Bernie Sanders Asks If Wells Fargo Incident Has Triggered Criminal Referrals to Justice Department

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 3:24AM EST · Published Sep 19, 6:32PM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Perhaps another nail in the coffin of Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC) CEO John Stumpf. Bernie Sanders, former presidential candidate and United States Senator from Vermont wants to know if the federal agencies involved in the bank’s scandal have made referrals of material to the Justice Department.

Comments from the Sen Sanders website about a letter to Richard Cordray the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Thomas Curry, Comptroller of the Currency:

“Your agencies recently fined Wells Fargo $100 million, and $35 million, respectively, for illegally opening up deposit accounts and taking out credit cards for customers without their knowledge or consent. Have your agencies made any criminal referrals to the Department of Justice regarding this matter?”

“Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said Sept. 8 in a release about the fine. “Because of the severity of these violations, Wells Fargo is paying the largest penalty the CFPB has ever imposed. Today’s action should serve notice to the entire industry that financial incentive programs, if not monitored carefully, carry serious risks that can have serious legal consequences.”

This ups that stakes for Stumpf’s House and Senate testimony, and his attempt, likely to fail now, to keep his job.

[wallst_email_signup]

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.