The senators list multiple triggers for potential clawbacks in Wells Fargo’s policy.
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Federal prosecutors are now reviewing the fake accounts, according to people familiar with those investigations, and on Friday, the House Financial Services Committee said it would be launching its own investigation and would hold its own hearing into the alleged fraud.
The House Financial Services Committee on Friday launched an investigation into allegations of widespread fraud at Wells Fargo & Co., making the panel the latest government entity to take a closer look at practices that have already resulted in a record $100 million penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Wells Fargo said its CEO, John Stumpf, will testify.
In addition to calling Stumpf to testify, Hensarling tells Strother that the Committee would like to conduct transcribed interviews with the following Wells Fargo executives: John Shrewsberry, senior executive vice president and chief financial officer; Timothy Sloan, president and chief operating officer; Michael Loughlin, senior executive vice president and chief risk officer; and Carrie Tolstedt, senior executive vice president for community banking.
Stumpf is also being called as a witness to a separate hearing being held by the Senate Banking Committee Sept. 20.
If Wells Fargo senior executives were truly in the dark, Warren also said that means “this is simply a bank that is too big to manage”.
The suit is the latest fallout for the bank after it was caught opening millions of fake bank and credit card accounts for customers over the past five years.
Wells Fargo, the second largest USA bank by market value, this month paid $185 million in fines as it admitted that employees had boosted sales figures by opening some two million deposit and credit accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge. Wells Fargo announced in July that she was retiring at the end of the year. Regulators said the misconduct occurred beginning in 2011.
There have been calls for Wells Fargo to recover some of the money paid to executives involved with the scandal, including Tolstedt, who Fortune magazine estimated will receive $124.6 million in a retirement pay package.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Utah, and seeks class-action status on behalf of hundreds of thousands of customers nationwide.
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Wells Fargo, the country’s third-largest bank by assets, has said it has fired 5,300 people over the matter and would eliminate sales goals in its retail banking on January 1, 2017.
