The banking royal commission that Malcolm Turnbull did his best to prevent has unearthed scandal after scandal.

After 30 years of nursing, Jacqueline McDowall set out to realise her dream of retiring in order to run a bed and breakfast.

The Melbourne-based nurse and her husband hoped to buy a B&B using the equity in their home, their combined superannuation held in two industry super funds and a bank loan.

A Westpac financial planner advised them to do this through a self-managed super fund, which 
happened to charge very high fees and insurance premiums.

A Westpac business banker said the bank could lend them up to $2 million.

The McDowalls sold their house and started renting as they looked for a property to buy as a B&B.

However, when they went back to Westpac to finalise arrangements for the loan, they were told it was impossible because you cannot use super funds to invest in a property you live in.

They were forced to move to the Northern Territory to take up higher paid work, are still renting and doubt they will ever be able to afford their own home again, Ms McDowall told the banking royal commission.

She described Westpac’s behaviour as “absolutely and utterly disgusting”.

“We had been to a big bank that we had banked in for 16 years and I never thought that I would be lied to,” she said.

The McDowall’s story is one of many scandals to have emerged during commission hearings.

After repeatedly refusing to order a royal commission on the grounds it wasn’t necessary, Prime Minister and former banker, Malcolm Turnbull, finally did so after Nationals MPs threatened to break ranks and vote with Labor to establish one.

The commission’s shocking revelations have trashed the reputations of the big four banks plus AMP and “the entire Big End of Town”, wrote leading finance journalist Michael Pascoe in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Ban banks from super says ACTU

The ACTU has called on the Turnbull government to ban the banks from operating superannuation funds in light of the banks’ legal and moral failures unveiled both inside and outside of the royal commission.

The commission heard that the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) knowingly charged customers for financial planning advice after they died. The estate of one client was charged for 10 years after his death.

The CBA knowingly charged many more customers for services they did not receive and has so far been forced to pay back $118 million to customers who were ripped off in this way.

The financial services company AMP also admitted charging thousands of customers for services they were never going to receive – and for repeatedly misleading the financial regulator ASIC about the practice.

The National Australia Bank (NAB) was found to have run a bribery and forgery ring across multiple branches in western Sydney.

NAB’s “Introducer Program”, which provided commissions to people for home loan referrals, led to forged documents and fake payslips to settle loans and envelopes stuffed with cash bribes.

Outside the commission, CBA has agreed to pay a $700 million fine after admitting to systemic breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws.

The federal government’s financial intelligence gathering agency AUSTRAC accused the bank of serious and systemic failures to report suspicious deposits, transfers and accounts.

Some of these transactions resulted in millions of dollars flowing through to drug importers.

Meanwhile ANZ, along with global banks Citigroup and Deutsch Bank, have had criminal cartel charges levelled against them by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.