Walmart’s Mexico Chief to Leave Next Year

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Arkansas ruled that a Michigan-based pension fund’s suit against Walmart may go forward. The fund is suing the company and claiming that Walmart defrauded investors by hiding the information it had related to alleged bribes paid in Mexico, China, India and Brazil. According to a report from Bloomberg, both U.S. and Mexican prosecutors are investigating charges that some executives of Walmart’s Mexican division were bribing officials in order to speed up the construction of new stores and warehouses. The charges were first revealed in 2012.

Rank has not been implicated directly in the bribery charges, and the head of Walmart’s international division said last week that the company plans to “rejuvenate” its Mexican business. Walmart’s success in Mexico was a function of the speed with which it grew. Now that expansion has cooled — partly due to the bribery charges — the company needs to adopt a plan B. International chief David Cheesewright said:

[W]hat we’re now having to do is build muscles in other areas around wage planning to make sure that they are just as adept at surviving in a lower growth market as they have in a fast one.

Walmart’s experience dealing with a slow-growth economy in the United States has not been particularly successful. Maybe it will stumble across the right equation in Mexico.

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