This is the Tom Coughlin/Jared Bowen story
I was dealing with last week. Start there if this is all Greek to you. Here, I'll
use Bloomberg to give you the update:
Thomas Coughlin, who was paid more than $15 million as Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s vice chairman in the last two years, looted the company of hundreds of thousands of dollars to reimburse himself for personal items ranging from underwear to puppy chow, the company claims in a lawsuit.
Coughlin used the retailer's coffers to subsidize personal expenses small and large for a five-year period beginning in 1997, Wal-Mart said in a complaint filed yesterday in Benton County Circuit Court in Arkansas. The suit seeks to void his retirement agreement with the company and make him return about $5 million in pay and bonuses. Coughlin retired in January as the company's No. 2 executive and resigned as a director in March.
[emphasis added]
Bloomberg continues:
The 124-page suit claims Coughlin and ``a small group of carefully loyal subordinates'' misappropriated ``hundreds of thousands of dollars and property for his personal benefit through various schemes'' including forged invoices and corporate gift cards meant to reward workers. It details the lengths the world's largest retailer went to root out the alleged wrongdoing and report it to authorities including the U.S. Attorney in Fort Smith, Arkansas, after an internal probe.
Would someone ask Wal-Mart exactly how many people have been fired because of this? Jared Bowen called it a purge. And last week they said that Coughlin was doing this for over a decade (see post I link to above). What happened to the other five years?
Now to the corporate stooge alert:
``The fact that Wal-Mart is the plaintiff and conducted its own investigation provides a lot of credibility to the case,'' said Jacob Frenkel, a partner with Shulman Rogers in Rockville, Maryland, and a former federal prosecutor. ``The next question is whether there are going to be government charges, either civil or criminal.''
To repeat myself from last week, Wal-Mart is allegedly ripped off of hundreds of thousands of dollars and this guy is praising their investigative abilities? How can they be competent enough to do a thorough investigation yet incompetent enough to let this go from five to ten years?
Here's the part that's news to me:
Several pages of the suit demonstrate Coughlin's spending,
all of it at Wal-Mart, which had sales last year of $285 billion. On July 24, 2004, Coughlin used gift cards to buy dry dog food twice among purchases totaling $139.32 and $17.52 and including other items such as mango salsa, beef jerky and Tang, the complaint said.
[emphasis added]
He's not exactly the former head of Tyco (who's name I'm not even going to try to spell), is he? If you read the earlier stories about a hunting vehicle, things sounded a lot worse. Did he get that at Wal-Mart? The question, obviously, is whether all this Tang and Mango Salsa actually went to Coughlin. You can bribe union staffers with merchandise, can't you?
JR