Lawyer Accuses Walmart of Wrongful Termination Following Bribery Probe
May 12 2020 - 9:02PM
Dow Jones News
By Dylan Tokar
A former in-house lawyer for Walmart Inc. has accused the retail
giant of drumming up false claims of child abuse and inappropriate
workplace conduct to undermine his work investigating bribery
allegations in Mexico.
The claims by Shane Perry, a former Walmart ethics officer, are
part of a wrongful termination lawsuit he filed last week in
Arkansas state court.
In the complaint, Mr. Perry says he was pressured to change a
memo on his findings on allegations that Walmart had violated the
U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, an antibribery law, in its
efforts to rapidly expand in Mexico.
Walmart, however, said the corporate lawyer was fired in 2017
for violating company policies.
"Mr. Perry's termination was due to violation of our ethics,
discrimination and harassment policies and had nothing to do with
his work on our seven-year FCPA Investigation," a Walmart
spokesperson said in a statement.
In his complaint, Mr. Perry accused the company of manufacturing
reasons for his termination. Neither Mr. Perry nor his lawyer
responded to a request for further comment.
The lawsuit was first reported by the Arkansas Times, a local
weekly newspaper.
Walmart last year agreed to pay $282 million to resolve a
yearslong investigation by U.S. authorities into the bribery
allegations, which became public as a result of a 2012 New York
Times investigation. The probe into the company had later expanded
to its operations in other countries, including Brazil, China and
India.
Mr. Perry was sent to Mexico in 2011 to look into the
allegations, according to his complaint. After a four-day
investigation, he wrote a memo to Walmart's senior management
summarizing his findings.
He received no response, and no word was mentioned to Mr. Perry
about his findings until five years later, he said.
The memo later became a topic of discussion between Walmart's
lawyers and U.S. authorities, his complaint said. In 2017, he was
asked to submit to an interview on the content of his memo. He
agreed, and within 24 hours was interviewed twice by five lawyers
on Walmart's defense team.
"Mr. Perry felt intimidated and threatened, even as a lawyer,"
the complaint said. "Perry refused to make changes in the
memo."
The tension later escalated into a retaliatory campaign to get
him fired, he claimed.
In his complaint, Mr. Perry accuses Walmart of attempting to dig
up complaints and allegations that could serve as the basis to fire
him and undermine his credibility.
Associates under Mr. Perry's supervision were interviewed about
his conduct, he said. One, a single mother whom Mr. Perry had
previously been asked to fire, reported him for inappropriate
misconduct, his complaint said. It alleged that her claim was a
pre-emptive move to save her job, and that Mr. Perry's attention
was an effort to help her improve her job performance.
A conversation with a co-worker on parenting also became fodder
for Mr. Perry's termination, his complaint alleged. In the
conversation, Mr. Perry related an incident from years earlier in
which he had used corporal punishment on two of his children after
they lied about their use of a new tablet.
According to Mr. Perry's complaint, Walmart's report on him said
he had lost control and beaten one of his children. A female
employee later described her interview with Walmart's internal
investigative team as a "witch hunt," the complaint said.
On the same day he was fired, Walmart reported him to state
authorities for felony child abuse. Local authorities later closed
their investigation into the matter without taking action, while
the local prosecutor declined to pursue the case, Mr. Perry
said.
Write to Dylan Tokar at dylan.tokar@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 12, 2020 20:47 ET (00:47 GMT)
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