A FORMER aide to Martin Luther King, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, has resigned after accusing Jewish, Arab and Korean shop-owners of “ripping off” urban communities for years, by “selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables”.

Andrew Young, who served under President Jimmy Carter as America’s first black UN Ambassador, quit the world’s largest retailer after his comments caused outrage among ethnic communities. He had been responding to accusations that Wal-Mart had a history of putting local shops out of business.

Mr Young, who is credited with putting Atlanta’s black community on the business map as the city’s mayor in the 1980s, said in an interview in the Los Angeles Sentinel: “You see, those are the people who have been overcharging us . . . and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was the Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

Mr Young’s resignation comes after six months as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a position created to help the retailer to win over local residents opposed to store openings.

In an apparently contradictory statement, Mr Young said of his comments yesterday: “It’s against everything I ever thought in my life. It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles.”

The incident comes at a particularly bad time for Wal-Mart, which in recent weeks has announced an embarrassing withdrawal from Germany and its first profit decline in more than ten years. The retailer sought to distance itself, with a spokesman saying he was “appalled” by Mr Young’s comments.

Mr Young was one of a number of advisers and pundits taken on by Wal-Mart as part of a strategy to fight back against heavy criticism of its social and environmental impact, particularly in America. The retailer was concerned that it would become a political football at local and national level, particularly ahead of the presidential elections in 2008. It set up a campaign-style “war room” at its head office in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Wal-Mart initially signed up a 35-strong team of consultants from Edelman, the global public relations consultancy, before hiring Edelman’s vice-chairman, Leslie Dach, this month to spearhead the operation in-house. Mr Dach, a former adviser to Al Gore’s failed 2000 presidential campaign, will head Wal-Mart’s government relations and corporate communications department and serve on the company’s executive committee John Hope Bryant, a long-time associate of Mr Young who sat in on the newspaper interview, told The Times that the report did not reflect Mr Young’s concerns.

He said: “Although he was not misquoted, Andrew Young tried to say in one sentence what would really have required a three-hour conversation and assumed that people would understand the point he was making.”

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