Maybe 500 people turned out — our reporters’ best estimate — for today’s protest targeting the Wells Fargo shareholder meeting in San Francisco. Protesters were calling for a moratorium on all foreclosures, as well as principal reductions on mortgages for homes whose values have dropped.
Marching from Justin Herman Plaza, protesters arrived at the Merchants Exchange Building in time for the 1 p.m. meeting, with about 16 actually infiltrating and disrupting the proceedings before being escorted out. SFPD says 24 people total were arrested inside the meeting and on the streets.
Our updates throughout the day, including reporter Aarti Shahani’s accounts of what went on inside the meeting…
6:47 p.m. Cy Musiker today interviewed Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, about what he thinks Wells Fargo’s obligations are considering the bank bailout, and whether the company has done enough for its customers.
Hanson said that the bank benefited greatly from the bailout and that:
One would expect in response to that, the ethical argument would be, they ought to do whatever they can to soften the blow on those individuals who got these mortgages and went into foreclosure or got these mortgages and are suffering from the continuing stream of payments. There is clearly a bad record on the part of the banks in dealing with rewriting these mortgages, in marking down the total amounts that are owed.
Wells Fargo may have a marginally better record than Bank of America, which is often presented as the worst behavior in terms of managing this, but nonetheless they benefited greatly during the recession from the government steps to keep the banks whole, their executives are still paid very high salaries, and I think there’s a reasonable expectation that they would have done more to help those normal citizens, middle class, who suffered during the recession.
4:10 p.m. After the meeting today, Shahani interviewed Oscar Suris, Wells Fargo’s Executive Vice President for Corporate Communications. Edited transcript…
AARTI SHAHANI, KQED: This meeting ended quickly, is that right?
OSCAR SURIS, WELLS FARGO: It ended according to the rules of the proceeding and the agenda.
SHAHANI: [Wells CEO] John Stumpf was saying it was a little unusual for it to go so quickly.
SURIS: I don’t know I would call it unusual. I just think that the company has a good story and there’s a high attendance of shareholders who are in support of the company’s performance, so it’s probably more a reflection of that than anything else.
SHAHANI: There was quite a bit of disruption during the meeting. What do you make of that?
SURIS: Shareholder meetings are in part an opportunity to have a dialogue. And we cetainly invited the opportunity…but we also wanted to conduct a meeting that would respect and honor all the participants and would also be in keeping with the rules of the meeting. We had some participants who wanted to not abide by those rules, and they interjected in a disruptive manner, and given our heightened focus on security today, we felt the best thing to do was escort them out of the meeting.
SHAHANI: Some protesters said they were put into a spillover room and intentionally filtered out of the main room, even though they’re shareholders. Do you have a response to that?
SURIS: Our focus from the very beginning has been to conduct this meeting according to the rules and also with a focus on keeping it as safe as possible for all of the meeting’s participants. We believe we had an obligation to do that and that was an obligation supported by the San Francisco Police Department.
But clearly we wanted to have all points of view in the room, all points of view were represented. But again, with a maximum capacity of 275 people, and protesters outside numbering more than 500, we weren’t going to be able to have everybody in here.
SHAHANI: Do you think that the criticism of Wells Fargo around foreclosures is fair?
SURIS: We think the characterization that we are not committed to helping this housing market get on its feet again are unfair…We have a very deep commitment both to the housing market and to consumers in it who are our customers. As our chairman and CEO John Stumpf said today, we are conducting two mortgage modifications for every one we foreclose on…That’s allowed us to modify mortgages for more than 740,000 homeowners since Jan 2009…We’ve forgiven more than $4 billion dollars of mortgage principal since Jan 2009.
However, minister Gloria Castillo, Vicar of El Buen Samaritano Episcopal Church in the San Francisco Mission district, said today that Wells Fargo refused her three requests for a loan modification.