Crown Perth directors told an inquiry they'd never heard of its own bank account

Past and present directors of Burswood Limited — the Crown-controlled company above the Perth casino licence — told the WA royal commission they were never told about a bank account allegedly used by international criminal syndicates to launder hundreds of millions of dollars. The account was owned by Riverbank Investments Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary whose principal place of business was listed at Crown Perth.

The Bergin inquiry, which in February 2021 deemed Crown Resorts unsuitable to operate its new Sydney casino, had found Riverbank was one of two Crown-controlled accounts allegedly used to launder hundreds of millions at the Melbourne and Perth casinos. Directors Maryna Fewster and John Poynton said they first heard of Riverbank through media reports in July 2019. Fewster said board papers mentioned the account but it was never discussed at a Burswood board meeting; told in December 2019 that Commonwealth Bank would close the account, she said 'it had no significance to me then'.

Crown Perth chief executive Lonnie Bossi reacted, Fewster recalled, with shock: 'I didn't know about the Riverbank Investments account either.' She said the full-page advertisements Crown's board published denying the claims gave her 'a great level of comfort' — and that the Burswood board 'was not equipped to mitigate the risks of criminal activity or gambling-related harm'. Poynton, who also sat on the Crown Resorts board, said the account was not hidden but the structure was at fault: 'If you don't know something, how do you ask something about which you know nothing?'

Fewster added that after the Bergin report the Burswood board's February 2021 meeting was cancelled by its then-chair Poynton and it did not meet again until April, even as the Crown Resorts board met 18 times between February and mid-April. The Riverbank account was part of Crown's VIP program, run out of Crown Melbourne.

A laundering-suspect account sat inside a wholly owned subsidiary whose name never reached a board agenda.

The board took comfort from denial advertisements instead of demanding the underlying facts.

A bank's decision to close the account in December 2019 registered as 'no significance' to directors.

Even after the Bergin report, the local board skipped its February 2021 meeting while the parent board met 18 times.

A subsidiary that never reaches a board agenda is a control that does not exist: directors cannot govern an account they have never heard named, and comfort drawn from newspaper ads is not oversight.

The Perth royal commission was examining Crown's suitability to hold WA's only casino licence when the article was published in July 2021; the inquiry was ongoing.