Multinationals picketed in Russia

A series of pickets against multinational tobacco companies were staged yesterday in a number of Russian cities stretching from the south to the northwest of the country, according to an ITAR-TASS story.

The picketers seemed to have had a number of grievances, not all of which could be laid at the door of the multinationals. Some were protesting about multinational companies controlling more than 90 percent of the Russian tobacco market.

But others complained that the Russian budget was missing out on about 500 billion rubles annually because of what they described as low excise duties on tobacco.

And those at Saratov, on the Volga, were demanding that the BAT-STF tobacco factory, owned by British American Tobacco, be relocated beyond the city boundaries.

Roman Plyuta, head of the Orthodox Union, which set up a picket in front of the Philip Morris Kuban factory in the southern city of Krasnodar, was said to have told ITAR-TASS that transnational corporations made “cigarettes of such quality that they would never be allowed in the United States or other Western countries.”

The smoking of these cigarettes “doubles and even triples [health] risks,” he added.

Plyuta said he believed that Western manufacturers added special ingredients to their cigarettes so that smokers became strongly addicted to them, even after a short period of smoking.