Wells Fargo shareholder lawsuit OKd
Wells Fargo & Co. executives and directors accused of steering the bank into the worst scandal of its modern history were ordered to defend a lawsuit accusing them of profiting from the creation of millions of fake customer accounts.
A San Francisco federal judge ruled this week that shareholders can proceed with a suit alleging the company’s top brass “repeatedly and brazenly” failed to serve Wells Fargo’s best interests. He found the complaint properly laid out evidence showing that executives and directors made false statements about the scheme in the bank’s filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The ruling came a day after Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., attacked Wells Fargo Chief
Executive Officer Tim Sloan while he testified before Congress, saying he bragged about high levels of new accounts even though he was aware of sales practice problems at the bank. “You should be fired,” Warren said. “You enabled this fake account scam, you got rich off it, and you tried to cover it up.”
Wednesday’s ruling didn’t address the merits of the dispute and is only one of several procedural hoops investors have to jump through to get the case to trial. Last month, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar gave the plaintiffs and the bank permission to try to negotiate a settlement with a private mediator.
Tigar dismissed insider trading claims under California law against Sloan and Wells Fargo Chief Risk Officer Michael Loughlin, as well as former CEO John Stumpf and former head of community banking Carrie Tolstedt, both of whom left soon after the scandal became public. Tolstedt still faces an insider trading claim under Delaware law.
An independent probe commissioned by the bank concluded in April that senior bank managers failed to heed warnings of spreading sales abuses for more than a decade, treating thousands of fired employees as rogues, and then downplayed the mounting terminations as the board began raising questions.
The bank also moved to withhold $32 million performance shares and cash bonuses from managers, including Sloan and Chief Financial Officer John Shrewsberry. In September 2016, it forced Stumpf to forfeit $41 million in stock and Tolstedt to surrender unvested shares worth $19 million.
As of April, the bank had spent at least $445 million on fines, remediation, consultants and civil litigation. The company still faces a number of investors’ securities suits seeking to recoup losses from a $30 billion decline in market capitalization after the scandal broke, and wrongful-termination cases filed by fired bankers. The company said in August that its review found employees may have created 3.5 million bogus accounts, more than 60 percent higher than its initial estimate.
Tigar found that the bank’s board members and managers knew about the illicit account scheme by 2014, and knew that they’d made false statements in securities filings about the program, designed to bump up bonuses for Wells Fargo employees.
“Just as it is implausible that the director defendants were unaware of the account creation scheme given the extent of the alleged fraud and the number of red flags, it is implausible that Wells Fargo’s senior management, involved in the day-to-day operations of the bank” weren’t aware of the effort, the judge said.