Scott to Sell Chunk of Wal-Mart Stock

Lee Scott, president and CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., filed with U.S. regulators on Oct. 18 to sell almost $8.4 million of the world’s largest retailer’s shares.

Scott filed to sell 160,000 Wal-Mart shares he acquired through exercised stock options, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission document.

Scott, who has headed Wal-Mart since January 2000, owns less than 1 percent of the company, according to a proxy statement filed with the SEC on April 16.

“He choose to file the sale as part of his estate planning,” a company spokesman told Reuters. The sale will take place sometime after Wal-Mart’s earnings are released, he said.

• A Wal-Mart employee has filed a sex-discrimination lawsuit against the company, claiming that denial of health insurance coverage for prescription contraceptives is unfair to female workers.

The class-action suit was filed Oct. 16 in U.S. District Court in Atlanta by Lisa Smith Mauldin, a customer-service manager employed by Wal-Mart since 1996, the National Women’s Law Center said.

Mauldin, a 22-year-old divorced mother of two earning about $12 an hour, has been eligible for Wal-Mart employee health insurance since she started working full-time in March 2000, the Washington-based group said.

It said the $29.84 that Mauldin pays out-of-pocket each month for birth control pills is a financial burden.

“In refusing to cover contraceptives, Wal-Mart is denying basic medical care to its women employees,” said Janine Pollack, one of the lawyers who filed the suit.

Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams said he had not seen the suit and would not comment on it.

“For almost 1 million employees, we offer excellent benefits, and we attempt very hard to assist all of our employees and cover all of them,” he said.

Those who are pushing for requirements that group health insurance cover birth control say about a third of traditional health plans cover contraceptive pills, but millions of women still have to pay at least $300 a year out of their own pockets. Other prescription methods, such as intrauterine devices, injections, implants and diaphragms, can cost even more, supporters say.

In June, a federal judge declared that it was unlawful discrimination to offer less complete insurance coverage to female workers than to males.

In December, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that it was against federal law for employers to exclude contraceptives from their health insurance plans when they cover other preventive treatments.