WEDNESDAY 16 FEBRUARY 2000

MR M BROUGHTON, MR K CLARKE, MR C BATES and MR D CAMPBELL

  1520. No, it is not a request.
  (Mr Clarke) Apparently we are going to hear about the Cameroons. I am not up to speed on the Cameroons and Mr Campbell went there yesterday going through all the documents on the Cameroons. If we are going to get three sentences about the Cameroons the fact is that I have no idea what the background is to the market in the Cameroons however many years ago it was. To put it in context means that it is no good the Committee having three documents from which it thinks it can work out what the tobacco market was like in the Cameroons in 1991. You do need an altogether more substantial context for all this.

  1521. May I put to you, as a member of parliament, who knows all about the workings of a select committee, when we get a defence from your company that we have been given selective quotes, what should we do in these circumstances?
  (Mr Clarke) At the very least if you wish to draw conclusions from those quotes, I certainly think you should see the full document.

  1522. Right.
  (Mr Clarke) You should not just take the headline put above it and below it by Mr Campbell and Mr Bates.

  1523. Do you think it reasonable for Mrs Wise to request in your own interests that we look at—
  (Mr Clarke) If Mrs Wise want to research the market in the Cameroons in whenever it was—

  1524. You would cooperate.
  (Mr Clarke)—Mr Campbell is going to tell us about, feel free to do so.

  1525. You will have to accept that this Committee can decide on its script. You cannot write our script for us.
  (Mr Clarke) I agree.

  1526. If we want the documents which we are told have quotations taken out of context, that is not a request that really is a requirement and I am not asking for you to consider it, I am asking for you to send them. A lot has been said about this Committee, jargon, health committee/select committee meaning kangaroo court, health issues. We have been told that we are supposed to deal with health issues, which we know, but it is our job to define the health issues; our job not the job of witnesses. We just do not accept witnesses giving us our terms of reference. Then we have had witnesses accused of bias. Mr Broughton accused Mr Bates of having special interest which would stop him being really—
  (Mr Broughton) Objective was the word I used.

  1527.—objective. All our witnesses habitually have special interests. That is why they are witnesses. If I may suggest, Mr Broughton, consider your own statement a few minutes ago, "the big companies are the responsible companies". Am I to take that as objective from the chairman, very well paid chairman, of one of the largest companies? I think you should be very careful about accusing the witnesses of bias or the Committee of having closed minds. Mr Clarke, I do not know whether you ever served on a select committee, but if you did ... You did not. Right. It shows.
  (Mr Clarke) I never had that pleasure.

  1528. If you ever had then you would know that one of the great protections is that we not only give our conclusions, which may or may not be reasonable, we also publish transcripts and evidence so that people reading our reports can also make their own judgements.
  (Mr Clarke) I have appeared before many committees, and I am quite prepared to reserve judgement on this one until I see the report. I have been before committees as a minister and sometimes I have felt I did not know where it was going to go and sometimes I felt I knew exactly where they were coming from. I reserve judgement on where this select committee winds up but it may be just by experience of debating tobacco, particularly in the United States, where the situation is worse than it is here, but you have taken a lot of evidence, you have taken evidence from an honour list of anti-tobacco campaigners all over the United States and here, an enormous number. I think you saw all the tobacco companies together in one, put them in the dock as one block, and we have put in some scientific evidence. The one criticism I have made is that on the strength of the article in The Guardian you have gone off suddenly onto smuggling right at the end. Having said that, I am being provoked into criticism by Mrs Wise and Mr Hesford but I have been perfectly content this afternoon. It followed the pattern I expected, it followed the pattern of our arguing the toss about half a dozen sentences out of eight million documents about what did or did not happen in Colombia six years ago.

  1529. May I say that I think if you look at the transcripts of our evidence we have taken a lot of evidence on smuggling, not just this session. Smuggling is a key issue. I think you understand that. You know why, from a health point of view, we are interested in smuggling. Mrs Wise has concerns that we were supplied with the full context of the references made by the witnesses here today. Are you happy to supply us with those so that we can evaluate whether they are out of context or in context or whatever?
  (Mr Clarke) Full documents and so on but I am just explaining to you that context does not mean just another document. It means the kinds of explanations we have had about what it is these documents are all about.

  Audrey Wise: Tell us that as well then.

  Chairman: We shall make contact with you subsequent to this meeting.

  1530. I understand that you see that we have biased selections of documents and I can see why you think that and I do appreciate that it is a real risk from your point of view that we have had selective bits of evidence given to us. Therefore may I make a formal request that you scan all eight million documents, put them on the internet and let people who do understand the market and do understand the process really have a look at them. That is what the Americans asked us to do. If we can achieve that, we shall have got somewhere. So I am asking you: will you scan all eight million documents, put them on the net and let legitimate and reasonable researchers actually give us the full context and the full nature of what is in those documents because we cannot do it?
  (Mr Broughton) I cannot think of a bigger waste of time and money.

