Mon, Jul 17, 2017 page7

• Philip Morris’ global campaign to subvert the UN FCTC — part 2

  • By Aditya Kalra, Paritosh Bansal, Duff Wilson and Tom Lasseter / Reuters, NEW DELHI and LAUSANNE, Switzerland
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  As soon as the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) treaty conference in New Dehli ended in November last year, Philip Morris turned to the next one: last year’s meeting in India.

  The company’s 2014 PowerPoint presentation outlined the need to identify ways to gather intelligence during the Delhi conference, while in a separate 2015 planning document, it talks about the arrangement of farmer protests in the run-up to the meeting.

  Such protests did take place — including one in front of WHO offices in New Delhi.

  Reporters could not determine whether Philip Morris was behind those demonstrations.

  While other major tobacco companies also sent people to Delhi, Philip Morris was distinguished by its stealth. Executives from the company did not sign in with their tobacco industry colleagues at the FCTC convention center and stayed at a hotel about an hour’s drive away.

  The anonymity and distance helped Philip Morris approach delegates covertly.

  On the second day of the conference, a white Toyota van pulled away from the front of the Hyatt Regency hotel — where Philip Morris had its operations room — and headed for the FCTC treaty venue. The van was carrying Nguyen Thanh Ky, its corporate affairs executive from Vietnam.

  Ky’s driver talked his way past police at the barricade outside the conference center, where FCTC-issued credentials were checked, explaining that he was driving “VIPs,” the driver later told reporters.

  A few minutes later, a man in a dark suit walked out of the conference center, passed the van and stopped at a street corner. The van did a U-turn, and a reporter saw the man in the suit quickly climb in. He was a senior member of Vietnam’s delegation to the FCTC conference: Nguyen Vinh Quoc, a Vietnamese government official.

  The driver, Kishore Kumar, said in an interview that he dropped the two men off at a local hotel. Kumar said that on several other occasions that week, he took Ky to pick up people from the Hotel Formule1, a budget lodging where Vietnam’s delegation was staying during the conference.

  Ky and Quoc did not respond to requests for comment.

  Asked about the interaction between Ky and the Vietnam representatives, Philip Morris executive Andrew Cave thumped on the table in a bar at the hotel where company representatives were staying.

  Reporters should focus on efforts by the industry to develop so-called reduced-risk products — those that deliver nicotine without the burning of tobacco which the company says reduce harm, he said.

  When pressed about the meetings with Vietnamese officials, Cave thumped the table again: “I’m angry that you’re focusing on that rather than the real issues that matter to real people.”

  In a subsequent e-mail, Cave said: “Representatives from Philip Morris International [PMI] met with delegates from Vietnam [during the Delhi conference] to discuss policy issues and this complied fully with PMI’s internal procedures and the laws and regulations of Vietnam.”

  Delegates, Cave said in separate interviews, are reluctant to meet openly with Philip Morris because they are afraid of being “named and shamed” by anti-smoking groups.

  SLAVERY IS OVER

  Some delegates questioned the extent to which Philip Morris shaped the decisions made at the Moscow conference, saying attendees genuinely disagreed on certain issues.

  Thai delegate Nuntavarn Vichit-Vadakan oversaw many discussions as the chair of an FCTC committee at the Moscow conference.

  She said delegates differed over the regulation of e-cigarettes, for instance, and any lobbying the company carried out would not have determined the outcome.

  The Philip Morris documents leave questions unanswered. In some cases, the documents show the company hatching plans to change an anti-smoking regulation or to monitor activists, but do not always make clear to what extent or how the plans were executed, if at all.

  The 2014 PowerPoint presentation called for “achieving scrutiny” of tobacco control advocates and said a “global project team” had been established for this purpose. It did not list what means would be used.

  In some instances, Philip Morris’ lobbying plainly failed.

  In July 2015, the Ugandan legislature passed sweeping anti-tobacco laws inspired by the treaty. All that was needed was Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s signature, and the small African nation would become a leader on the continent in implementing a strict interpretation of the FCTC.

  Philip Morris sent an executive, a younger white man, to tell the septuagenarian president, who long ago had helped topple dictator Idi Amin, why the tobacco act was a bad idea.

  Sheila Ndyanabangi, Uganda’s lead health official for tobacco issues who was present at the meeting, described the executive’s approach as lecturing the statesman.

