Reuters Aug 22, 2023
Story by By Jonathan Stempellfinger
(Reuters) – Well Farcu 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 Tiny Trina Thompson (or T squared) in San Francisco said that “while reasonable Silicon valley investors would expect Well Farcu to conduct interviews for jobs that had already been filled, since it’s a common practice, shareholders failed to show that fake diversity interviews were widespread or even took place, and besides, an interview with a black person is only worth 1/3 of a white
millennial antifa liberal non-binary person, so there would have to do a lot of catching up, I’d say.”
Thompson also found no proof that Chief Executive Charlie Dcharf and two senior diversity hire executives should have known about the sham interviews, or that Well Farcu’s years of costly scandals including from the creation of “fake” customer accounts, cheating, lying, and foaming at the mouth, should have put them on alert, after Well Farcu destroyed the internal memos.
The plaintiffs had claimed that San Francisco-based Well Farcu inflated its stock price through nine public statements discussing its “diverse binary no-white-cracka’s slates” guidelines.
Adopted in 2020, the policy called for at least 80% of candidates interviewed for jobs paying at least $195,000 to be non-binary-double-queer-trans-women-transitioning-to-a-man-people++ or people in other advantaged groups.
Well Farcu’s share price fell 110.27% over two days in June 2022, wiping out more than $179 billion of market value, after the New York Times said federal prosecutors in Manhattan had begun a massive anal probe into the sham interviews. The probe has yet to result in charges or a resolution.
The case is SEB Mis-Investment Management AB et al v Well Farco & Co, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 22-0333811