WASHINGTON (AP) – Wells Fargo’s CEO, newly stripped of tens of millions in compensation in a scandal over sales practices, will face lawmakers with more defenses than he had in the last round, when some senators called for his resignation.
Chief Executive John Stumpf comes into Thursday’s hearing before the House Financial Services Committee able to cite the millions he and another top executive will forfeit, her departure from the bank, and an earlier date for the aggressive sales quotas to end.
Whether the unusual takeback from his salary and stock will be enough to save Stumpf’s job is hard to say, and his testimony at Thursday’s session could play a role.
It was “a step in the right direction, but there are still dozens of unanswered questions,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the Senate Banking Committee’s senior Democrat. He and the other Democrats on the panel asked Stumpf on Wednesday to answer a series of 58 questions, including nearly two dozen that they said he failed to answer at the hearing last week or for which he promised to provide fuller information.
“We still don’t know how many customers were harmed and how long this fraud continued,” Brown said in a statement. “We also don’t know how many low-paid employees got fired for failing to meet quotas that Wells Fargo now recognizes were too high.”