Sen. Elizabeth Warren is urging the Federal Reserve to require the removal of Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan if the bank wants to grow.
According to a Reuters article, Warren, D-Mass., sent a letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell urging him to not allow the embattled megabank to grow in size until it replaces Sloan. In her letter, Warren said Sloan is “deeply implicated” in the bank’s prior misconduct.
“The Wells Fargo Board of Directors cannot plausibly claim that it is ‘ensuring senior management’s ongoing effectiveness in managing the firm’s activities’ while retaining a CEO that helped oversee this much misconduct,” Warren wrote in her letter.
This isn’t the first time Warren has called for Sloan to be removed from his post. In August, Warren and fellow Senator Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, demanded answers from the bank after the bank revealed that an error in its mortgage underwriting software led to hundreds of improperly denied mortgage modifications and unnecessary foreclosures.
Warren went a step further than Schatz and called for Sloan to be fired in a tweet.
Because of an error @WellsFargo made, 400 of its customers lost their homes. What’s the bank doing to make it right? Setting aside a few thousand dollars for each of the people affected. Pathetic. The execs who oversaw this – including CEO Tim Sloan – should be fired. https://t.co/dqlp3Py6IS
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 6, 2018
In February, the Fed announced its intent to restrict the growth of Wells Fargo until it "sufficiently improves its governance and controls,” citing what it called compliance breakdowns and widespread consumer abuses as the primary motivations for the order.
"We cannot tolerate pervasive and persistent misconduct at any bank and the consumers harmed by Wells Fargo expect that robust and comprehensive reforms will be put in place to make certain that the abuses do not occur again," said outgoing Fed Chair Janet Yellen.
