Australia’s corporate regulator’s chairman and staff spent more than $120,000 traveling to international events at the taxpayer’s expense in the 12 months to 30 June.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) revealed its chairman, Greg Medcraft, made eight overseas trips in the 2015 financial year, with just over half the total expenditure going of flights and transfers.
Having racked up more than $45,000-worth of expenses on three trips in August and September of 2014, Medcraft and his staff spent close to $75,000 traveling to Korea, Japan, Frankfurt, London, New York, and Washington DC, from February until the end of June.
The most expensive trip of the year, was for the International Organisation of Securities Commission (IOSCO) — of which Medcraft has been chair since 2013 — annual meeting in London in June, which involved six and a half days of meeting, and costed $19,701.
With the six-day IOSCO annual conference in Rio de Janeiro in September and October of 2014, being the second most expensive trip of the year, costing just over $19,500.
ASIC spent a further $17,000 sending Medcraft and a staffer to Frankfurt for a three and a half-day IOSCO Financial Stability Board forum and meetings, in April.
Medcraft flew solo at a cost of almost $10,000 to the US, where he addressed the National Press Club in Washington DC about IOSCO and its thinking on global regulatory reform on asset management.
The ASIC chairman also used his US trip “to explore building a mutual recognition agreement between the US and Australia to facilitate cross border retail bond offerings” between the two jurisdictions.
