Global reporting network unveils tobacco secrets

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Mar/Apr 2001 by Beelman, Maud S

The allegation had wafted through the close-knit international anti-tobacco community for some time. The tobacco multinational companies controlled the global smuggling of their own cigarettes in an attempt to expand market share and evade billions of dollars in national taxes.

Researchers had already demonstrated - by comparing international import-export statistics - that about one-third of all cigarettes reported annually as exported did not show up on import rolls. They questioned why the tobacco multinationals said and did so little about so much missing inventory every year. The rumor languished. Attention was focused on other fronts in the tobacco wars, and there was no proof, in a complicated story that spanned continents, of the alleged activity by a subject with deep pockets and a penchant for large libel lawsuits.

Then two unrelated developments converged to lift the veil. Tens of millions of pages of tobacco company documents were made public under U.S. court orders that settled the various tobacco litigations of the late 1990s. And the newly created International Consortium of Investigative Journalists began searching for a topic for its premier cross-border investigation - a story suited to the unique talents of ICU's global network of investigative reporters.

ICIJ was the brainchild of Charles Lewis, founder and executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative reporting group based in Washington, D.C. It was created in September 1997 to extend globally the center's style of long-term, large-scale investigations that few of its colleagues in daily media had the luxury of doing. Post-Cold War globalization had made borders permeable, giving new meaning to the adage that all news is local. But it also gave rise to increasingly more complicated issues, such as international crime or cross-border political corruption. Talented reporters working in concert across borders, the center determined, were needed for the task.

The tobacco smuggling allegations - which, if proved, would suggest corporate involvement in blatant attempts to evade the law - were the perfect vehicle to test the ICIJ model of cross-border collaboration.

The investigation started out as a tip from a source about the suspicions behind the discrepancy in import/export statistics. Through e-mails with members of the international anti-tobacco community, we soon learned that the same U.S. court order that dumped millions of pages of tobacco company documents in Minnesota had allowed one of the tobacco companies to put its documents in a depository closer to corporate headquarters in England. Through more e-mails we learned that one of the first researchers to gain access to this little-known depository had come across some documents he believed indicated corporate involvement in smuggling. He sent us a sampling.

So far, our reporting had been through e-mails, listservs and by researching what little had been written on the subject on the Internet and in Lexis-Nexis. The documents we saw convinced us to move ahead, and we arranged a meeting at our Washington office with the researcher (a lawyer active in the international tobacco-control movement) and an ICIJ member from Colombia, since the initial set of documents dealt mostly with tobacco operations in Latin America.

Clues revealed

Two days spent poring over more than 500 pages of company correspondence, internal memoranda and reports turned up many leads, including a document that discussed how the company would give 5 percent sales incentives to people selling cigarettes in "San Andresitos." We had assumed that was a town name, but the Colombian ICIJ member gasped. The correct spelling, she informed us, was "sanandresitos," and it was slang for the black market. This document suggested that not only were the companies aware of how their cigarettes ended up on the black market - something they had long denied they actually encouraged their sales on the smuggled market through financial incentives. It was a point we might have missed without cross-border collaboration.

Our next move was to expand the ICIJ reporting network. We needed to get into the depository ourselves, replicate the documents we had seen, and broaden the search. An ICIJ member in Britain, one of that country's most respected investigative reporters, joined the team.

We spent several weeks in the depository in England, studying thousands of pages of documents. (In all, we reviewed more than 11,000 pages of corporate documents for the story.)

We built a matrix of the major allegations and players and the documents that addressed them. We fleshed out the story with interviews in our respective countries. We wrote and re-wrote and had our copy reviewed for libel by four lawyers on two continents. And when we published in late January and early February, almost a year after hearing the smuggling allegation for the first time, we did so simultaneously in four countries. It appeared in the center's online investigative report The Public i (www.public-i.org), in The Guardian newspaper in Britain, which reprinted our findings, in La Nota, a Spanish-language business news magazine in Colombia, and in The Age, an Australian daily newspaper. Before week's end, our report had been re-reported, translated and reprinted in over 40 publications from 10 countries.