U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods in Manhattan on Tuesday granted preliminary approval to a cash settlement proposed the night before.
Settlement amount suggested by the broker. Woods has scheduled a session for Sept. 8 to consider final approval.
Wells Fargo has operated since 2018 under orders from the Federal Reserve and two other regulators asking it to improve governance and oversight.
The fourth-largest U.S. bank is also subject to a Federal Reserve-imposed cap on its assets, which limits its growth and its ability to compete with larger competitors, namely Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.
Shareholders accused Wells Fargo of overstating the extent to which it complied with those orders and said the bank’s market value fell more than $54 billion in the two years to March 2020. when the defects have been known.
Court documents showed the San Francisco-based bank denied any wrongdoing and agreed to discharge the burden and cost of litigation.
“We do not agree with the charges in this case, but are pleased that the matter is resolved,” Wells Fargo said in a statement.
Wells Fargo has paid billions of dollars since 2016 to settle regulatory investigations and disputes over its business practices.
These practices included opening approximately 3.5 million accounts without customer authorization and charging hundreds of thousands of borrowers for auto insurance they did not need.
And last March, the bank was fined about $98 million for failing to exercise sufficient scrutiny over the possibility of non-compliance with US sanctions on Iran, Syria and Sudan. .
The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said the bank’s weak oversight led it to violate US sanctions, by providing a trade finance platform to a foreign bank, which she used in prohibited transactions worth more than half a billion dollars. .
The American bank is not new to fines, having reached an agreement last December with American regulators to bear the amount of 3.7 billion dollars, in order to put an end to accusations of harming more of 16 million consumers.
The settlement included a $1.7 billion fine, as well as more than $2 billion in damages to some of its customers.
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