Report: British American Tobacco used payments, surveillance in Africa

British American Tobacco allegedly used “questionable payments” and “potentially unlawful surveillance” to secure its hold over markets in countries across the African continent, according to two separate analyses of whistleblower documents and court records conducted by the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath and published by international watchdog group Stopping Tobacco Organizations and Products.

“It's the biggest tobacco player on the continent. It's got a monopoly in many countries, and it is basically doing everything in its power to maintain that monopoly,” said Andy Rowell, who conducts research for the Tobacco Control Research Group, during a news briefing Tuesday.

The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, or FCTC, urges countries to protect “policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry in accordance with national law.” Though most of the countries listed in the analyses have ratified the treaty, progress in implementing and matching national policies to its enforcement has been “slower than anticipated,” according to one of the two reports.

“We did not see the kind of energy that we saw during the negotiation of the FCTC in these countries, by way of national laws that were domesticated,” said Akinbode Oluwafemi, chairman of the African Tobacco Control Alliance.

The African continent, with its overwhelmingly youthful population, is instead seen as ripe territory for the tobacco industry to expand, according to the reports, and as “one of the only regions in the world where cigarette sales are still growing.”

“Tobacco companies generally have a problem because 1 in 2 of their long-term users die of their addiction, so companies have to replace the dying smokers with new smokers. And [as] … smoking rates decline in the West, they are looking to Africa increasingly as the place they're going to derive profit and drive addiction,” Rowell said.

One of the analyses alleged the company appeared to provide payments in the form of “hand-delivered cash, bank wire transfers, spending money, cars, campaign donations, per diems and plane tickets” in an effort to sway national policies. It said that 236 payments, amounting to over $600,000, were identified in Burundi, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia between 2008 and 2013.

In South Africa, the company “hired private contractors, under the pretense of anti-smuggling efforts, to carry out military-style surveillance and operations to disrupt its competitors,” according to a press release about the analyses.

The reports are based on leaked documents, testimony from whistleblowers, and court documents. Researchers said they sifted through tens of thousands of leaked documents, spending years analyzing them.

“In nearly 25 years of working on the tobacco industry, I must have read in excess of a million documents. And to me, these are the most powerful. They are the most explosive,” Rowell said.

Some of the payments outlined in the reports include over $28,500 directed to people working at the Kenya Revenue Authority; over $38,500 to a former justice minister; $20,000 to the chair of a Ugandan parliamentary committee; and $56,000 to a private contractor to allegedly create a labor union to spark unrest at one of the company’s competitors. The reports also allege the company made an offer of $110,000 in exchange for evidence on “potentially illegal activities” by the company, with a proposal that appears to include an offer for “immunity from prosecution.”

The reports said staffers at the company’s headquarters in London “appear to have been involved in processing at least some service provider invoices, witnessing, auditing and agreeing on plans for service provider contracts.” Some employees used aliases and alternative private email accounts when communicating, it said.

In South Africa, the company and private contractor Forensic Security Services — which was hired to track and report on the illicit tobacco trade, particularly among the company’s competitors — “may have repeatedly crossed the line of legality to undermine numerous BAT competitors, disrupting both illegal and legal operations,” according to one of the reports.

The press release said the company allegedly oversaw two networks of paid informants that “operated under the guise of anti-illicit trade monitoring,” while disrupting operations of BAT South Africa’s competitors. The company reportedly paid informants using shell companies and untraceable cash cards, and the company “appears to have influenced the activities of state agencies” for purposes of surveillance, it said.

One of the reports also said BAT cigarettes produced in South Africa “ended up being smuggled into West Africa, allegedly fueling conflict, organized crime and political instability across the region.”

The researchers worked on this investigation with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the BBC’s “Panorama” program, which released separate findings Monday, including that the company was linked to a conspiracy to pay a bribe of between $300,000 and $500,000 to former Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe to get people released from jail.

The United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office concluded a five-year investigation in January into alleged bribery by the company and its employees, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to support prosecution.

Victoria Hollingsworth, investigative journalist at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, said the government body cited an “extremely high bar that they have to reach before they pursue any sort of case.”

 “We do know that they haven't seen all of our evidence. We know they haven't spoken to key sources,” she said.

Based on their findings, researchers called for investigations into the company.

In a statement Monday, the company said it “emphatically rejects the mischaracterisation of its anti-illicit trade activity by the BBC and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.” The company added that it fully cooperated with the U.K. government’s investigation.

“BAT has long been committed to fighting the global criminal trade in illicit tobacco. As part of those efforts, BAT has sought to assist national law enforcement agencies in providing support and, in the past, intelligence on suspected illicit operators,” the statement read.