Wells Fargo & Co.’s board clawed back an additional $28 million from former Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf and canceled about $47 million of ex-community bank head Carrie Tolstedt’s stock options after determining they were among senior managers who failed to heed warnings of spreading sales abuses for more than a decade.
The bank’s executives treated thousands of fired employees as rogues, and then downplayed the mounting terminations as the board began raising questions, according to the results of a six-month probe by a panel of independent directors. Investigators unleashed much of their harshest criticism on Tolstedt, 57, who was in charge of the unit where employees opened legions of accounts without customer permission. She earlier had been forced to forgo about $19 million in compensation before leaving the bank last year.
“Tolstedt never voluntarily escalated sales-practice issues and, when called upon specifically to do so, she and the community bank provided reports that were generalized, incomplete and viewed by many as misleading,” the authors wrote in the report released Monday.
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