Wal-Mart says board wasn’t spied on

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Friday that it had found no evidence that a fired systems technician had secretly listened to its board or that the retailer had conducted surveillance on shareholders who had submitted proposals for its upcoming shareholder meeting.

The world’s largest retailer said the findings came out of a review conducted by its legal department. It also said it was mailing an affidavit and certification of the review’s findings to shareholder proponents.

A copy of the letter and the affidavit was provided to some members of the media by Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart has faced mounting calls to disclose its surveillance records after it said in March that it had fired security worker Bruce Gabbard for what the company said were unauthorized recordings of calls to and from a New York Times reporter and for intercepting text messages.

In a Wall Street Journal report this month, Gabbard said he was part of a surveillance operation that included snooping on Wal-Mart’s board and stockholders.

After the article’s publication, Tom Hyde, Wal-Mart’s top legal officer, sent a letter to shareholder proponents saying that although the article implied that the company had initiated an intrusive “threat assessment” of shareholders who submitted proposals for inclusion in Wal-Mart’s annual proxy statement, that was not true.

In the letter being mailed Friday, Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. said he hoped the affidavit would allay the concerns of shareholders.

Gabbard testified under oath that statements about listening to board sessions were “taken out of context,” Scott wrote in Friday’s letter.

The former employee also testified that “other statements in the stories were inaccurately attributed to him, and that, based on his first-hand knowledge of the situation, some of the most disturbing assertions reported in the Wall Street Journal simply are not true,” Scott wrote.

A spokesman for Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal, said in an e-mail that the newspaper stood by its account.

“We remain confident that the information provided to the Journal by Mr. Gabbard, who is being investigated by the criminal arm of [the] United States attorney’s office for conduct relating to Wal-Mart, was accurately reported,” Dow Jones spokesman Robert Christie said.

Reuters was used in compiling this report.