Goddamit I don’t care if she was ready or not, or still wanted to grill banks as a Senator still or not… Warren should have run for President over the two dunkopfs we have now. It would have been a landslide. She has the most public respect of anyone in public office right now, IMO. She’s amazing.
WSJ reports.
Wells Fargo & Co. Chairman and Chief Executive John Stumpf will forfeit $41 million for the bank’s burgeoning sales scandal, marking one of the biggest rebukes to the head of a major U.S. financial institution.
The bank’s board moved to rescind pay for Mr. Stumpf and former community- banking head Carrie Tolstedt ahead of a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee Thursday. Wells Fargo’s board said Ms. Tolstedt, who oversaw retail banking during bad behavior there, will forfeit unvested equity awards valued at $19 million.
The board said she won’t exercise “outstanding options” during an investigation into the bank’s sales practices. Ms. Tolstedt has also left the bank, earlier than her planned Dec. 31 retirement.
The awards being forfeited by Mr. Stumpf represent about a quarter of the total compensation he has accrued over his nearly 35 years at the bank, according to an independent analysis by human-resources consultancy Overture Group LLC. Mr. Stumpf earned total compensation of $19.3 million in 2015.
The bank said that the $41 million is from Mr. Stumpf’s unvested equity awards. It also said that he would forgo salary during an independent investigation the board is leading and has recused himself from all matters related to that as well as independent directors’ deliberations. Neither he nor Ms. Tolstedt will receive a bonus for 2016.
As a Wells Fargo shareholder, I applaud the board’s action, 25% of your compensation over 35 years is pretty stiff penalty…
That’s a great start. How about some criminal charges now, since they were committing crimes.
What crime did they commit?
Are you serious right now?
Fraud. Theft.
Exactly - they need to nail some of these executives as an example to the rest of the industry. Not that anything will happen but it’d be nice to see. The pathetic excuse of ignorance is ridiculous and should not not apply, given the firings that occurred.
I’m sure there are people that will say that the C-level people are only guilty of being too ambitious with their sales goals. That they overreached, and failed to adjust their projections in a high-pressure market. At worst, these heroic job creators were duped by middle-management and failed in their oversight duties.
Well, if there’s no way to prove they had knowledge of it, then no criminal charges will follow. I do wonder, though, if putting all the middle managers on trial could reveal a few things about what the C-level folks knew… Like any criminal organization, lean on a grunt to get his boss, then lean on the boss to get the leaders.
Also, keep in mind that even if CEO John Stumpf is fired, he’ll likely still get to keep his $102.7 million golden parachute.
[quote]
But that’s not all. Wells Fargo’s latest proxy statement says that Stumpf is eligible for salary continuation, which presumably means that he would continue to get paid his $2.8 million salary or a portion of it, for a number of years after he leaves the company, including it appears even if he were fired. In addition, even after Stumpf leaves Wells Fargo, he won’t have to drive himself, or answer his own calls. According to the company’s latest proxy, Wells Fargo will continue to pay for a part-time driver for Stumpf for two years after he leaves the company, as well as an administrative assistant. Wells Fargo says the benefit is worth an additional $200,000 a year. The proxy statement does not say that he would lose assistant and driver even if he was fired for cause.[/quote]
Fuck this guy.
I mean his compensation values are obscene even if he wasn’t getting fired for basically defrauding huge swathes of banking customers. That he would get to keep all those perks?
Fuck this guy indeed.
Plus…
[quote]
“They ruined my life,” Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.
Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.
Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.[/quote]
Whistleblowers always get the shaft.
[quote]
One such former employee was fired after flagging issues directly to Stumpf, according to Senator Bob Menendez.
At the Senate hearing, Menendez read the New Jersey woman’s 2011 email to Stumpf, where she described improper sales tactics she felt were “wrong.”
“Did you read that email?” Menendez asked Stumpf.
“I don’t remember that one,” Stumpf replied.
“Okay, well she was fired. … So much for the safe haven,” Menendez said.[/quote]
So shocking. Wait, no , the other thing.
Commoner peasant: try to do the right thing, get fired.
Millionaire CEO: preside, aid and abet illegal tactics on a massive scale, ruin peoples lives, get a slap on the wrist, but keep your millions of dollars per year in compensation plus your ego stroking status symbols of chauffeur and assistant.
Can we launch this guy into a volcano?
Why do you hate winners, Craig? Jealous?
Identity theft. That’s what it would be called if anyone else did it.
The executives didn’t commit identity theft and I’m sure they didn’t instruct anyone to commit it.
I would however consider them culpable for setting up an environment with loose security controls, loose validation, and unrealistic performance targets. Executives who do that and don’t expect people to cheat somehow are guilty of negligence at best.
Definitely a possibility. Honestly I don’t have enough knowledge to say where there conduct would fit in a criminal trial, that would be for lawyers to do. But there are really only two scenarios in play here.
- their conduct was criminal on multiple accounts serious enough to put them in jail for longer than being caught with a joint
- if not criminally prosecutable IT FUCKING SHOULD BE
I mean can anyone defend their actions? Can anyone say that if someone that wasn’t a millionare bank executive had conducted a criminal ring on such scale, financially damaging hundreds of thousands of people, that they would not be facing 10-20 in federal prison? If you or I had done this, our lives would be effectively over.
@Strollen I know your question is ultimately valid, what part of the federal criminal code have they broken will be important if this ever gets charged. But can you honestly say that you do not think there is not something here that they can be charged with? Even if we can not name the exact law, it is abundantly clear that their actions should be illegal in some manner. I’ll leave defining that point to the federal prosecutors (hopefully).
Not winners, just bankers. Most criminally corrupt cartels on the planet.
The laws need to be changed so setting targets so unrealistic that it’s reasonable to believe that meeting those targets will likely result in crimes being committed as being an accomplice at a minimum.
and yes, gross incompetence in high-level CEOs of that degree should be punished by jail time.
Somewhere up the chain they created a internal processes that allowed this to happen. Banks have very specific rules and regulations and at certain levels, like tellers, you get mandatory days off not because anyone is being nice but to catch irregularities. So to have this many people knowingly open up accounts by stealing the identity of others (Iet’s keep in mind that identity theft doesn’t mean you have to ninja get the info, this is why parents can do it to their kids) to open those accounts… someone higher up knew.
They were firing people that were bringing it up by calling ethics lines. The leadership definitely knew what was going on
Never trust HR. HR works for the company. Their primary, secondary, and tertiary job is to protect the company.
Lawyer up. Don’t go to HR