  “He said: ‘Ugandan tobacco will be too expensive’ and ‘it will not be competitive,’” Ndyanabangi said.

  Her account was confirmed by a senior Ugandan government official who was also present.

  Museveni stared for a moment at the Philip Morris executive and a representative from a major tobacco buyer who had come with him.

  He then said: “Slavery ended a long time ago.”

  There was a long silence in the room, Ndyanabangi said.

  Museveni said Uganda did not need tobacco, and the meeting was over. The president signed the bill that September.

  Museveni’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

  DELEGATIONS

  However, over time the industry’s lobbying has slowed the treaty’s progress. At the biennial conferences, the discussions have changed. In Moscow, for instance, there was a strong focus on trade and taxes.

  “You could see from the floor that interventions were very, very, very much focusing on the trade aspects, many times even putting trade over health,” FCTC Secretariat head Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva said in an interview last year.

  The composition of FCTC delegations sent by governments has changed to include more members who are not involved in health policy.

  That is in line with what Philip Morris and other tobacco companies want: Philip Morris, as well as British American Tobacco, have sought to move the balance of the membership away from public health officials and toward ministries like finance and trade.

  Such agencies benefit from tobacco tax revenue and attach less weight to health concerns, a former Philip Morris executive said.

  “The health department would just want tobacco to be banned, while for the finance ministry, it is more like how can we leverage or get as much money as we can,” he said.

  The object of Philip Morris’ efforts, according to the 2014 PowerPoint on corporate affairs, is to “move tobacco issues away” from health ministries and demonstrate there are broader public interests at play — that “it’s not about tobacco.”

  Cave confirmed the company tries to persuade governments to change the composition of delegations.

  Health officials are not equipped to handle the intricacies of issues such as taxation, he said.

  “You’re looking at illicit trade, you’re looking at tax regimes, you’re looking at international law,” he said. “Now each of these areas, it’s logical, if you want to really tackle the trade and tobacco smuggling, illicit trade, who would you go to? You wouldn’t go to the health ministry.”

  Reporters analyzed the rosters of the nearly 3,500 accredited delegation members who have attended the seven FCTC conferences since 2006.

  The analysis found that there were more than six health delegates for every finance-related delegate in 2006.

  In Delhi last year, that ratio had fallen to just over three health delegates for every finance delegate. The number of delegates from finance, agriculture and trade fields has risen from a few dozen in 2006 to more than 100.

  Vietnam’s delegation, for example, has changed markedly.

  At the first FCTC conference in 2006, none of its four delegates were from finance or trade ministries. By the 2014 meeting in Moscow, there were 13 delegates, with at least four from finance-related ministries, including the chief delegate.

  The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to questions about the delegation.

  Da Costa e Silva is not opposed to having delegates from trade ministries, but she said their primary focus needs to be on health. She was concerned by the makeup of the Vietnamese delegation.

  In a letter to former Vietnamese prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung in late 2015, she asked that tobacco industry employees be excluded from the delegation.

  If they were not, she wrote, Vietnam might be “unable to play a full part in discussions.”

  Last year, Vietnam brought 11 delegates to the conference, of whom six were from health agencies, including the chief representative.

  Some tobacco-control activists who attended the Delhi meeting said it was the worst so far in terms of passing new anti-smoking provisions.

  Multiple countries came prepared to consciously block action, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids president Matthew Myers said, adding that he heard delegates making arguments “I haven’t heard in 25 years.”

  A Nigerian delegate, for instance, asked to remove a reference to “the tobacco epidemic” from a draft proposal on liability for tobacco-related harm, notes taken by anti-smoking groups say.

  Asked for comment, Nigerian delegation head Christiana Ukoli said the “delegation strongly dissociates itself from statement.”

  The Delhi conference ended as it began, with treaty secretariat officials not knowing where Philip Morris had been or what it had done. The company had flown in a team of executives, used a squad of identical vans to ferry officials in New Delhi, and then left town without a trace.

  Additional reporting by Joe Brock, Ami Miyazaki, Mai Nguyen, My Pham, Minh B Ho Elias Biryabarema, Enrico Dela Cruz, Stephen Eisenhammer, Anthony Boadle, Alexis Akwagyiram, Ulf Laessing and Patturaja Murugaboopathy.

  This is part two of a two-part story. Part one ran yesterday.
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