2/21/17

Four Executives Fired Over Wells Fargo Fake Account Fiasco

The Wells Fargo fake account fiasco has already resulted in the “retirement” of the bank’s CEO, John Stumpf, and Carrie Tolstedt, Wells’ head of retail banking, for allowing employees to open millions of unauthorized accounts in customers’ names. But the bloodletting isn’t done yet, as Wells has dismissed four additional executives without the PR-friendly spin of “retirement.”

Bloomberg reports that Wells Fargo fired four executives following the company’s board of director’s invention into the years-long fake account fiasco.

The fired employees include Claudia Russ Anderson, former community bank chief risk officer; Pamela Conboy, a regional president for Arizona; Shelley Freeman, former Los Angeles regional president and now head of consumer credit solutions; and Matthew Raphaelson, head of community bank strategy and initiatives.

The fired executives will not receive a bonus for 2016 and will be required to forfeit their unvested equity and vesting outstanding options, Bloomberg reports.

Prior to this week’s firings, Wells Fargo said it had let go 5,300 employees tied to the scandal. Despite this, no one else — including executives — had been held responsible for the fake accounts.

Lawmakers expressed their impatience with this during a senate hearing on the scandal back in September, prior to Stumpf’s “retirement.”

“You haven’t resigned, you haven’t returned a single nickel of personal earnings, you haven’t fired a single senior executive,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said during the hearing. “Your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low level employees… it’s gutless leadership.”

In October, a group of 14 senators urged the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Wells Fargo employees for their part in the scandal, noting that many senior executives had already admitted to knowing about the problem and allowed it to continue.

No comments:

Post a Comment