[Intl-tobacco] BAT rated one of worst corporations of 2002

[Robert Weissman]

3 part email:

At Multinational Monitor, we named BAT one of the 10 worst corporations
of 2002.

Below is:

1. An overview of the 10 worst companies.

2. An excerpt of the profile on BAT.

3. A response to the ranking from the Monitor newspaper in Uganda (no
relationship to Multinational Monitor).

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http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2003/000138.html

The 10 Worst Corporations of 2002
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

2002 will forever be remembered as the year of corporate crime, the year
even President George Bush embraced the notion of "corporate
responsibility."

While the Bush White House has now downgraded its "corporate
responsibility portal" to a mere link to uninspiring content on the
White House webpage, and although the prospect of war has largely bumped
the issue off the front pages, the cascade of corporate financial and
accounting scandals continues.

We easily could have filled Multinational Monitor's list of the 10 Worst
Corporations of the Year with some of the dozens of companies embroiled
in the financial scandals.

But we decided against that course.

As extraordinary as the financial misconduct has been, we didn't want to
contribute to the perception that corporate wrongdoing in 2002 was
limited to the financial misdeeds arena.

For Multinational Monitor's 10 Worst Corporations of 2002 list, we
included only Andersen from the ranks of the financial criminals and
miscreants. Andersen's assembly line document destruction certainly
merits a place on the list. (Citigroup appears on the list as well, but
primarily for a subsidiary's involvement in predatory lending,
as well as the company's funding of environmentally destructive projects
around the world.)

As for the rest, we present a collection of polluters, dangerous pill
peddlers, modern-day mercenaries, enablers of human rights abuses,
merchants of death, and
beneficiaries of rural destruction and misery.

Multinational Monitor has named Arthur Andersen, British American
Tobacco (BAT), Caterpillar, Citigroup, DynCorp, M&M/Mars, Procter &
Gamble, Schering Plough, Shell and Wyeth as the 10 Worst Corporations of 20=
02.

Appearing in alphabetical order, the 10 worst are:

Arthur Andersen, for a massive scheme to destroy documents related to
the Enron meltdown. "Tons of paper relating to the Enron audit were
promptly shredded as part of the orchestrated document destruction," a
federal indictment against Andersen alleged. "The shredder at the
Andersen office at the Enron building was used virtually constantly and,
to handle the overload, dozens of large trunks filled with Enron
documents were sent to Andersen's main Houston office to be shredded."
Andersen was convicted for illegal document destruction, effectively
putting the company out of business.

BAT, for operating worldwide programs supposedly designed to prevent
youth smoking but which actually make the practice more attractive to
kids (by suggesting smoking is an adult activity), continuing to deny
the harmful health effects of second-hand smoke, and working to oppose
efforts at the World Health Organization to adopt a strong Framework
Convention on Tobacco Control.

Caterpillar, for selling bulldozers to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF),
which are used as an instrument of war to destroy Palestinian homes and
buildings. The IDF has destroyed more than 7,000 Palestinian homes since
the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, leaving 30,000 people
homeless.

Citigroup, both for its deep involvement in the Enron and other
financial scandals and its predatory lending practices through its
recently acquired subsidiary The Associates. Citigroup paid $215 million
to resolve Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that The Associates
engaged in systematic and widespread deceptive and abusive lending practice=
s.

DynCorp, a controversial private firm which subcontracts military
services with the Defense Department, for flying planes that spray
herbicides on coca crops in Colombia. Farmers on the ground allege that
the herbicides are killing their legal crops, and exposing them to
dangerous toxins.

M&M/Mars, for responding tepidly to revelations about child slaves in
the West African fields where much of the world's cocoa is grown, and
refusing to commit to purchase a modest 5 percent of its product from
Fair Trade providers.

Procter & Gamble, the maker of Folger's coffee and part of the coffee
roaster oligopoly, for failing to take action to address plummeting
coffee bean prices. Low prices have pushed tens of thousands of farmers
in Central America, Ethiopia, Uganda and elsewhere to the edge of
survival, or destroyed their means of livelihood altogether.

