In the mailbags and inbox email servers of Australian public affairs television programmes like 60 Minutes , there is one issue that enflames viewers’ vitriolic responses more than any other.

The sheer volume of angry letters and emails we receive about this issue far outweighs anything else upsetting our audience, and it’s been the case for years.

The level of public passion and bitterness this issue inspires is overwhelming in comparison to what you might expect to be the top issue of the day: fears about Islamist extremism and terrorism, crime, anger about the Family Court, opprobrium of politicians (and journalists), the rising cost of living, immigration, and refugees.

No, they aren’t it.

There is a number one concern in Australia at the moment that leaves dust behind every single one of its rivals for top billing as the topic that incites more excoriating contempt and condemnation than any other.

I’m talking of course about Australia’s big banks.

Eleven days ago, 60 Minutes, aired a story about Cairns businessman Roy Lavis, whose company CEC Group went into receivership in 2011, devastating the lives of 750 employees who lost their jobs – just some of around 5,000 locals directly and indirectly affected by CEC’s collapse.

Our story was straightforward in the telling because, unlike so many complex banking stories, we had the benefit of the findings of an exhaustive investigation report prepared into the CEC Group collapse by the Federal Government’s Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Kate Carnell.

Her damning report was explosive in its findings.

"It is highly likely the CEC Group would have survived if not for the actions of the CBA," it said, also declaring the bank’s treatment of CEC was "highly unreasonable"and "potentially unconscionable".

Suggesting a bank acted potentially unconscionably is to suggest that bank may have acted illegally, breaching Australia’s strict consumer laws by abusing its power.

It is an incendiary, albeit – as the Ombudsman found – a justified allegation.

So, as is fair and proper, the Ombudsman Kate Carnell’s report was sent confidentially to the Commonwealth Bank in early March this year for comment.

But, as Ms Carnell revealed in the blow back from the bank against our story, the CBA completely failed to respond to her findings.

“They didn’t respond to it,” she said.

“I thought they didn’t have any problem with it.”

Imagine that. A major bank is accused of possibly illegal conduct by a Government Ombudsman and it totally fails to avail itself of the opportunity to defend itself against those findings.

It was when 60 Minutes obtained a copy of the Ombudsman’s report and asked the bank for an interview that, shortly before our broadcast, the bank sent its government relations lobbyist Euan Robertson to Canberra to angrily complain to the Small Ombudsman that her report had found its way to 60 Minutes .

The gall of it; shame on us for having the temerity to publish a Government report criticising a bank!

That is why we decided to criticise Commbank on 60 Minutes for what we dubbed in our story’s introduction as its “breathtaking arrogance”.

That a bank felt so powerful it believed it did not need to even respond to the Ombudsman’s findings is, we believe, symptomatic of a wider malaise across the banking industry.

And it is not just 60 Minutes that is attracting victims’ bitter allegations about ‘bastard banks’.

The Federal Labor Opposition is pushing for a Royal Commission into our banks and there is also support among Coalition MPs for a banking tribunal – an initiative that is also supported by Ms Carnell.

Federal politicians are getting the same mail we are. They know the major banks have a terrible perception problem and complaints about their behaviour are clogging up their inboxes too.

Treasurer Scott Morrison clearly had his reasons when he told the big banks in the May Budget that "no one likes you anyway".

Australians have had a gut full of the way our major banks are perceived to treat their customers, especially small business; and the banks have a perception problem – whether they want to admit it or not.

60 Minutes interviewed Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Kate Carnell. (Network)

When we interviewed Kate Carnell for 60 Minutes, she made this astonishing admission:

"When I started in this process for this banking inquiry, I believed that – you know – that there’d be two sides to every story. I believed that – you know – that banks wouldn’t operate this way. I just believed that and it was just, the more we got into these stories like Roy [Lavis’], the more I realised people really were treated unfairly and really were hurt and really do need to have some justice," she said.

Ms Carnell also stated categorically, based on her analysis of what happened to Roy Lavis and CEC Group, the Commonwealth Bank was best advised to negotiate a quick and speedy financial settlement with him for its clear failings.

