A banking application connected to World Liberty Financial Inc., a crypto firm partially owned by President Donald Trump, will proceed as normal, according to the chief of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, who rejected a request from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren to focus special scrutiny on the president’s potential conflict of interest with the company.
The Massachusetts lawmaker, who is the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, has been scrapping with a federal bank regulator and others in Trump’s administration over his personal stake in a company set to be regulated by the federal agencies he controls. But Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said on Friday that he’ll follow the normal course of the application process with the application for World Liberty trust bank.
“Congress has made clear that the OCC has a duty to act on the applications it receives in a timely manner,” Gould wrote to Warren in a letter. “The OCC intends to act consistently with this duty rather than your demand.”He said he intended for charter applications to be an “apolitical and nonpartisan process” in which the regulator will ensure that applicants meet standards and will comply with expectations.
“Comptroller Jonathan Gould — who serves at the pleasure of President Trump — is refusing to delay the review of World Liberty Financial’s bank charter application until Trump and his family divest from the company,” Warren said in a statement on Friday. “The OCC’s review is a sham. We have never seen financial conflicts of this magnitude and no crypto market structure legislation should pass Congress without guardrails to stop this kind of corruption.”
Last month, Gould — a former executive at blockchain business Bitfury — defended the trend of crypto firms seeking trust charters, which has drawn criticism from traditional bankers.
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