed slowly by ineptitude as it shambled towards oblivion. ...

But the latest sale of FAI's profitable insurance lines to the German company Allianz was the "harbinger of doom".

The report says Ray Williams ran the company like a personal fiefdom, unchallenged by an incompetent board.

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Justice Owen says HIH was not a place where wholesale fraud and embezzlement abounded but as it slowly disintegrated, key executives stand accused of lying to paper over the cracks.

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Still others looted the ship as it sank.

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Like Julius Caesar, HIH toppled on the Ides of March, March 15th, 2001, and also like Caesar, the regulator APRA failed to heed the warning signs.

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But the victims could still be left wondering why so few criminal charges? Their careers may be over but it seems few, if any, of the culprits will go to jail.

LINDA MOTTRAM: Finance Correspondent Stephen Long.