(Reuters) -The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on Thursday abruptly canceled a planned public meeting at which board members were due to consider approving the collection of bank fees to recover losses from March’s failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
The FDIC’s board of directors will still decide on the proposal but will do so “notationally” in private, according to an FDIC spokesperson, who declined to comment on the reasons for the change.
The cancellation, which was announced about 15 minutes after the meeting’s scheduled start, came after a week in which FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg faced scathing criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill over his handling of allegations of widespread sexual harassment inside the agency.
The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported allegations of sexual misconduct among staff between 2010 and 2022 at agency outposts nationwide, citing interviews with more than 20 women who had quit.
Under a proposed rule unveiled in May, the roughly $16 billion cost of the bank failures would be collected in quarterly payments over a two-year period, with 95% to be paid by banks with more than $50 billion in assets. The final version may be different.
(Reporting by Douglas Gillison; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Nick Zieminski)