Wells Fargo CEO gets pay hike despite scandals

One day after Tim Sloan was grilled on Capitol Hill for presiding over a near-constant parade of scandals, Wells Fargo announced that he would receive a $2 million cash bonus

Wells Fargo CEO gets pay hike despite scandals

Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan is getting a pay hike despite presiding over a seemingly never-ending parade of scandals.

Sloan will make about 5% more for 2018 than he did for 2017, thanks to a $2 million cash bonus, according to a report by The Charlotte Observer. The bonus brings Sloan’s total compensation for 2018 to about $18.4 million.

The bank reported Sloan’s salary Wednesday in its annual proxy filing. The announcement came just one day after Sloan was grilled by lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee. At that hearing, both Democrats and Republicans rebuked Sloan for the bank’s litany of misdeeds and its seeming slowness to fix them.

“Each time a new scandal breaks, Wells Fargo promises to get to the bottom of it,” Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), the committee’s ranking Republican, said at the hearing. “It promises to make sure it won’t happen again. But then a few months later we hear about another case of dishonest sales practices or gross mismanagement, another case of the consumer who has been harmed by the bank’s business practices.”

Wells Fargo also received a rebuke from a regulator this week, when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said that the bank had shown an “inability to execute effective corporate governance and a successful risk management program.”

Wells Fargo is currently operating under an asset cap imposed by the Federal Reserve. The central bank imposed the cap in February of last year, citing “widespread consumer abuses” and demanding that Wells Fargo clean up its act. The cap was supposed to have been lifted in September, but Wells Fargo did not produce a satisfactory plan to curb its abuses. In January, Sloan told shareholders that he expected the cap to remain in place throughout 2019.

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