EU spotlight must remain on Big Tobacco scheming as key transparency leader bows out

In late September, the fight for greater transparency and accountability in EU policy-making lost one of its leading voices with the departure of European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly.

Reflecting on her eleven-year tenure as ethics watchdog, O’Reilly has quipped that “some may not want somebody as active as I was,” an apt summary of her ambitious approach that the tobacco industry would undoubtedly agree with. Indeed, the outgoing Ombudsman repeatedly wielded the power of her office to expose Big Tobacco’s undue influence in crucial EU health policies and push the European Commission to abide by the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

As the EU progresses its ‘Beating Cancer’ and ‘tobacco-free’ goals, its policymakers must launch a bold counteroffensive against tobacco industry manipulation. This agenda is particularly urgent given the concerning health gaps separating the bloc’s East and West – the former of which has been disproportionately targeted by Big Tobacco’s efforts to undermine robust tobacco control regulation.

East-West gaps widening

While the continent’s tobacco consumption – currently the world’s second-highest – is set to continue its moderate decline over the coming years to roughly 23%, the WHO projects that it will post the highest rates by 2030. Hitting the Commission’s 5% by 2040 target will therefore be an uphill battle, especially in eastern Europe. Recent research has highlighted that the continent's highest smoking rates are broadly found in eastern European member-states, which continue “struggling with implementing basic” WHO FCTC tobacco control measures.

Indeed, Sweden has reduced its smoking levels to an EU low of just 8%, compared to nearly 40% in Bulgaria. More broadly, eastern member-states such as Latvia, Lithuania and Poland equally fall on the wrong side of Europe’s smoking table, while fellow Nordics Iceland, Finland and Norway follow Sweden in the rankings. Moreover, this widening regulatory gap risks worsening as the “tobacco industry presence shifts from countries in Western Europe….to Eastern countries which…tend to have less restricted regulatory environments,” according to a study co-authored by Dr. Marc Willemsen.

Eastern Europe also faces a concerning health system performance gap, with the Swedish Institute for Health Economics recently flagging significant inequalities in cancer treatment access in countries including Bulgaria, Romania and Estonia relative to their Western counterparts. What’s more, EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides has highlighted the life expectancy and health funding gaps impacting eastern member-states.

Tobacco industry’s complicit role

With its ceaseless, growing interference in the region, Big Tobacco has directly contributed to eastern Europe’s public health challenges, deploying a wide-ranging arsenal of tactics to undermine government's tobacco control policies.

According to the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group (TCRG), Kaliningrad – Russia’s Baltic Sea exclave bordering Lithuania and Poland – has long served as a hub for the region’s illicit tobacco trade, with ‘Big 4’ tobacco firms, such as Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and British American Tobacco (BAT), exposed for supplying black market organisations with “illicit whites” for smuggling throughout smuggled to the rest of Europe.

Not content with feeding an illicit trade that pads its profits, JTI and BAT have worked with their fellow industry giants to infiltrate anti-smuggling efforts. In 2013, they joined forces with Philip Morris International (PMI) and Imperial Tobacco (since renamed Imperial Brands) to launch the industry front group, the Digital Coding and Tracking Association, to promote the PMI-developed Codentify track and trace system to governments.

Since its creation, Codentify has been widely condemned as a tool of tobacco industry manipulation by leading civil society, academic and public health actors. As the WHO’s Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva has powerfully stated, the tobacco “industry pretends to be part of the solution,” yet “its own tracking and tracing mechanism, Codentify or Inexto” is “far less transparent than the tool required by the Protocol.”

Lithuania in Big Tobacco’s crosshairs

Despite Codentify’s gross violation of the WHO FCTC and its ITP Protocol’s requirements for industry independence, the DCTA, known for masking its tobacco industry links in its dealings with public authorities, facilitated the system’s implementation in Lithuania – in addition to securing an agreement with the country’s Tax Inspectorate to “verify tobacco taxes” in 2014. In its manipulation of Lithuania’s tobacco control regime, the industry’s major players notably had the help of useful ‘avatar’ firms, such as France’s Atos, which offered a semblance of independence to legitimise Codentify in government negotiations.

The DCTA has continued this approach via Codentify’s ‘heirs’; namely, Swiss firm Inexto, which acquired the system in 2016 and has maintained strong financial and operational ties to the industry, as well as Dentsu Tracking, which purchased Codentify’s co-developer, Blue Infinity, a year later. Ten years later, Lithuania, as well as the broader region, remain subjected to this alliance of industry front groups through their operational presence in the EU’s failed track and trace system.

TCRG researchers have warned that seven of the system’s eight primary service providers approved by the Commission have industry links. This call has been heeded by a broad coalition of MEPs, who pressed the EU executive on Dentsu’s dubious role in the EU system earlier this year before publishing a White Paper on the tobacco industry’s policy interference, in partnership with the TCRG and a group of tobacco control organisations.

In parallel, Big Tobacco has further diluted Lithuania’s anti-smuggling efforts with PMI IMPACT, a $100 million funding initiative launched in 2016 primarily to finance studies and organisations aligned with the industry’s commercial interests and misleading tobacco control narratives. In the project’s first funding round, PMI selected consultancy Civitta as a partner to conduct research in Lithuania on cigarette “smuggling economics” in Eastern European border-towns, which curiously neglects to mention the industry’s complicit role or the need for independent track and trace solutions to tackle the illicit market.

What’s more, last year, Civitta partnered with Dentsu Tracking and Inexto in a consortium bid for the Lithuanian Tax Inspectorate’s alcoholic beverage marking tender, indicating the formalised cooperation of tobacco industry-funded firms in the country.

Boosting East’s health budgets

Due to the tobacco industry’s persistent, flagrant breaches of the WHO FCTC’s independence requirements, the ITP Protocol is yet to be properly implemented in the EU, leaving its eastern member-states and their public health budgets particularly vulnerable to the industry’s machinations.

Enshrining the Protocol – particularly, its requirement for an industry-independent track and trace system, would allow eastern member-states to dramatically improve the performance and resilience of their national health systems. By recovering significant volumes of tax revenue currently lost to the continent’s exploding illicit trade, its governments could devote much greater funding towards treatments for cancer and other NCDs associated with tobacco consumption.

In light of Emily O'Reilly's departure, maintaining EU transparency will require a strong coalition of MEPs and civil society leaders to fend off industry interference in public health and tobacco control. Keeping the spotlight on these issues will be crucial in advancing ambitious anti-tobacco regulations and tackling the stark disparities affecting Eastern Europe, ensuring that all EU citizens benefit from healthier futures and more resilient health systems.