Category: News This Week

The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) is expected to try to ease Bulgaria’s tobacco smoking ban in enclosed public places in time for New Year celebrations, according to a Novinite story quoting the Bulgarian Trud (labor) daily.

Amendments to the country’s Health Act are due to be voted on in parliament in December, just before the start of the holidays, during which many hospitality-sector establishments expect to enjoy high turnovers.

“Right after we adopt the state budget, we will move the Health Act on the agenda and ease the ban around New Year,” said Spas Panchev, deputy chair of the BSP’s parliamentary group and one of the strongest proponents of easing smoking regulations.

The easing of restrictions would see the establishment of designated, separate smoking and nonsmoking areas in large restaurants and coffee shops, while the owners of smaller establishments, with floor areas of less than 70 square meters, would be able to decide whether their establishments should or should not allow smoking. Smoking would be allowed in bars and nightclubs.

However, it is by no means certain that those wanting to ease the current ban will carry the day because there is a lot of opposition to what they are attempting.

British American Tobacco is offering a version of one of its leading brands of cigarettes that provides details of the geographical source and harvest year of the leaf tobacco used in its manufacture, according to a This is Money story.

The story doesn’t mention the brand but a picture suggests that it is Dunhill.

Naming the sources of the main ingredients of products has long been used as a marketing tool by the manufacturers of everything from wine to chocolates, but it has been used only sparingly in the case of tobacco products.

According to the story, the new product from BAT will retail at £18 for a pack of 20—double the retail price of most cigarettes.

Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of the U.S. city of Chicago, is trying to raise awareness about the danger of smoking menthol-flavored tobacco by using a new publicity campaign.

According to a story by Lewis Lazare for The Business Journals, the campaign has been put together by the Chicago Department of Public Health in conjunction with the LimeGreen/Chicago advertising agency.

The Don’t Get Burned campaign is part of the department’s Healthy Chicago effort that Emanuel is emphasizing.

The target audience for the new campaign—which includes television, radio and print—comprises young people the tobacco industry is said to be wooing with menthol-flavored tobacco products.

The print campaign features close-ups of the faces of young people on whom are scarred the words Big Tobacco. The copy reads: “Tobacco companies use menthol-flavored cigarettes to get you addicted. Don’t get burned.”

The city of Chicago maintains that menthol cigarettes cause more young people to take up smoking and then make it harder for them to quit.

Australia’s standardized tobacco-packaging rules are a sticking point in talks over a new free trade agreement with the U.S. and other Pacific nations, according to a story by Chris Pash for Business Insider.

An intellectual-property business delegation representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which was in Australia last week, is said to view the removal, by law, of company brands as “strange.”

The representatives were said to understand the health benefits associated with standardized tobacco packaging but were of the opinion that a company’s brand was highly valuable and in some cases the majority of a business’s value.

This was an issue that needed to be solved in order to get closer to the U.S.-sponsored free trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Last month, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott raised the possibility of a deal within three months.

Mark Elliot, executive vice president of the Global Intellectual Property Center, part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the delegation was keen to have a conversation with the Australian government.

“There are some areas of disagreement with the former government [the Labor government that brought in standardized packaging], and the new government is still working through those issues,” he said.

If the price of cigarettes in South Korea were to be increased to almost four times the current level, even financially well-off smokers might be prompted to quit, according to a story in The Korea Times.

According to a survey of 800 smokers carried out by the Korea Health and Social Affairs organization, a price of WON8,943 per pack of cigarettes is the tipping point at which most smokers would start to think seriously about quitting. The current average price of a pack of cigarettes is about WON2,500.

That threshold varies according to smokers’ incomes, with those in the bottom 25 percent income bracket saying WON8,497 per pack would prompt a lifestyle change, and those in the top 25 percent saying WON9,660 per pack would be too much to pay.

The American Legacy Foundation has suffered a “diversion” of funds estimated at $3.4 million, according to a story in The Washington Post, which has turned the spotlight on some of the U.S.’s nonprofit organizations.

Legacy was founded as a nonprofit organization in 1999 out of the funds raised by the Master Settlement Agreement that resolved health claims brought against U.S. cigarette companies.

