Wells Fargo’s CEO pay package approved despite scandals
Wells Fargo boss Tim Sloan finally found a friendly audience — and all he had to do was fly to Des Moines.
The San Francisco-based bank handily defeated shareholder pressure to limit its CEO’s pay, knock off a board member, and study its employee incentives at its annual meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday — a stark turnaround from last year’s contentious meeting over the bank’s many scandals.
Sloan had even trotted out his son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids — Iowans, all of them — during the meeting at the Marriott in downtown Des Moines, as the CEO tried to put a positive spin on the bank.
“I said it last year and it’s still true: rebuilding trust is still our top priority,” Sloan told the audience.
Shareholders overwhelmingly backed the current slate of board members, with nearly 90 percent of the vote. A referendum on executive compensation, including a 35 percent pay raise for Sloan to $17.5 million, passed with 92.4 percent of the vote.
The overwhelming approval comes less than a week after the bank paid $1 billion in fines to federal regulators for years of ripping off mortgage and auto loan customers.
About 100 protestors were in the hotel lobby outside the meeting room, holding signs like “Bring Back Wampum,” a Native American form of currency, Reuters reported.
It wasn’t until the end of the meeting that chants of “Wells Fargo is the worst, puts people out of work” erupted from the crowd.
This year’s main rabble-rouser was Jonathan Chiang, the Treasurer of California, who took Wells Fargo — and Sloan personally — to task for their role in the bank’s many scandals.
“[Sloan] has proven too much a champion of the old guard to be the change agent needed,” Chiang said during the meeting. “It is time for him to go.”
The bank also defeated a shareholder proposal from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, which sought to force the bank to make a report on all of the employees who are paid in similar ways to employees who had participated in the fake accounts scandal.
That proposal only got 21 percent of the shareholder vote.
“We need daylight on what Wells Fargo is doing to oversee risky incentive pay practices that have contributed to multiple scandals at the bank,” DiNapoli said in a statement. “As long-term investors, we’ll be back next year and expect to gain even stronger support,” he added.