Just one member of Silicon Valley Bank’s board of directors had an investment banking career, according to the Daily Mail, while the others were major donors to the Democratic Party.
Tom King, previously the CEO of investment banking at Barclay’s, was appointed to the SVB board in September.
However, King is the only one with a career in the financial industry. Others include a former employee in the Obama administration, a donor to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and a major donor to Hillary Clinton, who prayed at a Shinto shrine when Donald Trump defeated Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Federal authorities are investigating the board after it failed to prevent the bank from going under, while it invested clients’ money in risky, low-interest government bonds and securities, the Daily Mail reports.
SVB is notorious for focusing on leftist issues, such as supporting Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies, holding a month-long Pride celebration and touting the diversity of its board.
Also, SVB board member Phil Cox sits on the board for NextGen Cyber Talent, a nonprofit that “provides a platform to increase diversity and inclusion in [the] cybersecurity sector.”
Another board member, Kate Mitchell, co-founded the National Venture Capitalist Association initiative, Venture Forward, which “focuses on advancing opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in [the] venture ecosystem.”
Mitchell donated $50,000 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 and cried when Clinton lost to Trump. Mitchell told CNBC at the time that she prayed at a Shinto shrine afterward, saying that she “prayed for me and us to get beyond our grieving and shock, and to figure out how to engage and listen to what happened and come back together.”
Rite Aid CEO Elizabeth “Busy” Burr, another SVB board member, told Authority Magazine in 2021 how she saw her role as getting companies to diversify, saying that “we all need to start with being conscious. Recognizing that if we aren’t solving the problem, we are part of it. And that there is in fact a problem. A big one.
“People of color in this country face a far more difficult journey to achieve their dreams than I do, and the barriers they have to deal with are systemic and often unconscious. We’ve just had four years of a President who unleashed a tide of racism and white supremacy,” Burr continued.
“The bizarre upside of that is that there are many more important conversations taking place, but we have a long way to go. It’s not enough to just report the numbers, instead, we need to demand a deep look at company culture — what are the informal networks and behaviors that support the status quo. Discuss this at the board level and hold management teams accountable for real change,” added Burr.
Board member Garen K. Staglin reportedly donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats over the last decade, most prolifically to Pelosi, whose estate is less than 15 minutes away from Staglin’s vineyard in Napa Valley, California.
Still another board member, Mary J. Miller, served in the Obama administration as an undersecretary of Domestic Finance for the Treasury Department, and ran as a Democrat in the 2020 Baltimore mayoral race.
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