EU needs tobacco-firm agreements
Cigarette smuggling is high-profit, low-risk activity. Usually, only low-level traffickers are caught, while the masterminds escape justice.
It has emerged that Margarete Hofmann, policy director of the EU’s anti-fraud office OLAF, sent a briefing paper to political advisers in the European Parliament on March 7 stating that the existing agreements with the four major tobacco companies were the ‘best instruments’ to combat cigarette smuggling at the international level.
This was revealed in a story by Quentin Aries and James Panichi for Politico.eu, relayed by the TMA.
The European Commission is due to announce its decision on whether or not to renew the 12-year €1 billion agreement between the EU and Philip Morris International to combat cigarette smuggling.
Documents accessed by Politico apparently revealed that Hofmann had warned that a failure to renew the deal with PMI would hurt law-enforcement agencies’ short-term anti-smuggling capability.
PMI was the first to sign an agreement with the EU in 2004, followed by JT in 2007 and BAT and Imperial in 2010.
After European Parliament Members voted to end the EU’s anti-smuggling and anti-counterfeiting agreement with PMI, which is due to expire in July, Dr Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva, head of the secretariat for the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, said charging cigarette companies with preventing smuggling was like putting a fox in charge of a henhouse.
But the paper took issue with this comparison. ‘That would assume we have a hen house — we don’t,’ the document reads.
