EU must learn from #ANZ mistakes in the #BogacOzdemir case with China

The German government is rightly facing questions both from its politicians and from the European Union over its capitulation to China over Taiwan, removing the Taiwanese flag from the website of its Foreign Ministry and replacing it with a white square – the international symbol for surrender, writes Maria Murphy.

But it is not only German leaders who are coming under scrutiny for showing fealty to China.

The leadership of ANZ – Australia’s multinational bank which has offices across Europe – now find themselves under mounting pressure to explain their own appeasement of China linked to the Bogac Ozdemir case.

As governments and the private sector “bend the knee” to China in a short-term quest to appease relations, it is increasingly apparent to those familiar with diplomatic and security issues that a new Chinese iron curtain is rapidly descending across the globe. A new cold war is erupting which has already placed countries like Germany and enterprises like ANZ on the front line.

Bogac Ozdemir was the Singapore-based Global Head of Credit at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), and has been a senior and respected figure in banking for many years. Formerly the Global Head of US Dollar swaps trading at Barclays Plc in New York, he has also worked for BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole and Citigroup. However, all this changed when, while working at ANZ, he wrote in early March about the response to the COVID-19 crisis on LinkedIn stating that “we are all in this mess because of China and I don’t believe anything from there.”

In response, Mr Ozdemir was viciously attacked – both on Chinese and English language social media, and in several Chinese language media outlets – by hordes of “wumao” (Chinese nationalist internet trolls paid by Beijing to harass critics of the regime).

As is typical in modern memetic warfare, the bots and trolls quickly deployed the usual smear tactics, asserting that any criticism of the Chinese Communist Party is somehow a “racist” and “prejudiced” attack on the Chinese people as a whole.

ANZ immediately buckled in the face of such manufactured outrage, issuing a knee jerk statement that indirectly agreed with the party-line that Ozdemir’s criticism of the Chinese government was somehow a racial slur, claiming that the post “showed a distinct lack of judgement”. In doing so, the bank’s board and executive unitedly promised a full inquiry.

For those in the know, there are suggestions that the Chinese financial regulator and the CEOs of other Chinese companies also lobbied ANZ behind the scenes, adding to the pressure to remove Mr Ozdemir. Before long, he was placed on “special leave” before ANZ promptly moved to fire him.

From the outset, ANZ seem to have acted not only as complicit co-conspirators in Beijing’s plot but they quickly became the proxies for a totalitarian regime increasingly attacking the security and wellbeing of Australia itself – not to mention Hong Kong, India or indeed its own internal minorities such as the Uighur peoples, who Amnesty International claim are facing genocide.

Such an approach as seen here is reminiscent of historical diplomatic policies of appeasement, all of which have inevitably resulted in not only a shortfall of respective governments’ driving objectives, but also catapulted them into all-out conflict with authoritarian regimes. Governments with tyrannical instincts and totalitarian goals are never content with a single pander from foreign parties to prevent confrontation; yielding to Chinese authorities risks the treatment of Bogac Ozdemir, and other capitulations happening across many global sectors, becoming the Munich Betrayal of our century, with subsequent events being potentially dire.

From the EU’s perspective, and no doubt the perspectives of NATO and SEATO, it is concerning that ANZ fell for such obvious and mendacious bullying tactics. There is rising concern that under CEO Shayne Elliott the bank’s security, communications and human resources defences simply crumbled. When push came to shove, ANZ was unable or unwilling to deal with the realities of being a major investor in what remains a communist state and the knock-on consequences of such a reality.

EU member states can get as tough as they want with China, but when inexperienced corporate leaderships are willing to throw their own star performers under an unsustainable bus to keep a totalitarian power sweet, what realistic expectation could there be that Europe’s corporate leaderships or organisations would fare any better? That when push comes to shove, the contradictions between all these organisations’ professed values and corporate social responsibility statements simply turn to dust.

It could be argued that ANZ is a special case as it is already so mired in scandal and intrigue that its submissiveness to China is simply just another regrettable step along a well-trodden path.

In 2019, ANZ had to take a $682 million hit to compensate customers it had ripped off over the previous decade. And in 2018, it was embroiled in a murky affair over allegedly forming a ‘cartel’ to fix the price of its shares to keep them artificially high.

Not only do such scandals demonstrate that Australia’s Royal Commission into its banks has failed to get them to clean up their act, but they leave such corporations open to espionage and blackmail by an even more unscrupulous Chinese intelligence community.

It is in this context that some in Brussels are worried that weak, scandal-prone financial institutions like ANZ, not to mention HSBC and UBS, are themselves potential weak links in the West’s armoury against a bellicose China determined to throw its weight around in an ever more desperate quest for power.

It is no surprise that, as a US citizen, Bogac Ozdemir has reputedly been called in for recent meetings with senior advisors at the White House to discuss the problems raised by ANZ. While this may be one of the worst examples of abuse in recent months, it is not the only case that Washington, London and Brussels are aware of.

In an age increasingly struggling with Chinese and Russian information warfare, EU leaders are right to want citizens and employees to be able to exercise their democratic rights to free speech without employers giving in and becoming part of the problem.

In the face of Chinese and Russian aggression, many in Europe want greater solidarity in standing up for the rule of law, including the rights of employees. That is why now is the time for the EU to develop a comprehensive plan to take on China. To learn the lessons of Bogac Ozdemir’s experience with ANZ and others like it.

If the EU is going to take seriously its struggle against tyranny in an age of fake news and information hostility, it is going to have to make sure that the leaderships and practices of all organisations across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors do not fall into the traps set by the world’s worst tyrants.

For those major banks and corporations who do continue to invest in China and thereby run the risk of becoming twenty-first century Krupps or IG Farbens, they should at least be open, transparent and self-aware of what they are really about.

As with wealth, so it is with morality – there is no such thing as a free lunch.

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