Schering Plough, for a series of scandals, most prominently allegation
of repeated failure over recent years to fix problems in manufacturing
dozens of drugs at four of its facilities in New Jersey and Puerto Rico.
Schering paid $500 million to settle the case with the Food and Drug Admini=
stration.

Shell Oil, for continuing business as usual as one of the world's
leading environmental violators -- while marketing itself as a socially
and environmentally responsible company.

Wyeth, for using duplicitous means, and without sufficient scientific
proof, to market hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to women as a
fountain of youth. Scientific evidence reported in 2002 showed that
long-term HRT actually threatens women's lives, by increasing the risks
of breast cancer, heart attack, stroke and pulmonary embolism.

What's the lesson to draw from this year's 10 worst list? Not only are
Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco and the rest indicative of a
fundamentally corrupt financial system, they are representative of a
rotten system of corporate dominance.

The full 10 Worst Corporations of 2002 list is available at <http://www.mul=
tinationalmonitor.org>.



Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor, http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are
co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the
Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corpor=
atepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

This article is posted at: http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/=
2003/000138.html


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Excerpted from:

"Bad Apples in a Rotten System: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2002,"
Multinational Monitor
December 2002
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02december/dec02corp1.html


BAT
"Corporate Mendacity"

"Some say that 'tobacco and responsibility' just don=EDt go together --
that a business can't be responsible if its products can harm people."

So writes Martin Broughton, chair of British American Tobacco (BAT), the
second largest tobacco multinational in the world, just behind Philip
Morris.

Rejecting that view, Broughton writes in BAT=EDs Social Report 2001/2002
that, "We have much to offer in helping address the problems that
concern our stakeholders, including supporting soundly-based tobacco
regulation and reducing the impact of tobacco consumption on public
health."

Broughton raises an interesting philosophical question about how a
tobacco company could be "responsible." Unfortunately, as far as BAT is
concerned, the question is only theoretical. The company continues to
engage in a series of egregious practices, made all the worse because
they involve the pushing of an addictive and deadly product.

BAT's social report itself represented a major public relations ploy by
the company, which along with the rest of Big Tobacco is eager to
distance itself from what the companies acknowledge to be the bad old
days =F3 when they denied any harms to their product and recklessly
promoted them.

As they have throughout history, the companies, with BAT and Philip
Morris at the helm, are positioning themselves to accept minimal
marketing and product restrictions -- while their cutting-edge
activities remain unhampered.

In advance of the release of the Social Report, Action on Smoking and
Health UK (ASH UK) issued a counter report, "British American Tobacco --
The Other Report to Society." Anticipating Broughton's claim, the ASH UK
report stated, "The problem with BAT is not only that it makes a deadly
and addictive product. We judge BAT by how it behaves, its business
practices, the directions it takes and its truthfulness. We find BAT to
be irresponsible because of the way it conducts its business, not simply
because of what it makes."

The ASH report notes that it took until 1998 before BAT acknowledged
smoking caused any harm at all. "Up until then they had undertaken an
elaborate public relations exercise to maintain a 'controversy' about
data that had convinced most respectable scientists some 40 years
earlier that smoking was a cause of serious diseases like cancer. This
is perhaps the greatest exercise in corporate mendacity the world has
ever known and one of the most serious corporate crimes of the twentieth
century. No admission has ever been made, no apology has been
forthcoming and no one has lost their job."

But the report does not condemn the company only for past practices.
Among many other indictments, it documents how:

BAT's worldwide programs supposedly designed to prevent youth smoking
actually make the practice more attractive to kids (by suggesting
smoking is an adult activity), while diverting attention from the issue
of getting adult smokers to quit. (BAT says it "does not want children
to smoke" and hopes its programs "will have a positive effect on
preventing youth smoking.") BAT continues to deny the harmful health
effects of second-hand smoke. (BAT says "there is no convincing evidence
that ETS [environmental tobacco smoke or second-hand smoke] is a cause
of chronic diseases," and the company advocates indoor ventilation
instead of smoke-free areas.) BAT has worked to oppose efforts at the
World Health Organization to adopt a strong Framework Convention on
Tobacco Control, including a recommended ban on tobacco advertising and
promotion. (BAT says that, while it accepts that tobacco advertising
should be subjected to special rules, existing regulations already go
too far.)

