The Federal Reserve Board last week banned a former banker from future work in the industry and issued enforcement actions against three others over their mishandling of sensitive information, according to a Thursday press release from the central bank.
John Freeze, former CFO of Jackson, Wyoming-based Bank of Jackson Hole, received more than 280,000 electronic documents — some of which contained confidential supervisory information belonging to the Fed board — shortly after he was terminated from the bank in 2019, the central bank asserted.
The documents “were copied at Freeze’s direction from a Bank-owned computer to a private cloud account … so that he could use the information contained therein in the event of future litigation with the Bank,” the Fed said.
The central bank barred Freeze from participating in the conduct of affairs at any Fed-supervised insured depository institution or holding company. That includes foreign banks under the Fed’s reach, and any board voting procedures pertaining to those companies.
The other three bankers the Fed listed in Thursday’s release were former employees of Manchester, Iowa-based Farmers and Merchants Savings Bank. Each was accused of misappropriating the bank’s confidential information in March 2021, as they were transitioning to jobs at another financial institution outside the Fed’s purview, to facilitate the transfer of customers from their old employer to their new one, the central bank said.
Randy Johnson, Chad Kellogg and Jeff Hines were fined $50,000 each and ordered to notify the central bank within 10 days of accepting any new position, and to certify in writing that they are in compliance with the Fed’s procedures on the handling of sensitive information.
Johnson, until 2021, was an executive vice president at the Iowa bank. Kellogg was the bank’s senior vice president for commercial lending. Hines was senior vice president for commercial banking. Johnson is now a senior vice president at Cedar Rapids-based Collins Community Credit Union, according to his LinkedIn profile. Hines is a vice president there.
