Stuart Theobald has written a great piece for the Sunday Times yesterday on the leak of confidential sections of the Competition Commission inquiry into the South African banking sector on wikileaks.com (which neither I nor Bekka can get to for some reason – check it out and let me know if you’re also having a problem).

Theobald writes: ‘The irony is that putting such information into the public domain may actually help the cause of competition, as the banks can take each other on, knowing much more about their competitors.’

Theobald discusses some of the information about profit margins from the report and notes that ‘banks which co-operated the most are prejudiced the most.’ I’d be really interested in seeing how the industry and consumers react to this information and what the overall effect is going to be both for those who disclosed details (including FNB and Nedbank) vs those who kept them secret.