Angel Alvarado Agüero, a former 16-year employee and top marketing executive for The Coca-Cola Company in Mexico, was wrongfully dismissed from the company in May 2007. This led to Alvarado filing criminal complaints against the company.
In addition to the reprehensible manner in which Coca-Cola got rid of Mr. Alvarado, the company also has cheated him out of mandatory profit sharing and other benefits by refusing to pay him monies accrued over his 16 years of service. But even more appalling, as Mr. Alvarado's legal cases will reveal, is that The Coca-Cola Company has also apparently cheated Mexican workers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in profit sharing and other benefits and shortchanged the Mexican government out of millions of dollars in tax revenues.
Mr. Alvarado's employment nightmare began after he questioned and refused a directive by the Company to carry out illegal monopolistic activity to destroy competition at the 700,000 mom and pop stores throughout Mexico where 80% of all soft drinks are sold. In the past Coca-Cola and its bottlers in Mexico, including Coca-Cola FEMSA, Coca-Cola's second largest bottler in the world, had been fined millions of dollars for similar unlawful behavior.