Leni Juca to travel to San Francisco for Wells Fargo shareholder meeting in representation of Small Business United, Make the Road NY, confront bank for investing bailout money in private prisons instead of small businesses.
Queens, NY – Next week, small business owner Leni Juca, owner of Oxium Copy and Print in Jackson Heights, Queens, will travel to San Francisco to deliver a message from small business owners to Wells Fargo at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on April 24: “Stop investing in private prisons; start investing in small businesses.”
Juca is a leader with Small Business United and Make the Road New York. He will join community leaders from across the country with the New Bottom Line campaign to demand accountability from Wells Fargo at the company’s shareholder meeting.
“When I learned how Wells Fargo received $43 billion of taxpayer money in the bank bailout a few years ago and then invested in for-profit immigrant detention centers infamous across the country for substandard conditions and the pain they cause our families, I had to take action,” Juca said.
Wells Fargo is a major investor in the GEO Group, Inc., one of the leading private prison companies in the U.S. One of GEO Group’s for-profit prisons is the Queens Private Correctional Facility in Jamaica, NY.
“I built my business on the values of hard work and honesty. When I treat customers right, they want to come back,” Juca said. “When Wells Fargo profits off the pain and suffering of my community after taking tax-payer dollars and then boasts of lending to people of color, they’ve gone too far. That’s not treating customers right. It’s being hypocritical.”
