Lampe, Anne

Anne Lampe won a Walkley Award in 1991 for her coverage of the so-called 'Westpac letters'. She has been a business journalist with V since 1983. Before that Anne was the London correspondent for the Australian Financial Review.She has written about property, banking, insurance, superannuation, tax, commercial litigation and fraud. Anne is particularly interested in focusing on consumer issues and how policy changes affect consumer interests.

Anne Lampe's own statement of support for her application explained the story as follows:

'The marketing of foreign currency loans and subsequent litigation by off-shore borrowers against major banls as their loan losses mounted has been aired in courts since 1988, with the banks vehemently denying that they were in any way negligent or incompetent in handling their borrowers' foreign currency loans exposure and transactions. The Pacific Paterneship/Westpac letters exploded one bank's defence.

'The letters showed mismanagement, staff incompetence and customer rip-offs on a large scale, involving millions of dollars of customer losses, illegal deal switching and secret commission taking on a big scale by dealers.

'The lawyers' findings in the letters were explosive, showing culpability of PPL as well as containing advice on how westpac could control the damage.

'It was to change the shape of foreign currency litigation, as well as focusing the attention of the Banking inquiry on th vexed question of who was to blame for the forex loan debacle.

Events

c. 1980 -	Career in journalism active
1991	Walkley Award (Print) - Best Coverage of a Current Story (Print), The Sydney Morning Herald - Fairfax

Australian Women Exhibitions

• The Women's Pages: Australian Women and Journalism since 1850, Australian Women's Archives Project, 2008, http://www.womenaustralia.info/exhib/cal/cal-home.html. [ Details... ]