Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan Chase likes to hold its annual shareholders’ meetings far away from the media glare of New York City’s pesky press corps. Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has good reason to want to dodge Manhattan’s investigative reporters – who might start to see a pattern of fraudulent behavior.
At the 2011 shareholders’ meeting in Columbus, Ohio more than 1,000 protesters descended on the event to protest the bank’s unsavory foreclosure practices. JPMorgan Chase’s 2013 shareholders’ meeting in Tampa – 1100 miles from New York City — came less than two months after the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a 300-page report on how JPMorgan Chase had used its bank depositors’ money to gamble in risky derivatives in London, eventually losing $6.2 billion of that money. The 2014 shareholders’ meeting, also in Tampa, came four months after the bank pleaded guilty to two felony counts for its role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme (the bank failed to report to U.S. regulators the highly suspicious activity it knew Madoff was conducting in his business account at the bank). The bank had to pay $2.7 billion of its shareholders’ money to the government in fines and restitution in the Madoff matter.
Dimon was exceptionally lucky in 2015. Just one day after JPMorgan Chase held its shareholders’ meeting in Detroit, the bank was hit with another felony count. This time it was for its role with other global banks in rigging the foreign exchange market.
It is unprecedented for any U.S. bank to receive three felony counts and survive – let alone keep the same Chairman and CEO who presided over those three felony counts. But not only has Jamie Dimon kept his job at JPMorgan Chase, his lavish compensation has made him a billionaire according to Forbes. (JPMorgan Chase awarded Dimon $29.5 million in compensation last year, his biggest haul since 2007 when he was paid $50 million by the bank.) The gravy train extends to the bank’s Board of Directors as well: see JPMorgan Paid a Board Member $532,500 in 2016; Now the Board is Getting a 25 Percent Cash Pay Hike.
What happened at this year’s annual meeting on May 15 in Plano, Texas? According to Kristin Broughton of American Banker it was not a happy affair. Broughton reports:
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