Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took on the Wells Fargo (WFC) bogus-accounts case in a letter to the bank’s customers to be released on Tuesday, when Wells Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf will testify before a Senate committee.
Clinton, who faced accusations during her party’s primary elections of representing Wall Street’s interests, said in the letter that Stumpf “owes all of you a clear explanation as to how this happened under his watch.”
See also: Former Wells Fargo Employees to CEO John Stumpf: It’s Not Our Fault
Earlier this month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulators announced a $185 million settlement with the bank for creating 2 million phantom accounts under actual customers’ names in a bid to meet internal sales goals.
In the letter sent to customers, Clinton laid out a three-prong plan to address what she called “the culture of misconduct and recklessness” in the banking system. It included “clawing back” the compensation of individual executives involved in wrongdoing and breaking up big banks that are not managed effectively. She also called for maintaining the CFPB, an agency created in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law that Republican lawmakers would like to reorganize.
