A number of increases in taxes on cigarette sales that were recently registered in Spain have prompted both price warfare between companies struggling for recession-hit consumers, and a sudden increase in the sale of cigarette products.
“At present the problem of cigarette market seems to worsen due to recession and an evident falling purchasing power,” stated José Luis Nueno, a professor of marketing.
According to a report realized by leading tobacco company Imperial Tobacco, about 6% of all cigarette sales in Spain belong to illicit market, more than 10% in Andalusia and nearly 20% in such regions as Málaga and Seville.
Within the past two years, tax increases in Spain have prompted a huge number of smokers switch to cheap cigarette brands or even rolling tobacco in comparison to earlier popular Virginia and such famous smokes as Marlboro and Camel.
One more option for the hard-pressed Spanish smoke lovers has been the chance to try something of Chinese-produced bootleg smokes that have become rather popular common, or to purchase cigarettes. The lowest prices for cigarettes and availability can make the illegal cigarettes more appealing.
Spain’s porous borders have always made it an appealing and very profitable market for contraband cigarette smugglers.
One of the most powerful cartels importing non-taxed tobacco products were Galician-based gangs who used high-speed boats in order to bring these products in the country. Very soon they switched to higher margin crimes, such as cocaine smuggling, and corresponding faced a wave of arrests. Mr. Nueno said that criminal operations in Spain have become much more divergent.
The great part of cigarettes confiscated by Spanish custom authorities comes through the country’s borders with Andorra, Portugal, and Gibraltar.
“Officially Spain has three regions where the use and demand for cigarettes is highest, namely Galicia, as it situated in the main proximity to Portugal. Andalusia, due to Gibraltar, and Catalonia, because of Andorra,” added Mr. Nueno.
The estimates for contraband tobacco products coming Spain are based on the extrapolation from the amount confiscated at customs.
According to statistics, in 2009, about 12.3 million cigarettes from illicit market entered Spain.
Smoking was banned in public places in many states except Croatia. But today Croatia is set to implement a public smoking ban, including bars and restaurants.
"A six-month temporary period for bars, restaurants and the tobacco industry is expiring Today and the law restricting the use of tobacco will be fully implemented," Health Minister said.
Statistics showed that in Croatia smoke 68 percent pf the population. That’s why ministry believes that the new anti-smoking legislation will protect non-smokers and will decrease the smokers’ number.
The legislation allows a six month transitory period for bars, restaurants and the tobacco industry to conform to it.
After this period, smoking at bars will only be allowed out on terraces, while restaurants can allocate a separate room for smokers where they can’t serve food or drink in these areas.
Fines of up to 2,100 euros (2,800 dollars) for individuals and up to 21,000 euros for employers will be imposed on those violating the smoking ban.
The health ministry considered that tobacco kills 10,000 people every year while an additional 3,000 die from passive smoking in Croatia.
Croatia already had laws banning smoking in health and education facilities, and marking out separate smoking areas in other public spaces.
But these rules have often been ignored, especially in bars, restaurants and offices. Because bar and restaurant owners, in particular have protested strongly, claiming it will seriously affect their business.
The writer citing “the acid rain scare of three decades ago” to support his argument that climate change is a scam probably has a sense of irony equal to his understanding of science.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s acid rain program is a good example of a successful strategy to combat a serious problem. This program has achieved its goals of reducing sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides through a cap-and-trade system on primarily coal-burning power plants. Since its implementation in the 1990s, it has successfully reduced acid rain levels by 65 percent at a cost much less than forecast.
As for global cooling, this was the brief darling of the pop press in the 1970s and was never taken seriously by the scientific community. It is in no way comparable to the present widespread scientific consensus that climate change is real and mostly due to human activities.
Regarding the “650 respected scientists” dismissive of global warming: There was also a time that the online tobacco
industry could muster many “respected scientists” to dispute that cigarettes cause cancer.
In fact, the strategies used then are now employed by climate change polemics. That is, recruiting just enough naysayers to confuse and instill doubt, despite the preponderance of evidence and expert opinion to the contrary, so those currently benefiting by the status quo can continue to profit to the detriment of everyone else. taxes
Corrections officer Rod Coston spends his afternoons and evenings guarding prison inmates as they walk between buildings at the Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia.
Most days, he smokes a pack of online cigarettes during his eight hours on the job. But starting next Sunday, Coston won't be able to turn to his favorite stress reliever while he's at work.
The state's 41 prisons go tobacco-free that day. Until then, inmates and prison staff can continue smoking in outdoor prison areas, although they haven't been able to smoke inside since the 1990s.
"I don't even know if I'm capable of going eight hours without a cigarette," said Coston, 46, who smokes around 20 cigarettes a day on the job and another pack away from work. "It's part of me, and I don't know if I can physically do it. I won't know until I do walk in on that day and see if I can get through the day."
Corrections officials began moving toward the total tobacco ban a year ago, when lawmakers put language into the 2008 corrections budget bill requiring prisons to be tobacco free.
