During a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Tuesday, senators denounced the actions of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) CEO Greg Becker, who has been accused of distributing bonuses and selling stock in the bank shortly before its collapse.
“In 2022, in particular, you [Becker] paid yourself a $1.5 million cash bonus even as the value of the company that you’re managing declined by two-thirds,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). The senator criticized the former CEO for selling a “significant amount of SVB stock” on February 27, not even two weeks before the bank’s failure.
During the hearing on the failure of both SVB and Signature Bank, committee chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) confronted Becker, stating, “You were paying out bonuses until literally hours before regulators seized your assets. To people in Ohio and across the nation, this feels uncomfortably familiar.”…