Category: News This Week

A company based in Queensland, Australia, is starting to offer stickers for wrapping around cigarette packs, according to a story in Marketing magazine quoting the Gold Coast Bulletin.

Box Wrap, a sticker manufacturing company, created the ‘workaround’ for smokers who dislike the olive green background color and hugely-dominate graphic health warnings, which have been mandatory on cigarette packs since December 1.

“People feel they have had their choice ripped off them, the company’s managing director, Anthony Do Rozario, was quoted as saying.

Promoted with the slogan, ‘It’s your box, it’s your choice’, the stickers allow smokers to cover up the plain packaging with a range of skins, including one depicting the Australian flag and another showing the derrière of a scantily clad woman holding a fishing rod (best not to ask).

Box Wrap was due to launch today a website and social media campaign for the stickers, which initially will be sold online for $8.75 for packs of six.

But the company, which has applied for a worldwide patent for its stickers, hopes they will be sold alongside cigarettes in retail outlets.

The Federal government’s Department of Health and Ageing is yet to respond to questions over the legality of the stickers, but has said that it will be looking at them closely.

An opportunist capitalising on Australia’s ‘plain-packaging’ laws has stolen $30,000 worth of cigarettes from 14 supermarkets across South Australia and Victoria, according to a News Interactive Network story.

On each occasion, the man has posed as a tobacco company employee to trick supermarket staff into allowing him to remove discontinued stock because of the mandatory packaging changes, police were quoted as saying.

He told staff he would return immediately with new stock but failed to come back.

Victoria Police detectives are leading the search for the man, who first struck on November 8, some time before the December 1 deadline for the new packaging.

The 14 incidents occurred between November 8 and December 3.

Flue-cured tobacco prices at the continuing auctions in the Indian state of Karnataka have surged by about 10 per cent across all platforms, according to a story in the latest issue of the BBM Bommidala Group newsletter.

The price surge seems to be being attributed mainly to the introduction of the e-auction system.

The e-sales had brought in transparency and were benefitting the small and medium farmers the most, Tobacco Board officials were quoted as saying.

The bright leaf grade that was trading previously for more than Rs139 per kg was now fetching about Rs150 per kg, the officials said.

The auction prices were truly reflecting market demand and the superior quality of leaf being brought to the platforms, they added.

The story said that ‘so far’ a total of 28.47 million kg of tobacco had been sold, with the season’s highest bid having reached Rs149.80 per kg.

Uttar Pradesh cigarette vendors and the Uttar Pradesh Cigarette Traders’ Association are urging the state government to cut its 50 per cent rate of VAT on cigarettes to bring it in line with neighboring states.

The traders claim the disparity between the VAT rates imposed in Uttar Pradesh and neighboring states is driving up sales of illicit products and resulting in a huge loss or revenue to the exchequer.

Neighboring states Delhi, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh charge VAT in the range of 20-23 per cent.

Uttar Pradesh increased its VAT on cigarettes from 17.5 per cent to 50 per cent in July, ostensibly to deter smoking.

Bulgaria’s Prime Minister, Boiko Borissov, has hinted that he will not oppose a move under consideration by his ruling party MPs that would see the country’s enclosed-public-places tobacco smoking ban eased to allow people to light up in restaurants and bars after 22.00 hours, according to a Sofia News story.

But Health Minister, Desislava Atanasova, has pledged to stand firm against the proposed amendment toBulgaria’s anti-smoking law.

Bulgaria’s ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces came into effect at the beginning of June.

The ban replaced previous restrictions that allowed restaurants and bars to set aside smoking areas with separate ventilation systems.

The Sofia News said that with the advent of winter, campaigning in Bulgaria against the full ban had been stepped up, with restaurants, bars and nightclubs becoming increasingly strident in insisting that the current smoking ban is harming earnings and jobs.

It will become illegal to be in possession of contraband cigarettes under a proposal currently under consideration by the government of Malaysia, according to a story in The Star.

