Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Committee on Financial Services, released the following statement today in response to an announcement by Wells Fargo & Company saying that Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John G. Stumpf would retire from the company, effective immediately:

“Given Mr. Stumpf’s failure of oversight at Wells Fargo, I believe it is more than appropriate that he today decided to retire from the company, effective immediately. Wells Fargo’s misconduct, including the unauthorized opening of more than two million deposit and credit accounts on behalf of unsuspecting consumers, is truly unconscionable, and Mr. Stumpf bears direct responsibility for failing to stop this fraud from proliferating under his leadership. In fact, during his questioning at a recent House Financial Services Committee hearing, it became clear that Mr. Stumpf either knew, or should have known, that this misconduct was happening within his bank and failed to do anything about it until prominent news articles were published.

With that said, I remain concerned that incoming CEO Tim Sloan is also culpable in the recent scandal, serving in a central role in the chain of command that ought to have stopped this misconduct from happening. Indeed, as recently as June of this year, Mr. Sloan was telling the news media that Wells Fargo’s aggressive cross-selling strategies were fundamentally sound and didn’t need to change.

As Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, I still believe that Wells Fargo is Too Big to Manage and that it should be broken up. I will remain focused on the Wells Fargo scandal and will continue to demand answers from the bank on who knew what and when. In the coming weeks and months, my Committee will continue to investigate this misconduct and determine how we can prevent this type of misbehavior from ever happening again.”

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