Court declares Westpac engaged in unconscionable conduct for interest rate swap, maximum penalty applied (ASIC, 2024)

Judgment entered

Checked against the primary document on October 2, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, with sampled and disputed records read a second time. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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In January 2024 the Federal Court declared that Westpac engaged in unconscionable conduct by pre-hedging a A$12 billion interest rate swap for the AustralianSuper and IFM consortium buying Ausgrid, and ordered the maximum A$1.8 million penalty plus A$8 million toward ASIC's costs. It is not an insider trading case.

The record

Structured fields for this action, as recorded in our case library.
Agency	ASIC
Release number	24-011MR
Date filed	2024-01-31
Status	judgment
Criminal parallel	No
Defendants
Techniques

What was ordered

Civil penalty: —
Disgorgement: —
Prejudgment interest: —
Total relief: —
Alleged gain: —
Penalty as published: A$1.8m

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars. This regulator states penalties in AUD. The figure is recorded as published and is not converted, so it does not appear in the USD totals or medians used elsewhere on this site.

What is alleged to have happened

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission announced the outcome on January 31, 2024 as release 24-011MR.

The court found that in October 2016 Westpac pre-hedged ahead of the swap in a way that exposed its client to significant risk without disclosure and consent. ASIC described the case as clarifying expectations about pre-hedging.

The insider-trading tag had no basis in the release and has been removed.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

Timeline

2024-01-31 ASIC media release

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

ASIC media release

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.