Rakuten workers asked online merchants to falsify prices

March 29, 2014 Leave a comment

Rakuten workers asked online merchants to falsify prices
KYODO
MAR 20, 2014
Employees of online shopping mall Rakuten Inc. instructed merchants to falsify prices of products in violation of consumer protection laws, according to some of the Internet mall’s tenants.
Rakuten revealed the price mislabeling last November for special sales honoring the victory by the Rakuten Eagles in the Japan Series, but without discussing whether its own employees had been involved in the illegal act.

“If it were true, it would have been a grave violation of company rules we cannot ignore,” a Rakuten representative said. “We would like to impose a strict punishment.”
The Consumer Affairs Agency will look into the matter, an official said.
An online merchant selling fresh food products said a Rakuten employee claiming to be an electronic commerce consultant asked the tenant in 2011 to double regular prices and offer a 50 percent discount to deceive consumers.
Other retailers pointed to similar instructions by Rakuten consultants. When announcing the incident in November, Rakuten slapped 17 tenants with a one-month sales suspension.

Filed under Macro Trends, TMT Trends

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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