Category: News This Week

Tobacconists and petrol station owners in the Netherlands are calling on parliament to make it a criminal offence for the under-16s to be in possession of tobacco products, according to an Expatica.com story quoting the Telegraaf.

Shopkeepers caught selling cigarettes to youngsters face a fine of €450 but the youngsters get off scot-free, the retailers argue.

‘The youngsters get away with it,” Edsko Schuitema, of petrol station owner lobby group Beta was quoted as saying. “But why should the responsibility not be shared?”

Meanwhile, Gert Koudijs, of the tobacconist shop owners’ association, NSO, said that the only way to stop 14-year-olds from buying cigarettes was to fine them for possession.

Dutch MPs are considering plans to increase the age at which teenagers can buy cigarettes from 16 to 18, following industry calls for an increase.

On January 1, it became a criminal offence punishable by fines for under-16-year-olds to be in possession of alcohol.

The Altria Group said yesterday that its board of directors had declared a regular quarterly dividend of $0.44 per common share, payable on April 10 to shareholders of record as of March 15.

The ex-dividend date is March 13.

Pro-smoking forces have won a rare victory in Australia.

After a two-year battle, smokers will again be allowed to light their cigarettes when dining outdoors in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, after the local council deferred to the wishes of restaurateurs concerned about lost profits, according to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald.

”We are so relieved – this is great news,” Omar Besiso, of the Parramatta Business Freedom Association, a group representing 50 businesses, was quoted as saying. ”It was never fair that customers could just leave and go to restaurants in Granville or Merrylands, where they could smoke.

”You can’t stop someone from smoking. We just didn’t want to be disadvantaged because our council won’t allow it.”

But as usual, this is likely to be a short-lived victory – at least as far as smokers are concerned

”The state government will bring in the same ban in 2015 that all restaurants have to comply with,” said Anita Tang, the manager of policy and advocacy at Cancer Council NSW. ”The council’s move is out of step with what the state government wants.”

NewCo has said that for each container it ships to its clients during 2013, it will donate $50 to one of three foundations chosen by the client.

The company said in a press note yesterday that it had decided to donate money to those who needed help ‘in their lives and in their development’.

Together with its global business partners and colleagues, the company had identified three sectors in which it would like to provide aid: education, health and the environment.

And specifically for 2013 NewCo has chosen the following projects:

* In the Guntur region of India it is supporting schools, especially those for the blind and the mentally and physically handicapped.

* In the Kushtia region of Bangladesh it is supporting education, acute medical care, and the treatment and rehabilitation of sick, injured, disabled and destitute women and children.

* In the Namadzi region of Malawi it is supporting a Wellness Clinic focused on HIV education, counseling and health, as well as on family planning. A crèche will allow mothers to go to work and leave their children in a safe environment.

More information about these projects is under the social responsibility section of NewCo’s website at www.newco-online.com.

Japan Tobacco Inc said today that it had repurchased 86,805,500 of its common-stock shares for ¥249,999,840,000.

This followed a resolution by JT’s board of directors on Monday providing for the repurchase up to 118,000,000 of its common stock (6.20 per cent of the total issued shares, excluding treasury shares), or shares worth up to ¥250,000,000,000, through the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s off-auction, own-share repurchase system between February 27 and March 8.

As a result of today’s repurchase of shares by JT, the government, which had previously announced that it was to offer for sale 333,333,200 of JT’s common stock, is now expected to offer 253,261,800 shares.

And once the government has sold its shares, the Minister of Finance, currently JT’s controlling shareholder other than the parent company, with 52.2 per cent of voting rights, is expected no longer to meet that definition, though it will remain the largest shareholder, with 36.7 per cent of voting rights.

The Altria Group said yesterday that its board of directors had elected Debra J. Kelly-Ennis to the board.

With the addition of Kelly-Ennis, Altria’s board increases from 11 to 12 directors.

Kelly-Ennis was president and chief executive officer of Diageo Canada, a subsidiary of Diageo plc, a global spirits, wine and beer company, from 2008 to June 2012.

From 2005 to 2008, she was chief marketing officer for Diageo North America, another subsidiary of Diageo plc.

Kelly-Ennis has held marketing, sales and general management positions also with RJR/Nabisco, The Coca-Cola Co, General Motors Corp and Grand Metropolitan PLC.

She is a member of the board of directors of Carnival Corp, Carnival plc and PulteGroup. She serves also on the board of directors of Dress for Success Worldwide.

Turkey’s shisha cafés have six more months to ply their trade.

A law requiring shisha cafés to comply with an indoor smoking ban in force for cigarettes, pipes and cigars since 2009 was published in Turkey’s Official Gazette last month.

It gave the cafés and their customers six months of grace before the axe falls.

And other regulations published in the Official Gazette last week will make it illegal from July 27 for shisha cafés to operate near schools and put them off limits to those under 18 years of age.

Prof. Michael Siegel, of BostonUniversity’s School of Public Health, believes that Mitch Zeller J.D. will likely take “a much more hard-line approach” in his dealings with the tobacco industry than did his predecessor, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal relayed by the TMA.

Siegel was commenting on the appointment of Zeller as the new director of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products, effective March 4.

Siegel expressed concerns that Zeller’s work in recent years with consultants Pinney Associates, where he advised pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, represented a conflict of interest as the FDA considered how to regulate electronic cigarettes.

Siegel said that many researchers viewed electronic cigarettes as being far less harmful than were traditional cigarettes, and a potential rival to the FDA-approved pharmaceutical smoking cessation aids.

More than 330 delegates have registered so far for the TFWA’s (Tax Free World Association) two-day conference due to be held at Beijing on March 5-7.

The conference theme is, ‘China’s Century: The Fast Pace of Change in China Duty Free & Travel Retail’.

The event, which will start on March 5 with cocktails at the Chinese capital’s historic Imperial Ancestral Temple Tai Miao, is said to have attracted many of China’s leading airports and travel retailers.

‘They will be joined by brands, landlords and retailers from around the world,’ according to a note in the association’s publication TFWA Evoice.

Details of the conference program is at: http://www.tfwa.com/duty_free/Programme.233.0.html