Wells Fargo interim CEO Allen Parker has barely been in the C-suite a month, and he’s already being forced to confront the lingering resentment over the bank’s many consumer abuses – from opening fraudulent accounts on behalf of millions of customers to improperly repossessing the cars of service members – face to face.
According to CNN, dozens of activist shareholders were forcibly removed from Wells’ annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday after they refused to stop heckling Parker, who intimated that the bank could switch to a ‘virtual’ format – as other companies have – for future meetings if shareholders ignored his pleas for quiet.
One unidentified woman screamed that Wells Fargo “could not be trusted”, while Bruce Marks, an activist investor with a history of disrupting shareholder meetings, demanded that the Wells’ board be “held accountable.”
All the while, Parker calmly pleaded with them not to speak out of turn.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave the meeting if you cannot allow me to finish and continue in a respectful manner,” Parker said.
“One of the wonderful things about shareholder democracy in our country is that we have meetings like this.”
Perhaps the most memorable disruption came from a marine who recounted how the bank improperly repossessed his car in the middle of the night, leaving him and his pregnant wife without a car. When she went into labor, they had to turn to the police for a ride to the hospital.
During the regular question-and-answer period, former Marine Robert Martin criticized Wells Fargo for repossessing his vehicle in the middle of the night. Wells Fargo was been fined multiple times for wrongfully repossessing hundreds of servicemembers’ vehicles.
Martin said the incident left him and his pregnant life without a car when she had a medical emergency. The couple needed to be driven to the hospital by a police officer. Wells Fargo, Martin said, sent him a check for $10,000.
“My anguish was more than $10,000,” Martin told the board.
According to Bloomberg, another shareholder attacked the Wells board as a bunch of “frauds.” Others blasted Wells executives as “criminals” and demanded that Parker turn the company around.
Approached by CNN about the CEO hiring process, Betsy Duke, Wells Fargo’s chairwoman, refused to offer any details but insisted that the job was a “desirable” one.
“The role of CEO of Wells Fargo should attract the top talent in banking,” Duke said.
Somewhere, Tim Sloan is secretly thankful that Elizabeth Warren suggested he resign. And Parker is probably secretly thankful that Warren Buffett recommended the bank pick an outsider for its next CEO, particularly as Wells stock continues to lag behind the other big American banks.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2ViRYHj Tyler Durden