The civil trial of three former Wells Fargo & Co. employees over their alleged roles in a scandal involving phony accounts kicked off yesterday, a rare public confrontation between a top U.S. banking regulator and former high-level bank executives, Reuters reported. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is squaring off against executives it says are partly culpable for the San Francisco lender's misconduct before an in-house OCC judge in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in a hearing expected to last at least two weeks. The long-running scandal over Wells Fargo's pressurized sales culture that led staff to open millions of unauthorized or fraudulent customer accounts has cost the bank billions of dollars in civil and criminal penalties and has badly damaged its reputation. The OCC alleges that Wells Fargo's former risk officer, Claudia Russ Anderson, former chief auditor David Julian and former executive audit director Paul McLinko failed to adequately perform their duties and responsibilities, contributing to Wells Fargo's "systemic sales practices misconduct" from 2002 to 2016. The proceedings mark a significant step for a regulator that has been criticized in the past for being too soft on the banks and executives it oversees, said regulatory experts.
