Walmart hid bribery probe

NEW YORK – Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, covered up a probe of its own widespread corporate bribery in Mexico, The New York Times reported Saturday, April 21, citing its own review.

Back in September 2005, a high-ranking company attorney received an email from a former executive at the retail giant’s largest non-US subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico.

In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country, The Times reported, saying the attorney had the information because he had been in charge of securing construction permits.

When the Arkansas-based US retailer sent investigators to Mexico City within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million, the Times said.

The Mexican subsidiary’s top brass knew of the bribery, and tried to hide it from US headquarters, the report added.

In a confidential report to his superiors, Walmart’s lead investigator, a former FBI special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”

While the lead investigator urged a broader probe, an examination by The New York Times found that Walmart’s leaders shut it down, the report added.

Indeed neither US nor Mexican authorities were alerted, it stressed.

Meanwhile Eduardo Castro-Wright, identified by the former executive as the driving force behind years of bribery, was promoted to vice chairman of Walmart in 2008, the paper noted.

Until this article, the allegations and Walmart’s investigation had never been publicly disclosed, the Times said.

Walmart became the world’s largest retailer by slashing supply and overhead costs and passing much of those savings on to the consumer.

It was an act that competitors, including mom and pop stores, often found impossible to match.

But in recent years the company has seen fierce competition surge from online retailers like Amazon, which, without the cost of running physical stores, in many cases have been able to match or even beat Walmart at price-cutting. – Agence France-Presse