Email
Password
(Forgot Password?)
A French court on Friday threw out a damage lawsuit filed by a 60-year-old smoker who accused a state-owned tobacco company of responsibility for his lung cancer.
Michel Loupias, a retired police officer, sought compensation from the company, Seita, for "failing to provide information (on health risks) and putting a dangerous product on the market."
But the court in the southern city of Toulouse ruled in favor of Seita, which argued the dangers of smoking were widely known before a 1976 French law required tobacco companies to issue health warnings on cigarette packs.
"Tobacco, like alcohol, is not strictly speaking a dangerous product," Seita lawyer Pierre Dozier told the court during a hearing on June 18. "It is not subjected to the same legislation as products that may contain harmful elements for consumers."
Dozier also said that since Seita was owned by the state, it was up to the Finance Ministry to inform the public about smoking-related health risks, not the company. . .
"All these (court) decisions highlight two essential points: the widely known risks linked to tobacco and the absence of a direct causality link," [Altadis] said in a statement.
Jump to full article »
"The single biggest litigation threat has receded," said Martin Feldman, an analyst with Salomon Smith Barney. "But tobacco will remain a difficult social issue, and the residual litigation risk will be of concern to investors."
Mary Aronson, the president of Aronson Washington Research, which advises institutional investors on tobacco litigation risks, said that state lawsuits were just part of a "snowstorm" of legal problems that have fallen on the industry in recent years.
WINNERS:
BIG TOBACCO U.S. states embraced a $206-billion US settlement of health claims against the tobacco industry, but the real winners are likely to be the major cigarette manufacturers. They are now free from claims for reimbursement to the states for the cost of treating sick smokers. The losers? Who else: the cost of dying goes up for smokers.
Four private firms that assisted WASHINGTON state's lawsuit will split the biggest share -- $80 million, Berman said. The breakdown for attorneys in the other seven states: $70 million in ARIZONA, $21.5 million in OREGON, $12 million in NEVADA, $10.5 million in VERMONT, $10 million each in MONTANA and ALASKA and $7 million in IDAHO.
Scott Williams, a Washington, D.C.-based industry spokesman, confirmed the figures and the states involved. He said legal fees for attorneys in the remaining 38 states covered in the national settlement will go to arbitration or be resolved through negotiations.
At the start of the meeting, Jim Nicholson, the Republican national chairman, pre-empted discussion of the impeachment issue by telling the governors that the meeting was intended to focus on other issues such as Social Security reform, tax cuts, education and the tobacco settlement, according to Rowland.
``We'll get to them (other issues),'' said Rowland, who will be taking a lead role in defending the states' rights to the money from the tobacco settlement against claims by the federal government. ``But it's not going to be for weeks.''
The problem, economists and legal experts who have studied the deal say, isn't that the damages won by the states are too small . . . It's that 99 percent of the total settlement is really a disguised tax hike.
Taxing cigarettes more heavily may or may not be a good idea, the critics say, but labeling as "damages" what is effectively a sales tax is misleading and will create a boondoggle for trial lawyers and a windfall for the smaller tobacco companies.
By calling the settlement 'damages' it makes it seem reasonable to pay the lawyers a lot. If you called it taxes, you wouldn't expect to give lawyers a fraction of the tax. Paul Klemperer, an economist at Oxford University. Quoted in <i>Smokescreen: The Ifs and Buts of the Tobacco Settlement</i>
The tobacco industry's $206 billion health-care settlement -- to be financed through higher cigarette prices -- probably will push up consumer inflation about 0.2 percentage point in December, a government economist said.
Yet it was the study of college-student smokers that mocked the celebration over the tobacco settlement. Harvard School of Public Health researchers, publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reported smoking jumped 28 percent among college students between 1993 and 1997. The authors blamed cigarette marketing. But researchers know that even in California, a state considered a model for its aggressive antismoking advertising and school programs, teen smoking is peaking again. Peer pressure seems to trump even the best-thought-out antismoking strategies. And that's something that no tobacco deal can touch.