Wells Fargo defeats shareholder lawsuit over fake job interviews

Wells Fargo won the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing the fourth-largest U.S. bank of defrauding shareholders by touting its commitment to hiring diversity while its managers were conducting sham interviews of non-white and female job candidates. In a decision on Friday, U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson in San Francisco said that while reasonable investors would not expect Wells Fargo to conduct interviews for jobs that had already been filled, shareholders failed to show that fake interviews were widespread or even took place. Thompson also found no proof that Chief Executive Charlie Scharf and two senior diversity executives should have known about the sham interviews, or that Wells Fargo's years of costly scandals including from the creation of "fake" customer accounts should have put them on alert.