Westpac sacks Gao overdraft error employee

Westpac has sacked the bank worker whose error led to Leo Gao escaping the country with millions of dollars.

And the Sunday Star-Times has learned the woman made a second error subsequent to the Gao blunder, in which she again keyed in the wrong loan amount. That mistake did not lead to any financial loss for the bank.

The Star-Times revealed last month that the woman feared losing her job and her home if she could not meet her mortgage payments.

She was called to a meeting with her bosses, accompanied by a member of Finsec, the bank workers union, and was subsequently dismissed. The woman will fight her dismissal, and take a case to the Employment Relations Authority.

Westpac says the woman was offered another role at the bank but turned it down. It is understood the alternative role carried the same rate of pay, but the woman was not interested in the type of work.

The woman, with more than 30 years' banking experience, worked out of Westpac's operational support centre in Christchurch. In early May she was formalising a $100,000 overdraft for Rotorua service station owner Gao and missed the decimal point in what a source called a "keying error", leaving Gao with access to $10 million.

He managed to transfer $3.8m to other accounts and escaped to China. His girlfriend, Kara Hurring, business partner, Huan Di Zhang, and mother, Lei Gao, also fled. Gao, Lei Gao and Zhang have been named in high court papers filed by Westpac and freezing orders have been placed on several properties.

The woman was disciplined after an internal investigation by Westpac in May. But it is alleged that she made a second error on another account, in which a customer was sent a fax confirming a loan amount and the wrong figure was specified.

A banking source said such errors were relatively common. "When you consider the millions of transactions each day on a keyboard in a bank, these things happen reasonably frequently."

A former Westpac employee who asked not to be identified but did the same job as the sacked worker, said he was "disgusted" the woman had lost her job. "I honestly think it's time management started taking some responsibility. They've cut back and cut back on checking officers. The girl basically made a decimal point error, it's pressure of work. Someone probably came to her at 10 to five and said `can you rush this through'. It stinks."

Westpac's general manager of customer and technology services, David Boyes, acknowledged that errors happened "from time to time". "Westpac has fair and transparent processes in place that forms part of investigating mistakes. We would be disappointed if there was any suggestion that fair process was not followed."

Boyes said while it would be "outrageous" to suggest the bank would use an error as an excuse for employment action, "errors can be the cause of certain actions as standards of accuracy are important for any bank to uphold".

Meanwhile, the Star-Times has been told that Gao claimed to have worked as a police officer in China, adding a twist to the search.

Isaac Le Vaillant, who worked at Gao's BP service station in Rotorua, said Gao spoke about being a policeman in China, including investigating triad-related murders.

"I would go to his house after work for a drink. He told me... he worked as a cop for quite a long time, maybe five years or so, and he used to tell me he used to go to murder scenes. He used to talk about that quite a lot. I think China's quite intense."

The Star-Times asked the officer in charge of the case, Detective Senior Sergeant Mark Loper of Rotorua, if he knew whether Gao had been in the Chinese police. Loper said: "Don't know, don't care," adding that the crime itself was all police were interested in. He was still waiting to hear from police national headquarters over jurisdictional issues with China.

- © Fairfax NZ News