The Wal-Mart
bribe scandal uncovered by the
New York Times on Saturday is causing some headaches for the world's largest employer. The
Times revealed a massive investigation into $24 million in bribes paid to local officials in Mexico to secure building and construction permits reported to top management in both the Mexican and American offices, but Wal-Mart's top brass attempted instead to cover-up the bribes and never alerted authorities. It's highly likely Wal-Mart violated the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, adopted in 1977 to help hinder and hold accountable bribery in foreign markets.
Predictably, on Sunday, Wal-Mart went into
damage-control and released a statement and uploaded a video to YouTube. The company's VP of corporate communications, David Tovar, says Wal-Mart "voluntarily" approached the Department of Justice, but cannot yet discuss what happened "in Bentonville more than six years ago."
Of course, this "voluntary" approach to the DoJ was only after the
Times informed them of the bribery investigation it was conducting. Also, this "more than six years ago" bit seems a feigned attempt to excuse themselves if maybe they '
don't remember everything because it was so long ago'. And this is the whole problem in the
first place. Wal-Mart not only didn't follow through on the allegations coming from their Mexico headquarters, but top officials in America explicitly told internal investigators not to be "aggressive" in their search.
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