Disney fined

Disney was fined dlrs 90,000 (€101,800) last year for destroying boxes of documents relating to a dispute over royalties owed on sales of Winnie the Pooh products, US court documents showed.

A judge also ruled that a jury would be told about the destruction and be allowed to draw its own inferences about the evidence those boxes contained.

The sanctions were ordered last August but were revealed yesterday after a judge ordered hundreds of pages of documents unsealed at the request of the Los Angeles Times.

A family-owned company that receives royalties from the sale of Pooh merchandise claims Disney has withheld more than dlrs 35 million (£20 million) by failing to report sales of at least dlrs 3 billion (€3.39bn) in Pooh-related computer software, videos and DVDs.

Disney says the merchandise in question is not covered under its agreement with Stephen Slesinger Inc.