Rendez-vous #22 with Marie Maurisse
Author of the investigative report The blazing success of Swiss cigarettes in Africa
May I first ask you to introduce yourself by telling us a bit about your personal and professional background and how and why you got interested in the cigarette industry in Switzerland and their sales in Africa?
Marie Maurisse: I am a French journalist and I have been living in Switzerland for almost 10 years. I have been working for various French and Swiss medias as an investigative journalist. I am freelancing since 2014 and I publish my investigations in newspapers and on TV while I am still a Swiss correspondent for the French daily Le Monde. I published 2 books with the French publisher Stock (one about French people in Switzerland, Bienvenue au Paradis, and the other about the porn industry, Planète Porn). My investigations are mostly about the health sector, the pharmaceutical industry, commodities, and finance. I am also co-founder and editor of the newsletter Gotham City, specialized in white collar crime.
Here in Switzerland, the cigarettes issue is not new. But there was no evidence that Swiss cigarettes exported abroad were worse than the cigarettes smoked here. When I heard about the launch of a competition for the Public Eye Investigation Award, I sent them my proposal and it was selected. I appreciated a lot the 2016 investigation they had done about Swiss dirty diesel fuels exported to Africa and I thought that a scientific research about Swiss cigarettes that are exported could be a clue to understand what is happening in this market. Winning the Public Eye provided me with the resources (time and money) to work on it. The award funded the lab tests that were key to prove what was taking place.
Q1. Your investigative report, The blazing success of Swiss cigarettes in Africa, was financed by a crowdfunding process organized by Public Eye a Swiss NGO founded 50 years ago with the goal to improve the relations between Switzerland and poorer countries. Can you tell us about the crowdfunding process, how your project was selected and what difficulties you encountered in your reporting?
Marie Maurisse: This was the first time that one of my investigations was supported by an NGO, so this was new for me. But in the end, my work was exactly the same that it would have been for a media but media would never have had the funds to finance such a project. I applied for the award and a jury of investigative journalists selected two projects (among 55 that were submitted), including mine. Public Eye organized a crowdfunding. I received 13 000 Swiss Francs (about the same amount in US $). The lab analysis costed almost 6000 Francs. With the rest of the money I paid the photographers, some freelance journalists in Africa to help me find the cigarettes, and my work and travel to Morocco to investigate there. The main problem for me was accessing the information, because the tobacco industry loves confidentiality, even when I asked very simple questions.
Q2. In the presentation you gave (in English) in Zurich on January 21 (available on Facebook starting at 41 minutes and 20 seconds) you explained that many people refused to talk and the companies you sent questions to did not answer most of them. Can you tell us the type of questions they evaded and why you focused on Morocco (you also mentioned Senegal and South Africa)?
Marie Maurisse: Every year, the Swiss Federal Customs Office publish the list of exports by good. That provides the official number of cigarettes exported from Switzerland worldwide, by country. The highest number is sent to Japan, then Dubai, and then Africa. In Africa, Morocco is the country where Swiss cigarettes are the most exported. That is why I decided to focus on this country. South Africa also gets a lot of Swiss cigarettes but I couldn't find any Swiss cigarettes there - strange, isn't it? Maybe they are re-exported to other countries?
The multinational cigarette manufacturers in Switzerland (Philip Morris, Japan Tobacco and British Tobacco) refused that I visit a factory and they didn't give me any information about the composition of their cigarettes nor the criteria they use about it. Why do you choose to put 10 mg of tar in cigarettes for country A, and 15 mg in cigarettes for country B ?
A few of the questions I asked that remained unanswered:
- Where are sold the cigarettes you manufacture in Switzerland? proportion by country?
- When and how are those cigarettes exported?
- What is the composition of the cigarettes that are exported?
- Is the composition different depending on the country where it is exported and according to what criteria?
- Why did you choose Switzerland for your headquarters and for manufacturing?
- What are growing markets for your products?
Q3. The key issue is that the cigarettes manufactured in Switzerland and exported (mostly to Africa and especially Morocco) have higher levels of tar, nicotine and carbon dioxide than the ones sold in Switzerland and could not be manufactured (or sold) in the EU (for instance) because of those higher contents. How did you check and compare those levels?
Marie Maurisse: I did not do the job myself. I hired independent researchers to do the testing. I chose the IST Lab in Lausanne, that is public and independent. It is specializing in analysis of nicotine delivery products and they have the machines to test the cigarettes I brought to them. They are part of the WHO network and work with all the scientific ISO standards in the sector. The whole process took two months. The method they used is a certified method and everything was double checked. It is serious.
Q4. While we can be shocked by the double standard, the legislation is such in Switzerland and in Morocco that this is not an illegal practice. As for Senegal where your investigation was also discussed, Philip Morris published a statement (in French) mentioned by the Senegalese Press Agency insisting they were respecting the local laws or should we say the tobacco industry is taking advantage of the lack of strict regulations in most African countries?
Marie Maurisse: I agree: what I found is not illegal. Maybe not ethical, it's for each person to judge. Like in other sectors, the industry makes business where she can. The lack of legislation in many African countries, but also in Europe (in Switzerland, cigarettes are never tested by the authorities to see if they respect the legal limit of tar, nicotine and CO). In Morocco, there is a law about it, but the implementation decree was never passed. So cigarettes are stronger than cigarettes smoked in France, Switzerland or England. Morocco authorities are very proud of the fact they collect a lot of taxes every year from cigarettes import. But this is a very short term strategy: in the end many smokers will die prematurely and the cost to treat them when they are sick is going to be high.
Q5. It looks like in 2017 people in Kenya also criticized the fact that the cigarettes exported to their country had higher levels of nicotine and other components than the cigarettes sold in Western countries. The article I saw does not provide any detail. Do you think the situation is probably the same all over Africa? Would a larger investigation be feasible? How much do you think it would/could cost? $500K?
Marie Maurisse: Yes I think this is the same in other countries of Africa. But there are not a lot of Swiss cigarettes everywhere else. So the idea would be to buy cigarettes in all African countries, and make a series of tests. Maybe with 50 000 dollars you can have some results.
Q6. Is there anything you would like to add?
Marie Maurisse: Thanks for your interest ! If someone has some interesting information to share, you can write to me, at mariemaurisse at gmail.com.
Thank you Marie for having taken the time for this rendez-vous.
Morocco smoking stats according to the Tobacco Atlas
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