We investigate the Cohen-Macaulay property for rings of invariants under multiplicative actions of a finite group G. By definition, these are G-actions on Laurent polynomial algebras k[x 1 , . . . , x ±1 n ] that stabilize the multiplicative group consisting of all monomials in the variables xi. For the most part, we concentrate on the case where the base ring k is Z. Our main result states tha...