Santa Clara County will temporarily end business with Wells Fargo Bank in response to the revelation that the company created more than 2 million fake accounts.
The Board of Supervisors unanimously voted Tuesday to cut ties for two years with the San Francisco-based company that collected money from the fraudulent bank and credit card accounts.
The board’s vote means the county’s Controller-Treasurer Department has to suspend investments on its securities linked with the bank and stop using the company as its broker-dealer to secure investments, county officials said.
The board also decided that Wells Fargo wouldn’t be the county’s managing underwriter for debt issuances during the two-year suspension, county officials said.
“Regrettably, federally imposed fines seem to be insufficient to change behavior. If pulling our business is what it takes to change behavior, then so be it,” Simitian said in a statement.
“My hope and expectation is that action by our County might prompt similar action by other jurisdictions in the state and the nation,” Simitian said.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is looking to cut ties with Wells Fargo under legislation introduced Tuesday by supervisors Jane Kim and John Avalos.
The legislation asks the city to consider a “responsible banking ordinance,” revoke the naming of Wells Fargo Plaza at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and launch an investigation by the city and district attorneys into the bank’s practices.
“Wells Fargo is committed to fix what went wrong and restore the public trust,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
“We have already provided full refunds to customers we identified as having accounts that could have been unauthorized,” according to the statement.
I haven’t received any refund. The trouble is that they haven’t identified customers who were coerced or worse. We were refinancing, and when we went to sign the papers, were told we had to take out (and pay for) a home equity loan as a condition of getting the mortgage. No one told us about this earlier. We also had to keep a checking, savings account with a certain amount of money, almost zero interest nd lots of fees. The worst thing was the amount of time it took to avoid being charged other fees for all of those. They would regularly call us on Sunday telling us our home equity was in default even though it never was, we always paid on time.
Seems to me Wells Fargo went really wrong when they bought Wachovia.
I was pressured by WF into opening an additional account for no purpose. Really pressured. But I agreed so I can’t claim they cheated me.
I closed it after a couple of years when it seemed just to produce more paper and have no value. o yes, he said it would help me have a relationship with the bank.
r-r-right.