Report: Walmart hushed up bribe network in Mexico
Report: Walmart hushed up bribe network in Mexico
NEW YORK — Walmart 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 Saturday that Walmart 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 U.S. laws likely were violated.
The bribery campaign was reported to have first come to the attention of senior executives at Walmart in 2005, when a former executive of its largest foreign subsidiary, Walmart 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 emails and follow-up conversations that Walmart de Mexico paid bribes to obtain permits throughout the country in its rush to build stores nationwide, the Times reported.
Sports gear washing up on Alaska beach may be Japanese tsunami debris
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Two sports balls from Japan may be the first positively identified items from the Japan tsunami of March 2011 to reach Alaska shores. According to an April 19 online notice from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Response and Restoration, a soccer ball and volleyball were found on the beach of Middleton Island by David Baxter, a technician at the radar site on the remote island in the Gulf of Alaska.
Baxter noticed Japanese writing stenciled on the balls. His wife translated the writing on the soccer ball and traced it to the name of a school. NOAA confirmed that the school was in the tsunami zone, though located uphill and not seriously damaged by the disaster.
Panel: 114-foot tsunami could hit Hokkaido island
TOKYO — Hokkaido’s Pacific coast may be hit by tsunami as high as 114 feet, 10 inches if a massive earthquake strikes near the Japanese island of Hokkaido, according to an interim report by an expert panel at the Hokkaido Disaster Management Council.
The experts raised the maximum predicted magnitude of an earthquake near Hokkaido from 8.6 to 9.1, based on sediments collect from past tsunami.
By wire sources