Greenwashing the top priority among a dozen key ASIC focuses for 2023

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) says greenwashing, along with predatory lending and misleading insurance pricing, will be a “continuing focus” for the agency in 2023.

Among the selection of 12 enforcement priorities for the commission in the year ahead were protecting financially vulnerable consumers, unfair contract terms, superannuation sector misconduct and social media misinformation.

ASIC deputy chair Susan Court warned the business sector that it will be running a fine comb over sustainable finance practices and disclosure of climate risks, financial scams, cyber and operational resilience and investor harms involving crypto-assets.

“We take our role to protect consumers and investors seriously and won’t hesitate to take action to protect consumers where we identify poor conduct,” Court said in a statement.

“We will also remain focused on helping industry to meet their legal obligations, including by providing simple, effective and easy-to-access guidance.”

From September-December last year, ASIC said it took many significant enforcement and regulatory actions to deal with incidents in the financial services, retail and crypto-assets sectors. The issues dealt with involved misconduct, market integrity threats and consumer harm.

“This includes corporate governance and directors’ duties, product design and distribution, and misleading statements involving sustainable finance practices,” Court said.

“We also took our first action for greenwashing in October and issued infringement notices to three entities in the reporting period for misleading sustainability-related statements.”

On Wednesday, the commission released its latest enforcement and regulatory report covering the last quarter of 2022.

From July-December of the previous calendar year, ASIC commenced 62 investigations and worked through another 103 ongoing investigations.

A total of 173 criminal charges were laid, with $76.3 million in civil penalties imposed by the courts from July-December 2022. This saw 312 criminal charges laid in the calendar year overall and $222.1 million in civil penalties ordered.

One of ASIC’s most high-profile cases was bringing action against the directors of Star Entertainment Group Limited to account for alleged breaches of their director and officer duties involving money laundering risks.

The enforcement agency further issued 14 design and distribution obligations (DDO) stop orders during the reporting period to prevent consumers and investors being targeted by products inappropriate to their objectives, financial situation and needs. A total of 22 DDOs were handed down last year.

ASIC has also published an inaugural regulatory developments timetable with a view to giving industry transparent information about when to expect guidance documents will be issued commission.

“Our regulatory developments timetable is just one of many initiatives to streamline our interactions with the entities we regulate,” Court said.

This article was first published by The Mandarin.