Gold Quill Award

An expose of the multi-million dollar financial advice scandal at the Commonwealth Bank won Adele Ferguson the highest honour in Victorian journalism – the 2014 Monash Gold Quill.

The award was shared with Four Corners producer Deb Masters and researcher Mario Christodoulou for the program ‘Banking Bad’, which encapsulated a two-year investigation by Ferguson, whose work appears in The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review.

The judges praised Ferguson for a “courageous, painstaking and tenacious exposure” of the financial advice scandal at Australia’s biggest bank.

“Her work … revealed a culture of greed, secrecy and corruption within the Commonwealth Bank that destroyed the life savings of many vulnerable Australians,” the citation said.

“The bank was forced to make a public apology and announce a $250 million-plus compensation scheme open to 400,000 customers.”

Ferguson’s investigation forced the Federal Government to abandon plans to water down regulation of the financial planning industry. The fallout from the scandal – and Ferguson’s ongoing reporting – continues to reverberate across Australia’s banking sector.