NEW YORK–Warren Buffett, who is Wells Fargo's largest and most powerful shareholder, said he does not believe the bank should turn to Wall Street as it seeks a new CEO.
As CUToday.info reported earlier, CEO Tim Sloan abruptly exited the position in March after leading the bank for the past several years as it works to navigate and recover from a series of scandals, the largest of which involved the opening of more than three-million bogus accounts as employees attempted to meet aggressive cross-sales targets.
The bank remains in the crosshairs of consumer groups and Congress, and continues to operate under a rare asset growth cap imposed by the Federal Reserve.
Buffett told the Financial Times the hiring of a Wall Street executive to fill the CEO slot is "automatically going to draw the ire of a significant percentage" of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. "And that's just not smart."
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns nearly 10% of Wells Fargo and he has long been a strong proponent of the bank.
‘Aren’t Losing Any Customers’
"They just have to come from someplace [outside Wells] and they shouldn't come from Wall Street," Buffett told the Financial Times. "They probably shouldn't come from JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs."
Buffett expressed optimism in Wells Fargo's underlying business despite the harm done by the fake-accounts scandal that erupted in September 2016, and a number of other scandals that have emerged since.
"If you look at Wells, through this whole thing they're uncovering a whole lot of problems, but they aren't losing any customers to speak of," said Buffett, whose firm at the end of 2018 owned more than 400 million Wells Fargo shares currently worth about $21 billion.