  1531. We do not believe so. The answer is either yes or no. They in America have currently put 24 million papers on the internet; they have requested that we get the other seven to eight million on the internet as well so there is a full record of it. I am asking you: will you do it?
  (Mr Broughton) We have put on the record everything that would have been on the record had we operated under the US rules. Just remember what the difference is here. In America, because they were much more prepared for litigation than we were, because there had been litigation for so much longer, the document requests were responded to. In the UK we were not able to respond to the document requests in the time we were given so we put the entire file. The entire file contained way more than would have been in there to be responsive. You are not asking for the same as America; you are asking for a great deal more than the American companies have done.

  1532. The Americans have had 24 million pages on the internet.
  (Mr Broughton) You are asking for a great deal more.

  1533. I am asking for eight million.
  (Mr Broughton) No, you are not, you are asking for a great deal more.

  1534. In his second to last response Mr Clarke criticised us or the other witnesses for basing conclusions on documents which might be six years out of date. When I put a specific question to Mr Broughton, whether he would produce the documents which would bring us up to date, which have references to illegal trade, smuggling, parallel market or whatever, he refused to do so. If we are to make our judgements not on documents which are six years old but on up-to-date ones, perhaps you could ensure that British American Tobacco provide them for us.
  (Mr Clarke) No large organisation in the public sector or the private sector would be any more willing than we are to start producing millions of documents for the benefit of investigative journalists and campaigning bodies to go through this kind of process. The fact is that if you give enough documents people from a set point of view can always produce something. As all politicians know of all persuasions, it is rather like the editing of television. The television editor says, "I take the sermon on the Mount. You give me enough footage, I can turn it into a fascist rally". If you produce for Mr Campbell millions and millions of pages he will keep coming back I can assure you; he will find things. I do not think he will ever acquire more substance than this. He just has an inner belief that we are all conspiring to organise smuggling and nothing will shift it. I can tell you that we are not and we cannot produce millions and millions of documents.

  1535. Are there any quick final points you want to make? Mr Clarke, I shall start with you. Any quick final points?
  (Mr Clarke) The only final point is that I think people should accept that the issue is that there are health risks associated with tobacco therefore what is legitimate marketing and what is the responsibility of governments and companies to sell it. The rest, which originally stems from the wilder activities of the plaintiffs' lawyers in the United States, attempts to turn the whole thing into criminality, conspiracies, targeting the young, all this sort of thing, is actually an attempt by people who no doubt for excellent motives gild the lily, think the ends justify the means. This is a legitimate company of good ethical standards. We live up to the standards you would expect of a publicly listed company in the United Kingdom.
  (Mr Broughton) I put forward what I believed to be a constructive set of 20 proposals during the last session. I would add to those proposals a willingness to sit down with anybody to debate constructively how we can prevent smuggling occurring. That is not just reduce taxation, there is a whole series of things. We should like to be able to sit very constructively and talk about how we reduce smuggling in the UK or other countries and specifically how we can take action that prevents access to children as a result of smuggling.
  (Mr Bates) I believe they have not answered the allegations, they have attempted to wave them away by dismissing them as selective quotes. Even if there were a single memo which showed that senior people in BAT were orchestrating smuggling, there is a case to answer, even if it is a single memo from eight million. I should also like to look forward. I am glad of the offer of their audit committee looking at this properly instead of just bland dismissals. I hope that will be something which is published and shown to the shareholders. I should also like to look forward. There should be a DTI investigation. If the DTI is not interested in this sort of thing, then I do not know what it is interested in; a very, very serious matter. I take seriously the response from BAT which is to take smuggling seriously and that they will therefore cooperate in the development of a smuggling protocol under the auspices of the World Health Organisation's framework convention on tobacco control. Ultimately the responsibility lies with governments to have law and order policies in place which keep this lot under wraps.
  (Mr Campbell) I agree with the sentiment expressed around the table that it is for the Committee not BAT and not for me to reach a final conclusion on what you think their documents mean and nothing could be more right than they bring forth those documents to you and such other documents as they see fit so that you may reach your own conclusions. The record of this hearing will of itself refute such remarks by Mr Broughton that the case of money laundering was ill put against them. The defence was a good defence but it was not a defence to the question which was raised in my evidence and it will be shown. Finally, Mr Broughton said that I was unfair to him in saying he misled the Committee and then proceeded to admit how he had misled the Committee about the depository, not in one way but in three. First of all, the 350,000 pages which were passed to Minnesota exist electronically and have already been scanned. Secondly, he omitted to state that the pages we had all requested, all the pages, have already been scanned. Thirdly, I spoke yesterday with his own manager, Mr Lewis, who said that at the building at the back which you did not see, millions of pages—and these were Mr Lewis's words—were being scanned and the reason they were being scanned was because BAT is about to face more legal actions. They were actually being scanned for the process of discovery, which deals with some questions from over there. I have to say that I also learned from BAT staff there that the members of that building were sent home and were not allowed to work that day the Committee visited in order that the Committee's awareness of what was going on might be mitigated.

  Chairman : Thank you very much. Gentlemen, it has been a very interesting session. We are very grateful for your cooperation with our inquiry. Thank you very much.