26 mai 2008
Cigarettes to be available only as ‘under the counter’ purchase
cigarettes will no longer be available over the counter and cigarette vending machines will be outlawed under plans to be announced this week.
Only months after the Governm
ent raised the age for buying cigarettes to 18, the Health Secretary said that more anti-smoking measures were likely to be introduced, including banning packets of ten.
Alan Johnson said that packs of ten Woodbines had encouraged him to start smoking when young. He backed plans to enforce nationwide the decision in Scotland to force cigarettes “under the counter”. Speaking on Sunday AM on BBC One, he said: “I think they are right to do that and indeed we are considering that as well. We will launch a consultation document on that next week.”
He said that many European countries had banned vending machines, with “startling” results. “Whether you should still be able to buy ten cigarettes or whether you should insist you can only buy 20 is an issue we need to look very closely at,” he said.
He also gave a broad hint that the price of alcohol would rise: “The instinctive reaction . . . is that if you’re selling lager at less than . . . mineral water, then that’s wrong.”
20 mai 2008
Imperial Reports Lower Profit, to Raise $10 Billion
Imperial Tobacco Group Plc reported a 45 percent drop in first-half profit on costs for buying Altadis SA and said it will sell stock worth 4.9 billion pounds ($10 billion) to current investors to help fund the takeover.
Net income dropped to 233 million pounds in the six months through March from 421 million pounds a year earlier, the Bristol, England-based company said today in a statement. That missed the 370 million-pound median estimate of five analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Imperial agreed to buy Madrid-based Altadis in July of last year, months after unveiling the acquisition of U.S. cigarettes maker Commonwealth Brands. Most of the Spanish company's sales come from its domestic market and France, adding to its allure for Imperial, which is expanding in new locations because its main U.K. and German markets are shrinking.
``The focus will be to see how Altadis is performing,'' Rogerio Fujimori, an analyst at Credit Suisse in London, said yesterday. The takeover gave Imperial, Europe's second-largest cigarettes maker, cigarette brands including Gauloises and the world's largest manufacturer of cigars.
cigarettes
Investors will have the right to buy one new share for every two held as of May 15, said Imperial, the maker of Lambert & Butler and Davidoff cigarettes. It will sell 338.7 million new shares for 1,475 pence each, 44 percent less than yesterday's closing price in London trading.
Imperial rose 16 pence, or 0.6 percent, to 2,618 pence in London yesterday. The stock has slipped 3.5 percent in 2008, while larger competitor British American Tobacco Plc, the maker of Pall Mall cigarettes, is little changed.
The cigarette maker had said costs related to the Altadis purchase would lop 110 million pounds from first-half profit. The drop in earnings is ``all because of this exceptional charge,'' Fujimori said.
Imperial had said it would sell as much as 5 billion pounds of stock by July to help finance the takeover and retain its investment-grade credit rating. The company has raised its stake in Logista, the Spanish cigarette distributor controlled by Altadis, to about 97 percent following an offer to minority investors this month.
08 avril 2008
Appeals Court Panel Throws Out Class Action Over Light Cigarettes
In a victory for the tobacco industry, a federal appeals court threw out on Thursday an $800 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of smokers who said they had been misled that light cigarettes were safer than regular ones. 
Plaintiffs’ lawyers wanted to represent millions of people across the country who had smoked light cigarettes. But the court, saying it was impossible to generalize about why smokers chose light cigarettes, ruled that the group could not be treated as a class. Instead, smokers wanting to sue over the issue would have to do so individually.
There might be various reasons for a smoker to choose a light brand other than “the belief that lights were a healthier alternative,” the ruling said. Other possibilities are that a lights smoker “was unaware of that representation, preferred the taste of lights, or chose lights as an expression of personal style.”
Even though the ruling had been generally expected, and tobacco company stocks were little affected by the decision, analysts still viewed it as positive for the industry.
Several experts said the ruling, the latest in a string of industry victories in cases involving light cigarettes, relieved the tobacco industry of potentially billions in damages and could also deter other similar class-action lawsuits around the country. “It may be persuasive to judges around the country who might well be watching it,” said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.