Congress Pummels Walmart over Lack of Disclosure
Members of Congress have already tired of Walmart’s (NYSE: WMT) tardy reactions to its requests for information about a bribery probe in Mexico started a month ago by the world’s largest retailer. It has been alleged that officials in the Walmart Mexico…
Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings and Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Henry A. Waxman sent a letter to Duke today, in which they wrote, among other things that “you have provided us with no documents, you have declined to allow any Wal-Mart employees to brief our staffs about the allegations, and you have failed to respond to our request to speak with Maritza Munich, a key figure in the investigation.”
One revelation from the letter is that Walmart’s internal investigation has spread:
During the May 21 briefing, Wal-Mart’s outside counsels stated that they were retained to conduct a broad review of your anti-corruption policies and operations in Mexico, Brazil, and China. They informed our staffs that as a result of this review, they are recommending that WalMart also evaluate its operations in India and South Africa. Wal-Mart’s attorneys identified these five countries — which they referred to as “first tier” countries — because they represented regions “where risk was the greatest.”
It is hard to think what Wal-Mart might gain by its sloth.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.