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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Coca-Cola under Investigation over Fraud Claims

United States beverage giant Coca-Cola Co. says federal prosecutors are investigating allegations of accounting and marketing fraud, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.


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United States beverage giant Coca-Cola Co. says federal prosecutors are investigating allegations of accounting and marketing fraud, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The allegations, raised by a former manager at the company, hasled to widening inquiries into Coke's finances, including an informal examination by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company said it learned of the investigation from employees who had been interviewed by the government, and is cooperating with the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia.The company declined to offer further comment, the newspaper said.

In May, former finance director, Matthew Whitley, of the company's fountain division, sued Coke claiming his employment had been wrongfully terminated for alerting executives to what he said was a two-billion-dollar accounting fraud within the Atlanta firm.

The report also said that before filing the suit, Whitley told Coke he would refrain from legal action if the company paid him 44.4 million dollars. Coke declined the offer and started its own scrutiny of the allegations, the report added.

The issue had evolved into a big investigation from a simple whistle-blower case with somewhat outlandish cash demands in the beginning, the report quoted Charles Mulford, director of the DuPree Financial Reporting and Analysis Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta as saying.


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