The Washington Post: In emails, Wells Fargo executives griped about scrutiny, mulled using charity as leverage

The Washington Post, March 5, 2020: In emails, Wells Fargo executives griped about scrutiny, mulled using charity as leverage

Last year, Wells Fargo’s then-interim chief executive, Allen Parker, thought he had struck a deal.

Regulators had fined the bank $1 billion for consumer abuses, including opening millions of accounts consumers didn’t want. A senior political appointee at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Eric Blankenstein, told Parker that any additional investigations would be resolved privately — and without additional fines.

“Eric also assured me that there would continue to be ‘political’ oversight of the engagement with us,” Parker said in an email to a member of the bank’s board of directors.

The email exchange was uncovered during a year-long investigation of the San Francisco-based bank by the House Financial Services Committee that found widespread problems with how Wells Fargo and its board of directors have responded to more than three years of scandals in its operations. The back-channel communications between Blankenstein, the Trump Administration appointee who resigned under a cloud, and Parker potentially undermined career bureau officials who were not aware of the arrangement, the more than 100-page report found.

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