Perhaps the most explosive news to emerge about BAT this year came from
Australia, where a judge found the company to have engaged in an
elaborate, carefully considered, company-wide document-destruction
scheme.

In a case filed against BAT by a dying smoker named Rolah Ann McCabe,
Judge Geoffrey Eames found that BAT systematically destroyed key
documents including reports, memoranda and other materials specifying
what the company knew about the addictiveness of nicotine and when it
knew it, what it knew about health impacts of smoking and when it knew
it, and matters relating to marketing cigarettes to children, among
other topics.

"The predominant purpose of the document destruction," the judge found,
"was the denial to plaintiffs of information which was likely to be of
importance in proving their case, in particular, proving the state of
knowledge of the defendant of the health risks of smoking, the addictive
qualities of cigarettes and the response of the defendant to such
knowledge."

BAT defended, and continues to defend, the shredding on the grounds that
the company was not obligated to hold on to documents that may be useful
to an opposing party in some future litigation. But the judge stated
that while corporations are not obligated to store documents
indefinitely, they are not free to destroy them in anticipation of
future litigation.

Finding the harm from the document to be unknowable and irreparable, the
judge issued a verdict in favor of McCabe without allowing BAT to mount
a defense. The jury awarded McCabe more than $350,000. Because McCabe
was dying, and in an effort to expedite the case, her attorneys agreed
before the litigation that no punitive damages would be sought. BAT
appealed the decision.

As Multinational Monitor was going to press, the appellate court handed
down a decision reversing Judge Eames' holding. The Court of Appeal
ruled that, although BAT did destroy vast troves of documents, it was
not required to preserve them, or at least the obligation was not such
that the judge was justified in denying BAT the ability to mount a
defense. The appellate court said it did not offer judgment on whether
BAT's conduct might be considered an effort to pervert justice. But it
did effectively rule that BAT's actions were not wrongful in the way
found by Judge Eames, and that some of BAT=EDs internal documents were
protected by attorney-client privilege, as the company had claimed.

The case will now be considered on the merits of McCabe's claim for
damages. Rolah Ann McCabe died shortly before the appellate ruling. Her
family intends to continue the case.


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(Uganda)
Monitor Editorial 07/01/03
www.monitor.co.ug


Cigarettes only help drowning men sink deeper
The Multinational Monitor has named British American
Tobacco (BAT) the world=92s second worst corporation of
2002. The Multinational Monitor ranked BAT at number
2, with after the accounting and consultancy firm
Arthur Andersen, that helped the giant American energy
company cook its books.
BAT's place among the evil companies was earned
because its controversial worldwide programmes that
are supposed to discourage the youth from smoking, but
allegedly make the practice more attractive to kids by
giving the impression that it is a =93cool=94 adult
activity. BAT also got a bad rap for continuing to
deny the harmful health effects of second-hand smoke,
and working to oppose efforts at the World Health
Organization to adopt a strong Framework Convention on
Tobacco Control.
Recently the Ugandan courts ruled that smoking in
public places is harmful. Clearly the sensitivity
about the health hazards of smoking in Uganda, like
other Third World countries, is growing beyond the
circle of anti-smoking activists. It would be BAT well
to take due attention and adopt a more responsible
attitude.
In fact one can argue that the responsibility of
tobacco companies in countries like Uganda are, in
moral terms, perhaps higher than in the west. First,
there are already too many diseases killing off
Africans =96 malaria, AIDS, TB, name it. Secondly, these
countries simply can=92t afford to treat the diseases
related to smoking.
Refusing to deal seriously with the hazards of smoking
in this situation is like adding a dead weight on the
head of a drowning man.
Monitor Newspaper
Uganda