"Commbank is our biggest bank,” she told us.

“I think it has an obligation, a moral obligation to, you know, to settle with people like Roy.”

She clearly believes she is in the right - that her findings against CBA are based on the very best expert advice, and she is not backing down - as perhaps the bank hopes she will.

At this point, you would think the Commonwealth Bank might sit back for a moment and quaff a reflective brandy or two in its 19 th floor boardroom; that it would consider very carefully how and if to take this further.

It has been excoriated in an Ombudsman’s report that it failed to respond to.

It has, according to evidence given to a Parliamentary banking inquiry, another 2000 or so Bankwest complainants claiming that it unfairly shafted them and, despite the bank’s denials in that hearing of a conspiracy against its customers, it seems inevitable that at least some of those many cases will eventually find their way to a new government banking tribunal that can publicly investigate alleged bank malpractice and levy penalties where breaches are found.

But in the wake of our story, the Commbank’s lobbyists and spin-doctors chose to stand and fight (perhaps they got heady inspiration from Nine’s Australian Ninja Warriors fighting it out on Cockatoo Island in the harbour far below their corporate HQ).

Through the pages of the Australian Financial Review, Commbank has unleashed a splenetic scourge of spin-doctors - and it also, unwisely, chose to take on the Small Business Ombudsman upon whom we relied for our story.

In 33 years of reporting, I have never seen an Ombudsman savaged so mercilessly as Kate Carnell was this week.

Just about everything she found against the CBA was arrogantly dismissed by the AFR (and Commbank) as politically motivated – about the most damaging slur you can levy against a Government official entrusted as an independent arbiter.

Over six successive days and venting thousands of words, Aaron Patrick, the AFR journalist entrusted as the safe pair of hands to air Commbank’s claims, has run seven breathless major, often full-page, stories in which he has sought to weave an elaborate conspiracy theory suggesting 60 Minutes is working in league with Federal MP Warren Entsch and Ms Carnell.

"Bank executives believe that Ms Carnell’s investigation into the CEC collapse and several earlier parliamentary inquiries into the banks, are being driven by politically connected property developers upset with commercial decisions made by banks during the global financial crisis," Patrick credulously reported.

For good measure, the AFR’s editorial writers also weighed in, slavishly towing the CBA line and dismissing the whole Ombudsman’s report as "bank bashing hysteria".

60 Minutes ’ story was also peremptorily cast aside as "one-sided".

On the way through, the AFR also put the boot into Prime Minister Turnbull, suggesting he was simply playing to political populism when he upbraided the banks for their arrogance at Westpac’s 199 th anniversary lunch in April last year.

So it’s a case of, 'Nothing to see here, it’s all politicised bollocks and how dare those vulgar scoundrels from commercial TV investigate the banks’, the AFR appears to be sycophantically spluttering. It was not the greatest moment in the once-mighty AFR’s contribution to investigative journalism.

At least the AFR’s Mr Patrick had the good grace to report to his readers that when he rang me for comment, I called him a "lickspittle" for his craven toadying to the bank’s line.

He also acknowledged I had asked if he would be able to look at himself the morning after his obsequious puff-piece was published.

One claim he made in support of his wacky conspiracy theory was that we did not mention MP Warren Entsch had been the company’s acting chairman, thereby suggesting 60 Minutes had deliberately concealed his board role on the CEC Group board.

Patrick’s allegation was totally false.

Our story stated clearly that Mr Entsch was "on the board of CEC when he says the company collapsed under the weight of Commbank’s demands". At time of writing, our requests for a correction by Mr Patrick have been ignored.

Mr Entsch is also writing his own complaint to the AFR but we are not holding our breath in expectation it actually gets published.

The Small Business Ombudsman’s office yesterday revealed the AFR’s Mr Patrick has repeatedly ignored several offers to come to Canberra to review the evidence the Ombudsman relied upon to make her findings.

It is a very generous offer, and it has to be asked: how could the AFR possibly assert it has done a proper investigation into this matter if it has not bothered to actually sit down with the Ombudsman to hear her evidence?

