20 July 2026
By Roger Kennedy
roger@TheCork.ie
EU must wake up to Big Tobacco’s overlooked ally in undermining public health policy
In early July, newly reported findings from a major study spotlighted a less visible channel of tobacco industry influence: American Chambers of Commerce (AmChams). Conducted by researchers from the Global Governance in Tobacco Control (GGTC) and published in BMJ Tobacco Control, the analysis covers their interventions on regulatory proposals, new nicotine products and illicit trade – exposing how commercial interests continue to threaten public health safeguards.
Spanning over 100 AmChams across four continents, the study examines numerous cases of these organisations weighing in on tobacco control debates, with lobbying targeting European directives among the notable examples. Given the ongoing revisions of the EU’s Tobacco Excise Directive (TED) and Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), these findings arrive at a particularly concerning moment for Brussels.
Encouragingly, Cyprus’s industry-friendly EU Council Presidency has now given way to Ireland’s ambitious, World Health Organization (WHO)-aligned stance, positioning the bloc to take a bold stand against the Big Tobacco lobby and protect critical public health policies from their interference. From this firewall should flow an ambitious revision of Europe’s tobacco control framework, strengthening tobacco taxation, tackling illicit trade and reining in new nicotine products to advance the EU’s 2040 tobacco-free generation goal.
A sprawling network of influence
The scale of the problem becomes harder to dismiss once the numbers are laid bare. Among the 103 AmChams reviewed by GGTC researchers, 80 were found to have tobacco companies on their membership rolls, including Imperial Brands, Philip Morris International (PMI) and British American Tobacco (BAT). Big Tobacco figures occupied senior or leadership posts in 27, while 59 had promoted at least one tobacco-friendly stance since 2010. These organisations provide major support to Big Tobacco by wrapping industry lobbying in the institutional credibility of wider US business and diplomatic networks.
Concerningly, this influence reaches into virtually every front of the tobacco policy debate. The GGTC study records efforts to push back against tighter product rules, higher taxes, warning labels, plain packaging and marketing curbs, while also advancing industry-aligned narratives on illicit trade and new “harm-reducing” products. Furthermore, Chambers have been mobilised to amplify the tobacco industry’s CSR campaigns and economic contribution claims with government stakeholders in their countries of operation, helping recast tobacco companies as responsible investors to secure favourable policy decisions.
Eastern Europe offers a particularly stark illustration. In January 2025, Bulgaria was shaken by the death of a 14-year-old boy after he used an e-cigarette containing a synthetic cannabis-like substance – a tragedy lawmakers responded to by unanimously advancing legislation that would have outlawed e-cigarettes outright. Yet the local AmCham pressed parliamentarians to change course, invoking illicit markets and lost tax revenues, resulting in the blanket ban giving way to restrictions focused only on disposable devices, leaving rechargeable products untouched.
Ukraine shows how the same influence can operate through the supposedly neutral language of enforcement. In what some commentors see as a major violation of WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control’s (FCTC) Article 5.3, a 2023 AmCham event on illicit tobacco brought together MPs, ministries, industry executives and Kantar, a research firm with close tobacco-sector ties. Kantar figures subsequently surfaced in law-enforcement policy documents addressing smuggling, despite the WHO FCTC Protocol’s requirement to keep industry-linked actors out of illicit trade monitoring and enforcement.
Warning for Brussels’s generation-defining reform
Hardly an isolated pattern, the study found similar lobbying interference across the Americas, Africa and other parts of Europe, with the GGTC notably pointing to the mobilisation of Chamber networks in several EU countries to influence Brussels’s tobacco control directives. This is highly troubling as the EU accelerates its overhaul of the TED and TPD, with AmCham-assisted lobbying converging on the same core issues now before lawmakers: novel nicotine products, tax increases and illicit trade. These concerns are only heightened by parallel allegations that tobacco companies used AI to inundate the EU consultation process with fake responses, raising further questions about the industry’s ability to shape policy debates at scale.
The Commission proposal for the TED revision aims to lift minimum cigarette duties, reduce vast tax gaps between member states and bring newer nicotine products into the net, while the revamped TPD opens the door to tighter controls on illicit trade and abusive sales practices for both cigarettes and novel tobacco products. In response, Big Tobacco has ramped up its lobbying efforts to protect its illicit trade profits, notably by preserving the wide tax disparities between EU member states that fuel parallel trade, as well as the bloc’s anti-smuggling traceability system over which the industry retains significant influence.
Essentially, this latest offensive seeks to preserve the victories Big Tobacco secured when the EU last updated the TPD over a decade ago. In 2014, tobacco lobbyists successfully stripped out plans for an independent, WHO-compliant tracking system and later influenced the operator landscape for the regime launched in 2019. Much like Kantar’s role in Ukraine, EU traceability operators including Inexto and Dentsu Tracking have historic links to the industry or Codentify, while reportedly deriving most of their revenues from tobacco companies, in breach of WHO Protocol requirements on industry independence.
The ineffectiveness of this industry-aligned traceability system – acknowledged by both tobacco industry data and the Commission itself – has combined with vast tax gaps to let parallel trade flourish, with low-tax member-states such as Luxembourg at the heart of the industry’s playbook. In short, tobacco manufacturers overload such markets with cheap cigarettes that then spill into higher-tax countries including France and the Netherlands, before pointing to those very flows as an argument against EU-wide tax rises. The scale is stark: in 2024, nearly nine in ten cigarettes sold in Luxembourg were consumed abroad.
Following the WHO’s path forward
If Europe is serious about breaking this cycle, it must start by confronting the influence that helps sustain it. As the GGTC study emphasises, that means enforcing the WHO FCTC’s Article 5.3 requirement to shield public health policymaking from tobacco interests, with full transparency over industry ties, rigorous scrutiny of conflicts of interest and an end to institutional partnerships where independence is compromised. Accordingly, the European Parliament should seize the initiative by championing a new and ambitious plan to confront tobacco-industry lobbying and protect future policy debates from undue corporate influence.
Yet insulating policymaking from lobbying will not be enough on its own. The EU must also implement a genuinely independent traceability system consistent with the WHO Protocol and free from operators financially or historically entangled with the industry. Country-level delivery quotas should curb oversupply into low-tax markets, while stronger and better-aligned tobacco taxes would narrow the disparities that sustain parallel trade. Taken together, these reforms would curb the structural advantages Big Tobacco has exploited for years and restore public authorities’ ability to set policy in the public interest.
As the EU advances the TPD and TED revisions, the AmCham findings should be read as more than another case study in tobacco lobbying. Crucially, they serve as a reminder that industry influence often travels through respectable intermediaries, blurring the line between commercial advocacy and public interest. Looking ahead, Brussels now faces a defining test: whether its tobacco rules will be shaped by those profiting from addiction or by the imperative to protect future generations.