The department offered inmates smoking cessation classes as it readied for the ban to take effect. Inmates have been able to buy fewer cigarettes and more nicotine patches and gum at prison stores in recent months, and no cigarettes have been sold since Jan. 1. Visitors have been told they won't be able to bring tobacco products into the prisons.
I wish to draw attention to the damage tobacco growing has caused to the environment in West Nile, the North, Bunyoro and south-western Uganda.
Several acres of woodland have been felled for flue-cured tobacco production in Maracha, Arua, Koboko, Yumbe, Hoima, and Masindi districts. Forests that would otherwise have filtered carbon emissions and protected arable land from erosion are removed, and temperatures in the tobacco-growing districts are rising.
Firms like British American Tobacco, Leaf Tobacco and Commodity, as well as Continental, in their fallacy, give eucalyptus seedlings to farmers supposedly to replace chopped forests without considering the long maturity period and its impact on the water table.
The tobacco firms do not plough back their high profits yet they hype their cosmetic social responsibility programmes. South African Breweries' "Drive Arrive Campaign" resulted into 10% decline in road accident-related deaths in 1998. What have the tobacco companies done?
Apart from the trivial contribution through the mandatory 2000 Crop Ordinance that Arua enacted, tobacco companies have not done much for the community. Since tobacco growing is laborious and an all-year round activity, many food crops are foregone by tobacco farmers, which has caused food insecurity.
Besides, during peak seasons, students stay home harvesting tobacco, leading to poor academic performance and child labour. Tobacco companies have not trained farmers to invest their little earnings and this leaves them in a cyclical poverty trap.
The negative impact of tobacco growing includes the accumulation of chemical compounds in soils and declining fertility. Tobacco production negatively affects people's health. The effects include nicotine poisoning, pesticide exposure, respiratory effects, musculoskeletal and other injuries.
The Government should assist tobacco growers in West Nile to produce alternative crops that thrive well there without fertilisers or pesticides. The sh48b the Government gets in tax revenues from tobacco exports and products should not shroud the negative effects on tobacco on the population.
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.
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.
Austrian customs officials have started imposing tough fines on persons bringing Czech cigarettes to Austria and in addition they confiscate all the non-permitted cigarettes they find, the daily Lidove noviny wrote Tuesday.
Czechs taking out more than one carton of Czech cigaretteswhile travelling for holiday to Croatia via Austria could be severely punished because the Austrian customs officials have started imposing tough fines on all drivers who violate "the tobacco law" while crossing the Austrian border, the paper says.
Under the law, passed shortly before the Czech Republic joined the Schengen area without border checks last December, one person can only take out 200 pieces of cigarettes with the Czech-language health warning message while travelling from the Czech Republic to Austria.
Drivers have to pay a 50 euro fine for each additional carton of cigarettes if caught and besides, Austrian police confiscate the cigarettes from them, the paper says.
"The time when we just reprimand the people violating the law or simply return cars back to the Czech Republic is over. At present we confiscate everything that crosses the permitted limit," Franz Dorninger, head of the Linz customs administration, told Lidove noviny.
While as recently as in January and February Austrian customs officials were still lenient towards Czechs violating the tobacco law, in March they imposed 47 fines for carrying non-permitted amounts of cigarettes from the Czech Republic to Austria and 48 fines were imposed in April, Dorninger says.
"On average, the drivers who are usually caught having two additional cartons of cigarettes above the one permitted carton on them had to pay a 100 euro fine," he says.
However, statistics does not allow to find out whether the drivers punished were Czechs or Austrians, HN writes.
The Czech Industry and Trade Ministry resents the Austrian police raids on people taking Czech tobacco products out to Austria. On the basis of the EU agreements from January 1, 2008, Austria must allow the import of up to 800 pieces of Czech-made cigarettes per one person, Lidove noviny writes.
However, since Austrian cigarette sellers have threatened to stage a general trike if their government failed to protect them against the cheap Czech competition Vienna has adopted special measures.
Although it has officially confirmed that people are allowed to take to Austria up to four cartons of Czech cigarettes per one person this is only possible if the health warning message is written in German.
The import of cigarettes with the Czech health warning message remains limited to one carton.
"In our opinion, such measure runs counter to the rules of free trade within the EU," Czech Industry and Trade Ministry spokesman Tomas Bartovsky told Lidove noviny.
Industry and Trade Minister Martin Riman has thus called on Austrian Health Minister Andrea Kdolsky in written to abolish the controversial measure.
Riman was not satisfied with Kdolsky's answer in which she pointed to the protection of the health of the Austrian population.
He has thus called on the Association of Czech tobacco products traders to complain about the measure at the European Commission, Lidove noviny writes.
Despite the gradual increase in prices of tobacco products in the Czech Republic they are still cheaper there than in Germany or Austria. Foreigners thus buy roughly one-fourth of the 73 billion pieces of cigarettes annually sold in the Czech Republic, the daily Pravo wrote on Monday.
According to Pravo, foreigners took some 5.6 billion cigarettes out of the Czech Republic last year.
On the other hand, some 1.8 billion cigarettes were taken to the Czech Republic from Poland, Ukraine and Slovakia where tobacco products are substantially cheaper for Czechs, Pravo said.
