USA: PM’s fouls come home to roost

Philip Morris (PM), the world’s largest transnational tobacco company, may try to hide its corporate head under the wing of its parent company, Altria, these days, but it cannot escape the attentions of health advocates trying to make it accountable for its actions. If Altria’s annual stockholders’ meeting in April was anything to go by, when it faced a record level of protest accusing it of spreading the smoking epidemic around the world, things can only get worse.

Altria’s worldwide earnings are now so large that they dwarf the entire economic activity of many a small nation whose citizens are daily encouraged to smoke Marlboro cigarettes. In 2004, its net revenue was $89.6 billion, more than two and a half times the gross domestic product of Kenya, seven times more than Nicaragua’s, and 12 times that of Malawi, one of the largest tobacco producers in the world (and the most tobacco dependent).

Not surprisingly, Altria’s chief executive, Louis Camilleri, is well rewarded for his group’s success. Although on a basic salary last year of “only” $1.5 million (he has …