Wal-Mart de Mexico bribery case silenced by top executives

A New York Times investigation into Wal-Mart has revealed that top Wal-Mart executives may be focusing more on damage control when they should be rooting out wrongdoing.

“In 2005, after a senior Wal-Mart lawyer learned that the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico, had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance, Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery.” A lead investigator wrote of the findings: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.” However, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut-down the investigation. And only after the findings came out did the executives work on controlling their image, not fixing the corruption.