The foundation declared on a 2011 federal disclosure form that it had become aware of a diversion in excess of $250,000 committed by a former employee.

It disclosed that the diversion was due to fraud and now says it believes it fulfilled its disclosure requirement.

But the Post story said that records and interviews revealed that Legacy had suffered an estimated $3.4 million loss linked to purchases from a business described sometimes as a computer supply firm and at others as a barbershop, and to a former assistant vice president.

The Post said too that the disclosure report had not given details about how Legacy officials waited nearly three years after an initial warning before they called in investigators.

“We’re not innocent in this,” said Legacy Chief Executive Cheryl Healton, who, in fiscal 2012, received a “compensation package” worth $729,000. “We are horrified it happened on our watch. . . . The truth hurts—we screwed up.”

With $50 million in annual expenditures and $1 billion in assets, Legacy is perhaps best known for its edgy, anti-tobacco advertising campaign known as Truth.

The full story is at http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/inside-the-hidden-world-of-thefts-scams-and-phantom-purchases-at-the-nations-nonprofits/2013/10/26/825a82ca-0c26-11e3-9941-6711ed662e71_story.html.

London-listed Imperial Tobacco shares fell by 63p, or 2.6 percent, to £23.67, and British American Tobacco shares dropped by 79p, or 2.4 percent, to £32.81 after PMI said it planned to enter the e-cigarette market in the second half of next year and would bring forward the launch of another reduced-risk alternative to traditional cigarettes that heats, rather than burns, tobacco.

BAT already offers e-cigarettes, and Imperial plans to launch two battery-powered products next year to tap into a market that generates about $2 billion in global sales.

But analysts at Citigroup said PMI’s plan to spend $100 million to accelerate the rollout of its next generation of products and its intention to increase its marketing investment in traditional cigarettes were likely to present the two British companies with “tougher competition.”

But PMI suffered too. Writing for Bloomberg News on Thursday, Cotten Timberlake said PMI had “extended its decline into a second day, falling the most in five months after a crimped profit outlook prompted Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to cut its rating on the shares to neutral.”

“The stock fell by 3 percent to $86.60 at the close in New York for the steepest drop since June 20.”

As well as raising health concerns in China, tobacco consumption has negative implications for the country’s sustainable development, according to a Global Times story quoting a Tsinghua University researcher.

Hu Angang, director of the university’s Research Center for Contemporary China, was speaking at a three-day seminar on tobacco control that ended yesterday in Beijing.

Hu said tobacco was the biggest killer in China; so it was not just a public health issue but something that impacted the sustainable development of the whole nation.

While the government worked on economic renewal, the transformation of the tobacco industry had to be addressed and the tobacco supply reduced, Hu added.

China signed the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in 2003 and it became effective in January 2006.

But experts are said to be critical of current government efforts to curb smoking, describing them as lagging far behind FCTC standards.

However, in December last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Health and six other government departments issued the China Tobacco Control Program (2012–2015) aimed at reducing tobacco plantings and tobacco production consumption.

The program was the first state-level tobacco-control initiative and it marked a new phase in the quest for comprehensive tobacco control.

The National Coalition Against Contraband Tobacco (NCACT) has commended the government of Quebec for contributing $4 million to the city of Montreal to fight the contraband tobacco trade.

At the same time it has contrasted Quebec’s action to the apparent lack of action by the government of Ontario.

“Illegal cigarettes are a serious problem in Quebec and Ontario, and this action taken by [Quebec’s] government is an important step in the right direction in the fight against contraband,” said Gary Grant, NCACT spokesperson and 39-year veteran of the Toronto Police Service.

“The illegal cigarette trade in Quebec remains extremely volatile. By committing additional funds, Quebec’s government recognized that more remains to be done to control the negative impact the illegal cigarette trade continues to have across the province.”

Later, Grant said the Quebec government was giving the issue the serious attention it deserved. “Ontario must do the same,” he said. “The province has committed to tough new anti-contraband measures in the last two provincial budgets. It is important the government follow through on these commitments.

“There is more contraband tobacco in Ontario than [in] any other province, and the problem won’t improve unless that government takes concrete and meaningful action to address this problem.

“Commitments are meaningless without action,” concluded Grant. “Ontario must take action.”