Wal-Mart gags bribe probe
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E-mail Shanghai Daily via agencies, April 23, 2012
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A banner on a Wal-Mart store reads "Low prices, every day, in everything" in Mexico City on Saturday. US retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc hushed up its own internal probe of charges made by a former executive of its unit in Mexico that the Mexican division had bribed to grab market dominance, the New York Times said on Saturday. [Shanghai Daily] |
![A banner on a Wal-Mart store reads 'Low prices, every day, in everything' in Mexico City on Saturday. US retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc hushed up its own internal probe of charges made by a former executive of its unit in Mexico that the Mexican division had bribed to grab market dominance, the New York Times said on Saturday. [Shanghai Daily]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20120423/001aa0ba5c8510ff029512.jpg "A banner on a Wal-Mart store reads 'Low prices, every day, in everything' in Mexico City on Saturday. US retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc hushed up its own internal probe of charges made by a former executive of its unit in Mexico that the Mexican division had bribed to grab market dominance, the New York Times said on Saturday. [Shanghai Daily]")
Wal-Mart Stores Inc hushed up a vast bribery campaign that top executives of its Mexican subsidiary carried out to build stores across that country, according to a published report.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that Wal-Mart failed to notify law enforcement officials even after its own investigators found evidence of millions of dollars in bribes. The newspaper said the company shut down its internal probe despite a report by its lead investigator that Mexican and US laws likely were violated.
The bribery campaign was reported to have first come to the attention of senior officials at Wal-Mart in 2005, when a former executive of its largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico, provided extensive details of a bribery campaign it had orchestrated to win market dominance.
The Mexican executive, previously the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits, said in e-mails and follow-up conversations that Wal-Mart de Mexico paid bribes to obtain permits in its rush to build stores nationwide, the Times reported.
Wal-Mart's growth in Mexico has been so rapid that one of every five Wal-Mart stores now is in that country. It is Mexico's largest private employer, with 209,000 employees there.
The newspaper said that only after learning of its investigation did Wal-Mart inform the US Justice Department in December 2011 that it had begun an internal investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Under that law, it is illegal for US corporations and their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials.
Wal-Mart, which is based in Bentonville, Arkansas, said on Saturday that it takes compliance with that law very seriously. It also noted that many of the "alleged activities" in the Times article occurred over six years ago.
"If these allegations are true, it is not a reflection of who we are or what we stand for," spokesman David Tovar said. "We are deeply concerned by these allegations and are working aggressively to determine what happened."
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