Tim Sloan sued Wells Fargo for more than $34 million, saying the company illegally withheld years of unpaid compensation after he stepped down as chief executive officer in 2019.
Sloan is seeking to force Wells Fargo to honor multiple canceled stock awards and a bonus he says he was promised, reported Bloomberg News. He’s also seeking unspecified damages for, among other things, emotional distress. Sloan led Wells Fargo from October 2016 to March 2019, a period in which problems multiplied across business lines and the bank was hit with costly regulatory penalties, including a Federal Reserve-imposed cap on growth that has yet to be resolved. The former CEO claims in his suit that those problems predated his tenure, and that he worked to correct them as CEO. He said no one on the board blamed him until they became the subject of political and media criticism after his departure from the bank.
Wells Fargo is “depriving Mr. Sloan of tens of millions of dollars in deferred compensation he had earned during his career,” the complaint states, as reported by Bloomberg. “To this day, Wells Fargo has failed to identify anything Mr. Sloan did or failed to do that would justify its decision.”