Stumpf has been criticized for his handling of the scandal. Stumpf had been facing criticism after an interview last week in which he implied that retail banking employees were to blame, and his prepared remarks seem to indicate a shift in tone. Tolstedt announced her retirement earlier this year, and the bank’s proxy statement suggests that as of February 24, she had 2.5 million shares of Wells Fargo stock or options to buy stock that she must exercise within 60 days.
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Tolstedt’s departure has created a firestorm because the longtime Wells Fargo executive is set to walk away with an incredible $124 million in stocks, options and restricted shares. She is retiring from the bank this year. Back then, the committee brought in J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. chief James Dimon to explain his bank’s “London whale” trading losses, in which the company lost more than $6 billion.
Wells Fargo, like other banks, has detailed clawback policies and provisions laid out in its proxy statements.
When it comes to cross-selling, Wells Fargo used the slogan “Eight is Great”. And signing customers up for online banking and credit cards, as part of the account on-boarding process, was another method to add a “new product” to their quota. The bank neither admitted nor denied the allegations, while acknowledging that it fired 5,300 employees over five years related to the sales practice.
Organized by the Committee for Better Banks – a coalition of bank workers, community and consumer advocacy groups, and labor organizations – the call featured three onetime bank employees who said the unreasonable sales goals and extreme pressure from management led to pushing unnecessary, and at times harmful, services and accounts onto consumers.
One former top financial regulator who helped prosecute more than 800 bankers in the savings and loan crisis during the 1980s and 1990s said the banks and other corporations protect those in the executive suites, leaving it up to government agencies to ferret out white-collar crime.
The bank should also reconsider whether to continue to allow the person who chairs its corporate responsibility committee, Federico Peña, to remain in that post, Mayo says.
Members of the panel are expected to quiz regulators on why Wells Fargo’s practices went on for years without being stopped.
“This was not the work of a few rogue employees over the course of a few weeks”, several Democrats on the Banking Committee wrote in a letter to Stumpf last week.
In the letter sent to customers, Clinton laid out a three-prong plan to address what she called “the culture of misconduct and recklessness” in the banking system.
The Wells Fargo PAC has given $831,700 to federal candidates in the 2015-2016 election cycle, 34 percent to Democrats and 66 percent percent to Republicans.
Notably, The U.S. Department of Justice has also launched an investigation that may result in civil or criminal charges.
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Published reports confirm that federal prosecutors are in the early stages of an investigation into the bank’s sales practices.
