A fired Wal-Mart security operative has retracted a claim attributed to him in news reports that Wal-Mart spied on its own board of directors, the retailer said in a lengthy statement that also repeated a denial it had snooped on critical shareholders.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc late on Friday released a letter from Chief Executive Lee Scott to shareholders and a 10-page affidavit from the retailer's top lawyer stating that a company review found no evidence there was any "inappropriate information gathering" aimed at critical investors.
The affidavit also said that Wal-Mart lawyers had interviewed the fired former security operative, Bruce Gabbard, this week after filing a trade secrets lawsuit against him on April 6 and winning an emergency court order to bar him from speaking to reporters.
Under oath, Gabbard said an allegation attributed to him in the Wall Street Journal was taken out of context, Wal-Mart said. Gabbard's attorney could not immediately be reached because Wal-Mart released the material on Friday evening.
In a Journal story published on April 9, Gabbard was quoted as saying, "I'm the guy listening to the board of directors when Lee Scott is excused from the room."
In his statement to Wal-Mart's lawyers, Gabbard said "that was from a statement taken out of context," and that nobody at Wal-Mart had ever monitored or recorded board meetings and no one had ever asked him to do that.
Several shareholders presenting policy resolutions for the June 1 shareholder meeting asked Wal-Mart for apologies and a full explanation of why a Wal-Mart memo, made public by Gabbard, suggested that Wal-Mart security perform a "potential threat assessment" of them.
Scott's letter to shareholders reiterated that there had been no surveillance.
"This letter and the attached Affidavit and Certification of Findings will undoubtedly fail to appease those individuals or groups whose sole purpose is to perpetuate negative and inaccurate publicity about our company," Scott wrote.
"We do hope, however, that this response will allay the concerns of those shareholders who have an interest in seeing our company grow and prosper," he wrote.
He did not apologize, as several investor groups had demanded.
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