Jerry Brown’s office snipes with other states’ regulators over who sealed Wells Fargo deal
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Who deserves credit for forcing Wells Fargo & Co. to buy $1.4 billion in troubled securities from small investors?
California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown and a group of regulators from other states announced separate deals Wednesday requiring the banking giant to repurchase so-called auction-rate securities that had been frozen since the credit crunch struck early last year. Half the total will go to California residents.
But Brown’s office and the regulator group, the North American Securities Administrators Assn., each says it led the way.
A spokeswoman for Brown said the attorney general’s office hammered out a legal settlement with the banking giant a day before NASAA agreed to a nearly identical pact.
“We forged the settlement with Wells and they just piggybacked on it,” said Christine Gasparac, the Brown spokeswoman. “I don’t want to get into a war with NASAA, but it’s our settlement.”
That’s not the way Denise Voigt Crawford, president of NASAA and commissioner of the Texas State Securities Board, sees it.
“He had nothing to do with our settlement,” Crawford said of Brown. “This is crazy. He’s not the securities regulator in California and he wasn’t involved in our negotiations. ... Now he’s claiming credit for one of our settlements.”
The good news for investors in the troubled securities is that they’ll get their money back regardless of who spearheaded the settlement.
-- Walter Hamilton