This is where they do things that they don’t dare to do in Europe anymore.”Ī spokesperson said BAT was opposed to the illegal trade in tobacco, which the company called a “serious, highly organized crime.” It’s much easier to cheat the system,’’ she said. “This is their playground,” Hana Ross, a University of Cape Town economist who researches tobacco, said of the industry. The agreements were concluded in the wake of legal disputes between three companies and the EU over cigarette smuggling.
The Malian case is the latest to show the world’s leading tobacco companies are not always abiding by the terms laid out in a series of historic agreements between 20 with the European Union (EU), in which they agreed to prevent their cigarettes from falling into the hands of criminals by only supplying legitimate demand. Meanwhile, BAT’s annual revenue in 2019 alone exceeded the total GDP of Mali and Burkina Faso. Public trade data and expert analysis show BAT and Imperial continue to oversupply the country with billions more cigarettes than it needs. OCCRP’s reporting found the Malian government not only helps to distribute BAT’s cigarettes, but also apparently turns a blind eye to gross accounting irregularities at its partner Imperial and even possible trade fraud.Īnd it continues today. The dirty business goes well beyond the desert. An internal document suggests BAT used informants in West Africa to keep abreast of the workings of the illicit trade. Sources say these cigarettes, trucked north with the help of the military and police, then fall into the hands of jihadists and militias. “Clean label cigarettes” is industry jargon for packets that come with health warnings in a major European language, French, meaning they can be sold on the gray market.Ĭigarettes soon after the north fell to militants, knowing that its product would be fodder for traffickers.įor years the company partnered with Mali’s state-backed tobacco company, a subsidiary of Imperial Brands, to distribute cigarettes in regions controlled by rebel militias and throughout the country. Secrets contained in leaked documents, backed up by trade data and dozens of interviews with insurgents, former BAT employees, experts, and officials, show BAT started to oversupply Mali with clean-labelled Now an investigation by OCCRP can show this is no accident. This violence is now spilling out across West Africa, displacing more than two million people in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, and Niger.Ĭigarettes made by one of the world’s largest tobacco companies, British American Tobacco (BAT) and distributed with the help of another major, Imperial Brands, through a company partially owned by the Malian state, dominate this dirty and dangerous trade. The profits from their long journey fuel north Mali’s many armed conflicts, lining the pockets of offshoots of al-Qaida and the so-called Islamic State (IS) group, as well as local militias, and corrupt state and military officials. Stashed inside pickup trucks and guarded by armed militias and jihadists, every year billions of illicit cigarettes wind their way through the lawless deserts of northern Mali bound for the Sahel and North Africa. Mali’s government has ignored years of blatantly false tax figures from Imperial Brands, a shareholder of the state tobacco company that distributes Dunhills in militant-run areas.Internal documents show BAT used informants in West Africa to keep abreast of the illicit trade.BAT started to oversupply Mali soon after the north fell to militants, knowing its product would be fodder for traffickers, according to dozens of interviews.The profits of cigarette smuggling fuel the bloody struggle between jihadists, armed militias, and corrupt military officers that has turned northern Mali into a lawless warzone.
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