Wells Fargo Claws Back $75 Million More From 2 Executives Over Fake Accounts

Two executives who were publicly excoriated over Wells Fargo's opening of millions of bogus accounts must give back millions more dollars in pay, the bank's board announced Monday. The board is clawing back an additional $47 million from Carrie Tolstedt, who headed the troubled sales division, and $28 million from former CEO John Stumpf. read more »

SEC: Payments for Bullish Articles on Stocks Must Be Disclosed to Investors

27 Firms and Individuals Charged With Fraudulent Promotion of Stocks

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced enforcement actions against 27 individuals and entities behind various alleged stock promotion schemes that left investors with the impression they were reading independent, unbiased analyses on investing websites while writers were being secretly compensated for touting company stocks.

SEC investigations uncovered scenarios in which public companies hired promoters or communications firms to generate publicity for their stocks, and the firms subsequently hired writers to publish articles that did not publicly disclose the payments from the companies.  The writers allegedly posted bullish articles about the companies on the internet under the guise of impartiality when in reality they were nothing more than paid advertisements.  More than 250 articles specifically included false statements that the writers had not been compensated by the companies they were writing about, the SEC alleges. read more »

Loans ‘Designed to Fail’: States Say Navient Preyed on Students

In recent months, the student loan giant Navient, which was spun off from Sallie Mae in 2014 and retained nearly all of the company’s loan portfolio, has come under fire for aggressive and sloppy loan collection practices, which led to a set of government lawsuits filed in January. But those accusations have overshadowed broader claims, detailed in two state lawsuits filed by the attorneys general in Illinois and Washington, that Sallie Mae engaged in predatory lending, extending billions of dollars in private loans to students like Ms. Hardin that never should have been made in the first place. read more »

A Dubious Key Witness Didn’t Sink This Insider Trading Case

The prosecution of William T. Walters for insider trading had it all: outsize personalities from the worlds of sports and business, a defendant known for high-stakes betting with a history of brushes with the law, the prosecution nearly compromised by an F.B.I. agent leaking confidential information to the news media, and a seriously flawed cooperating witness who struggled to tell the truth, even on the witness stand.

In the end, though, it was the power of the insider trading narrative, which is so appealing to jurors, that helped convict Mr. Walters, known as Billy, on multiple counts of securities and wire fraud. His trades resulted in gains and losses avoided of about $43 million, making it one of the largest prosecutions ever. read more »