Reputation invested: ANZ chief executive Mike Smith.
Reputation invested: ANZ chief executive Mike Smith. Photo: Louise Kennerley

ANZ wants to offload its majority holding of the Cambodian bank that this year was embroiled in a scandal involving the financing of a Cambodian sugar plantation using child labour.

ANZ chief executive Mike Smith said in Hong Kong on Monday the bank wanted to sell its 55 per cent stake in ANZ Royal. Cambodian company Royal Group holds the remaining 45 per cent.

Pointing to ANZ's 2012 sale of a stake in Vietnam's Sacombank, Mr Smith said: ''We would like to do the same in Cambodia. I would much rather have a wholly owned business in these places.''

After the child labour claims were revealed in January, corporate governance experts said the incident underlined difficulties for banks maintaining corporate governance standards when expanding overseas.

Mr Smith has said that some partial stakes in Asian banks could be problematic because ANZ received only a proportion of profits but had 100 per cent of its reputation invested in the holdings.

ANZ's new head of Asia, Andrew Geczy, said on Monday the bank was looking to ''strengthen its footprint'' in Thailand and Myanmar, where at present it only has representative offices.