Wells Fargo is appealing a controversial court decision that accused the bank and its outside counsel with commiting fraud and perjury, and striking a secret deal with Finra in an arbitration proceeding.

Wells Fargo filed its appeal in the Superior Court of Fulton County, Ga., yesterday, seeking to overturn Judge Belinda Edwards’s ruling in January that Finra and Wells Fargo’s lawyer appeared to have a secret agreement to strike certain people from a list of arbitrators.

Wells Fargo said simply they are “seeking relief from all errors and rulings adversely affecting them.”

The ruling set off a Congressional inquiry into Finra’s arbitration process and pushed Finra last week to hire an outside law firm to conduct a review of its arbitrator selection procedures.

Finra, which previously denied problems with its system, hired the law firm of Lowenstein Sandler after criticism from both plaintiffs’ lawyers and lawmakers concerned about the findings.

Finra President and CEO Robert Cook announced the findings of the report will be made public.

“We take this matter very seriously. Finra recognizes the importance of maintaining trust in the system and is committed to ensuring the ... arbitration forum is operated in a fair and neutral manner,” Cook said in a statement.

In the January 25 ruling, Edwards concluded that Wells Fargo’s outside counsel, Terry Weiss, had a secret arrangement with Finra to keep certain people off the list of arbitrators in all of his cases.

As a result, Edwards granted a motion to vacate a 2019 arbitration award in Wells Fargo’s favor against two investors seeking to be made whole from losses totaling $1,178,446 in a merger arbitrage investment.

According to court documents, Weiss admitted that Finra, a private entity that acts as a self regulatory organization for the securities industry, provided him with a “subset” of arbitrators in which at least three people were removed from the list provided to the claimants.

The court found that “factual evidence presented by the investors leads to its factual finding that Wells Fargo and its counsel committed fraud on the arbitration panel by procuring perjured testimony, intentionally misrepresenting the record, and refusing to turn over evidence until after” closing arguments in the arbitration case.

Finra denied the court’s findings at the time. “There has never been any agreement between Finra Dispute Resolution Services and attorney Terry Weiss regarding appointment of arbitrators. Any assertions to that effect are false,” Finra spokeswoman Michelle Ong said.

Ong said at the time that Finra has reviewed all cases involving Terry Weiss as counsel and “none of the three arbitrators in question was excluded or removed from ranking lists prior to sending the lists to the parties," she said.

“As the neutral administrator, we continually strive to make the Finra forum the fairest, most efficient program available and stand behind the integrity of our neutral list selection process,” Ong added.

Michael Edmiston, president of the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association (PIABA), has been among those critical of Finra in the wake of the ruling.

“The problem here is you don’t know the scope of how badly the system is stacked against investors,” said Edmiston, who is also a former senior staff attorney at Finra. “You don’t know what other secret agreements firms have with Finra. It is just this one attorney or multiple attorneys with numerous firms who have created this secret process. You literally just do not know.”