60 Minutes spoke to both Ms Carnell, Mr Lavis, Mr Entsch, and Commbank and we also spoke to former CEC employees and investors and other sources.

Yesterday evening, Mr Entsch wrote an angry letter to the AFR complaining about its one-sided coverage:

“Mr Patrick has shown nothing but contempt for Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Kate Carnell by dismissing her findings and questioning her professional skills and ability to conduct a thorough and impartial review of the CEC case," the letter read.

“I would like to know why reporter Aaron Patrick has failed to declare in print that he has been invited by the Ombudsman to come and view the evidence in the CEC case first-hand, but has repeatedly refused this offer?

"In fact, he told Ms Carnell he is "not interested in that" and that he is "only interested in a short grab" for his articles. How can you tell an accurate story when you refuse to look at all the facts?”

But of course, the fact Mr Entsch has had any dealings with the Ombudsman this week at all is just further evidence for the AFR of this massive supposed conspiracy to undermine the banks.

No doubt, as we speak, the AFR has its photographers poised to capture Kate Carnell slugging back fine Grange in a mansion on the Gold Coast with Mr Entsch and those dreadful Queensland property developers behind the conspiracy against our banks.

We had heard about Roy Lavis’ case during 2015 Parliamentary inquiries into impaired loans but it came up again while we shot another story in Cairns earlier this year, investigating how the National Australia Bank had pressured a husband and wife couple, Terry and Cathy Maloney, to deal with a convicted criminal named Joseph Prestia.

As it always happens with bank stories, the NAB exposé generated a blizzard of other alleged bank victims who then sent their mounds of paperwork into 60 Minutes, all pleading for their gripe with their bank to be exposed.

A plethora of these cases were small business clients of Bankwest who found themselves foreclosed, and declared to be in ‘non-financial default’ by the Commonwealth Bank after the CBA bought Bankwest off United Kingdom bank HBOS in 2008.

Time and time again, these Bankwest complainants alleged Commbank had shut them down using questionable loan-to-value ratio non-financial defaults, suggesting the value of the asset against which they had borrowed was now far lower than Bankwest had agreed.

Significantly, most of the alleged victims asserted they were never in financial default on their loans – they had consistently paid their interest and principal on time and in full.

Banking stories are notoriously difficult to produce for television because they invariably involve complicated discussions about the masses of paperwork used to contract the loan to the borrower in the first place.

How to measure the rights and wrongs of a bank’s actions when, as happened in Roy Lavis’ case in 2008, he said he and his CEC Group board were suddenly confronted by a panicked demand from CBA that CEC dramatically reduce the borrowings that the bank had agreed to only weeks earlier?

Throughout the previous year, the bank had supported CEC in a growth strategy to buy land for development by approving borrowings from $106 million to $169 million by Christmas 2007; it had authorised $18 million just before Christmas after undertaking a credit risk assessment of Roy’s company.

Then the Global Financial Crisis began to hit and, as Roy told it, just weeks later in late February 2008, CBA decided he would not get his money unless he agreed to a massive reduction in debt.

By October 2008, he claimed he was forced to more than halve his debt down to $80 million.

Roy said he complied with the Bank’s debt reduction demands and, with a lot of effort, he kept on paying his interest and principal on time – and, because of that, he believed he had the bank’s support to keep on running his business.

But what he said happened is as he reported the bank’s imposed debt reductions to the Australian Stock Exchange, shareholder confidence in the business gradually collapsed, and the bank’s demands for debt reductions continued even further.

He was forced to release $89 million from asset sales in eight months to reduce a debt that had increased with the bank’s approval by just $63 million in the preceding year.

Being forced to sell his most valuable assets, Roy said (and Kate Carnell agrees with him), destroyed his business.

We first met Roy Lavis when he rolled up to the Cairns Hilton in a borrowed, battered, Toyota land-cruiser hefting a distressingly large pile of manila folders and binders, the last remnants of CEC Group’s paperwork during that 2008-2011 period when he was fighting for his corporate life.

Roy gave personal guarantees to try to keep his company afloat and he was forced into bankruptcy; it has made his efforts to rekindle his business almost impossible.

