Tiffany pays $262,500 to settle case on baby rattles

News wire reports

Published June 28, 2006 at midnight

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Tiffany & Co., the world’s second- largest luxury jeweler, agreed to pay a $262,500 fine to settle allegations it failed to report a hazard with silver baby teether rattles. Tiffany recalled 3,700 of the rattles in February 2005, almost a year after it stopped selling them.

Tiffany didn’t tell the government that the center bar from its Farm Teether Rattle could break, releasing small beads and animal figures and posing a choking hazard to babies, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a statement today. In agreeing to settle the case, Tiffany denied it violated the law, the statement said.

"We had a defective rattle, we took it off the market, and nobody was hurt," said Tiffany spokesman Mark Aaron.

The company received at least three reports of defective solder joints in the rattles between November 2003 and

February 2004, the commission said. In once incident, a baby was reported to have mouthed a small animal figure. The

jeweler failed to notify consumers who had purchased the rattles, which cost $150 each, and didn’t report the problem until after the commission opened its own investigation, the agency said.

Tiffany stopped selling them in March 2004.

Shares of Tiffany rose 15 cents to $32.62 at 11:23 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares

have fallen 15 percent this year.

Tiffany operates 157 stores and boutiques worldwide, 59 of them in the U.S.

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