The Health Minister, Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai, was quoted as saying that his ministry was finalizing proposed amendments to the existing Control of Tobacco Products Regulations.

“As part of government requirements, we will need to engage the public and get their feedback first, but we target to implement this by the first quarter of next year,” he said at a press conference in Putrajaya on Monday.

Liow said the government needed to have stiffer regulations to control the high number of contraband cigarettes available in the country.

He was said to have been quoted in an earlier report as saying that contraband cigarettes accounted for more than 30 per cent of the cigarettes in circulation nationwide.

He had also said that contraband products posed a higher health hazard [presumably than licit cigarettes posed] due to the lack of control in the tar and nicotine content of the former.

Five men who were involved in smuggling tobacco into the UK have been jailed for terms of between 18 months and four years and nine months, according to a story by Jane Hunt for the East Anglian Daily Times.

Martyn Levett, prosecuting, told the Ipswich Crown Court that the case concerned the smuggling of tobacco and cigarettes to sell on the black market.

The goods were hidden in cardboard packaging protecting household furniture and handicrafts imported from Indonesia and Thailand.

“Sometimes the contraband was concealed in packaging mocked up to give the appearance of a high-back chair or inside packages shaped as animals such as ducks,” he said.

“These examples show the sophisticated methods employed by the smuggling team.

“Over a two-year period between June 2007 and June 2009, seven of the consignments were intercepted by Customs and were found to contain a total of 3.6m cigarettes and 1.6 tonnes of hand-rolling tobacco.

“The duty evaded on the cigarettes was in excess of £500,000.”

The Egyptian government has announced a series of tax hikes that will see a 50 per cent increase in the retail price of cigarettes, according to a Bikya Masr story.

The tax hikes, which take in everything from alcohol to bottled water, from advertising to retailing and from energy prices to real estate, seem to have caught everybody off-guard, coming as they did on Sunday with less than a week before a constitutional referendum.

But the hikes were apparently forced on the government as part of the price for a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In April this year, a Zawya.com story reported that illicit cigarettes had taken 20 per cent ofEgypt’s market – up from an insignificant level 18 months previously – because of a series of sharp tax increases on licit cigarettes and because of problems with security in the country.

The Tobacco Board of India is expected to remain headless until at least February following the completion of the two-year term of the former chairman, G Kamalavardhan Rao, according to a Times of India story.

Rao, who has been named Revenue Secretary of Kerala, handed over to the board’s executive director, C V Subba Rao, last week.

The absence of a chairman comes at a difficult time. The board is currently in the process of introducing e-auctions, and while demand for some of India’s flue-cured is buoyant, steps are being taken to reduce production in response to the country’s obligations under the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

Auctions are in progress in Karnataka and are due to start early next year in Andhra Pradesh.

Small, local tobacco companies in the Philippines will be forced to shut down and lay off hundreds of workers once Congress passes a law imposing extremely high taxes on low-priced cigarette brands, according to a story in The Manila times quoting Blake Dy, vice-president of Associated Anglo American Tobacco Corp.

“We are doomed,” Dy said after members of the bicameral conference committee on excise taxes agreed that 69 per cent of the tax load would be shouldered by the tobacco industry and only 31 per cent by the alcohol industry.

This means that for the first year of implementation, tobacco will pay an additional P23.4 billion in taxes, while alcohol will pay only an additional P10.56 billion.

The division of the tax load is a far cry from the current setup in which the targeted revenues from excise taxes are equally provided by tobacco and alcohol products.

The Senate proposed a tax sharing of 60-40.

The committee also dropped the current four-tiered tax classification system for cigarettes to a two-tiered scheme in which brands priced at P11.50 per pack and below would be classified as low-priced. These low-priced brands, currently taxed at P2.72 a pack, would have to shoulder taxes of P12 a pack next year.

Dy said that tobacco companies will begin laying off employees in April.

“They have just signed our death warrant,” he said. “Local tobacco companies would not be able to survive under this grossly inequitable, unfair system that clearly favors alcohol with reasonable increases while killing us with exorbitantly high tax hikes…”