The irony is, as we stand on the Cairns harbour esplanade, almost everything around us was built by Roy’s CEC Group. For decades, he was the bloke who built Cairns’ sewers, streets and housing developments.

As Carnell told us: “Roy was one of those fantastic Australians who grow a business from nothing. We need more Roy's.”

Over two weeks before our story was due to be broadcast, we sent Commbank an exhaustive list of questions aimed at extracting from the bank an explanation for why it did what it did to Roy Lavis and CEC.

We also attended a long, off-the-record briefing with CBA’s public affairs manager Tracy Lee and government lobbyist Euan Robertson, a former advisor to Labor Shadow Minster Tony Burke.

Days passed without a bank response and broadcast drew closer.

Then, shortly before broadcast, the bank finally agreed to allow us a short interview opportunity to put questions to CBA’s chief risk officer David Cohen.

We have always made an extended version of that interview available online, despite the AFR’s false assertions we only gave Mr Cohen 90 seconds.

That interview can be viewed here:

What surprised us from the start about the bank’s position was that it unrepentantly claimed in the interview Small Business Ombudsman Kate Carnell had got things badly wrong and that, in particular, it was CEC who came to the bank in December 2007 recommending a debt reduction strategy.

Former CEO Roy Lavis and former chairman Warren Entsch both adamantly deny this claim – and so does the Small Business Ombudsman Kate Carnell.

“It’s complete and utter bullshit,” former acting chairman Warren Entsch told us.

They say the company only agreed to a debt reduction demand made by the bank at the end of February 2008 and that when it was reported to the ASX, the CEC share price plummeted because of it.

But the bank purports the opposite is the case:

“By December 2007,” CBA’s Mr Cohen claimed, "the board of CEC, and these were very experienced board directors, we had a former Premier of Qld in Rob Borbidge, we had a former chairman of ASIC, we had a current Federal member [Entsch], um very senior people, very senior accountant, these directors and senior management, including Roy Lavis, came to the view that actually the business model as CEC had been implementing was just not viable, so CEC itself decided that it needed to reduce its debt…”

I challenged Mr Cohen during our interview about this assertion (and we included that exchange in our story) because I knew it was clear from the documents the debt reduction strategy had been imposed on CEC by Commbank.

Here’s an extract from a letter from CEC to CBA dated 22 February where CEC’s managing director clearly states the debt reduction strategy was the bank’s concern, not CEC’s:

Supplied.

In another letter dated 28 February 2008, it is again abundantly clear CEC’s continued loan facility is dependent on the company agreeing to CBA’s proposed dramatic debt reduction strategy – a demand made by the bank, not CEC:

Supplied.

It’s the same again when the facility is renewed on 30 May 2008, the bank requiring yet another huge cut to CEC’s borrowings.

It is very clear the debt reduction strategy demand has come from the bank not CEC:

Supplied.

When the facility is up for review again in October 2008, it is again the bank that is insisting on the debt reduction strategy, not CEC:

Supplied.

Roy Lavis laughed off suggestions by CBA’s David Cohen it was CEC who came begging in that December 2007 period for a debt reduction.

As he correctly noted, the bank had approved another $18 million extension to his loan facility on 20 December 2007.

“Why in heavens name would we have agreed to CEC Group paying bank fees totalling $875,000 within 12 months for a debt reduction program the bank falsely claims was CEC Group’s initiative,” Roy asked.

Nothing in any of the AFR’s lengthy reports addresses this clear conflict between what the bank claims and what the Ombudsman accepted as the truth.

Instead, everything the Ombudsman said was peremptorily dismissed by its reporter as politically motivated.

To further underline the charge, much was made of the fact MP Warren Entsch has campaigned on behalf of his friend and former CEC board member Roy Lavis to highlight what Entsch calls "bank bastardry".

Then again, in his most recent article suggesting a massive conspiracy against the banks, the AFR’s Aaron Patrick quotes an anonymous former director of CEC as saying the CBA was not to blame for the company’s failure.

Oddly, the purported former director does not explain why he agreed at the time to the investment strategy which he now so fulsomely decries as "reckless" to the AFR.