A Showdown Over Wells Fargo’s Board of Directors Looms -<br />By STACY COWLEY and MICHAEL CORKERYAPRIL 24, 2017<br />PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — The scandal at Wells Fargo over the creation of millions of fake bank accounts<br />cost more than 5,300 people their jobs, many of them tellers and other low-level employees.<br />The bank’s directors allowed Wells Fargo’s decentralized management system to flourish, even though it gave them fairly little insight into important operational areas, and they — like the bank’s regulators — overlooked signals<br />that something was badly amiss, including a growing number of whistle-blower complaints and firings of employees.<br />Giant pension funds — like Calpers, which manages the retirement funds of California’s public employees,<br />and its New York City counterpart — are planning to vote against most of Wells’s 15 board members, saying they failed in their duties to oversee the company.<br />The Wells Fargo meeting promises more fireworks as groups of nuns<br />and environmentalists — in particular, those who oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, which Wells has helped finance — converge on the resort.<br />On Monday, Wells Fargo received a rare respite from months of regulatory pressure: The Federal Reserve<br />and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said Wells Fargo had submitted an adequate plan to wind down in the event that it faced a financial catastrophe.<br />The next group of employees who could lose their jobs are Wells Fargo’s board of directors,<br />who face re-election on Tuesday at the bank’s annual shareholder meeting.
