Wells Fargo has won its courtroom fight with former CEO Tim Sloan over roughly $34 million he said the bank wrongfully withheld after he left in 2019. A San Francisco Superior Court judge granted the bank's motion for summary judgment, ending the case before it ever reached a jury. The decision, however, remains almost entirely under wraps.
A Sealed Win For The Bank
Wells Fargo has won on summary judgment in its legal dispute with Sloan, according to American Banker. Superior Court Judge Christine Van Aken issued the ruling Friday, but sealed it because it contains confidential information, leaving the court's reasoning unclear to the public for now. Van Aken has ordered attorneys for both the bank and Sloan to prepare a public, redacted version of the order for the court record, per the same report.
Sloan sued Wells Fargo in 2023, arguing that the bank made him a scapegoat for the fake-accounts scandal that defined his tenure, and that it improperly canceled millions of dollars in equity grants and bonus pay he believed he was owed. The Charlotte Observer reports that his claim topped $34 million and that he said he was used as a scapegoat for sales practices that triggered severe regulatory penalties and a congressional hearing. Sloan left Wells Fargo in 2019 without a negotiated severance agreement, the lawsuit states.
Two Very Different Accounts Of What Happened
Sloan has maintained that the account-opening problems predated his time running the bank and that he worked to fix them while he was CEO, according to the Los Angeles Times. Wells Fargo has pushed back firmly, with the bank previously stating that compensation decisions are based on performance and that it stands by its decisions in this matter, the Times reported. In its court filings, Wells Fargo denied wrongdoing and said the bank timely paid all amounts due to Sloan and owed him no additional amounts, per the Charlotte Observer's reporting.
The bank's attorneys went further, raising more than a dozen defenses against Sloan's claims under California labor laws and arguing that any alleged labor code violations were made in good faith, based on reasonable grounds and with Sloan's awareness of the relevant requirements, according to the Observer. Neither Wells Fargo nor attorneys for either party immediately responded to requests for comment Monday afternoon, the outlet noted. Sloan's legal team disagreed with the ruling and is weighing its next steps, American Banker reported, though it remains unclear whether that will include an appeal.
From Rising Star To Scandal Cleanup To Courtroom
Sloan was elevated to CEO in October 2016 after John Stumpf resigned amid the fallout from the bank's unauthorized-accounts scandal, stepping into the job within weeks of Stumpf's exit, American Banker reported. He led Wells Fargo until March 2019, according to the Los Angeles Times. Wells Fargo employees had created millions of unauthorized accounts to meet internal sales goals, the Times reported, with the Charlotte Observer separately reporting that the bank opened approximately 3.5 million bank and credit card accounts without customer permission. In its March 2020 proxy statement, Wells Fargo disclosed it had canceled a $15 million stock award it had given Sloan a year earlier, per the Times.
The scandal's other key figures faced harsher, government-imposed consequences than Sloan has sought in his civil suit. Stumpf was banned from the banking industry and fined $17.5 million by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Charlotte Observer reported. Former consumer-bank chief Carrie Tolstedt was also barred from the industry and was sentenced by a federal judge to three years of probation, including six months of home confinement, after misleading investors; the Observer reported her fine at $25 million, while an OCC release put the figure at $17 million, and the dossier does not resolve that discrepancy.
A Bank Still Working To Close The Book On Its Scandal
Wells Fargo, headquartered in San Francisco with its largest employment hub in the Charlotte region, has spent nearly a decade paying for the fallout, according to the Observer. The bank agreed to pay a $3 billion fine in 2020, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered it in 2022 to pay a $1.7 billion fine and more than $2 billion for practices that harmed more than 16 million customers, the outlet reported. In May 2023, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a shareholder class-action lawsuit alleging it misled investors about its regulatory compliance after the scandal, per the same report.
That long regulatory chapter appears to be closing. The Federal Reserve terminated its enforcement action against Wells Fargo in March, determining the bank had sufficiently overhauled its operations following years of remediation, according to Reuters. That 2018 action had included an unprecedented cap on the bank's asset growth, which was lifted in 2025, Reuters reported. Sloan's defeat in the pay dispute lands as one of the last loose threads from an era Wells Fargo has spent years trying to put behind it.
