Over the past 30 years, Australia’s front line corporate and financial police force has been the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

Over the past 15 years, ASIC has been at the centre of major controversies for failing to either prevent or punish wrongdoers who engage in financial or corporate crime. The lack of early and effective enforcement of the law has caused immense financial, mental and emotional pain for tens of thousands of Australians.

Multiple attempts have been made by policy makers to correct ASIC’s poor performance including via various reviews, parliamentary inquiries and the 2018 Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.

In 2022, John Adams started to dig into ASIC’s statistics as published in their various annual reports and discovered that:

• ASIC only commenced official investigations in less than 1% of cases when a report of alleged misconduct was submitted to ASIC;
• ASIC’s performance in handling reports of alleged misconduct had substantially declined over the 11-year period from FY 11 – 12 to FY 20 - 21 despite receiving more funding and additional resources.

Sensing an opportunity to highlight glaring public policy problems and make a case for major public policy reform, Adams went to work writing his own research report and liaising with various Senators from the Parliament of Australia.

On 6 October 2022, Adams published his seminal report that triggered national headlines and public debate about ASIC’s ongoing performance woes. This
included leading coverage from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Economist alleges corporate watchdog ASIC is only
investigating tiny proportion of complaints - ABC News

Weeks later, on the morning of 27 October 2022, the Australian Senate by a vote of 43 to 20 established an inquiry into ASIC’s investigation and enforcement
performance resulting from Adams’ analysis.

Adams would go on to play an instrumental role during with the inquiry from making various submissions, organising witnesses to exposing more ASIC scandals via the freedom of information process.  

So appalling was the conduct discovered at ASIC that Adams also referred multiple ASIC officials to the National Anti-Corruption Commission for investigation.

In July 2024, the Senate Economics References Committee handed down a historic landmark
report calling ASIC a comprehensive failure and for ASIC to be abolished. The inquiry report also called for ASIC to be replaced with two separate regulators
– Corporations Regulator and a Financial Conduct Authority.

This special silver coin which comes in one troy ounce
and half troy ounce investment grade (99.9% pure) physical silver bullion rounds and is the ultimate statement that Australians desire to be free from financial crime and will not tolerate corrupt and incompetent public servants wasting their hard-earned money that cause harm to their fellow citizens.