Mitt Romney's Bain Made Millions On Big Tobacco In U.S., Russia

Source: Huffington Post

WASHINGTON -- As the Soviet Union splintered in the early-1990s, Sushovan Ghosh packed his colleagues into a van and chugged across the collapsing nation, hitting depressed towns and famished cities, busted up factories and lonely kiosks. In each ragged destination, they stopped long enough to interview cigarette smokers. Ghosh plied the citizenry with free cigarettes and, sometimes, McDonald’s hamburgers.

They were pursuing a lucrative target: determining what Russian smokers wanted out of a cigarette -- specifically, a Western cigarette. "We had to develop a brand the Russians would smoke," Ghosh explained to The Huffington Post. For one study, they interviewed more than 1,000 smokers. "We stopped the bus and offered them cigarettes. And they all queued." Ghosh’s work for cigarette companies was chaotic, unbridled and, ultimately, deadly. To Mitt Romney and his colleagues at Bain & Co., it was a chance to rake in money. Ghosh said he reported directly to Romney, who was excited about the Russian market. "He was my boss," Ghosh said.

(Before Bain 7% of Russians smoked.) After Bain:

The effect of BAT and other multinationals on Russian public health has been devastating. A late-'90s survey of 15 years in Russia found that 24 percent of males and 22 percent of females smoked. The numbers keep rising. A 1999 Global Youth Tobacco Survey in Moscow found that nearly 40 percent and 30 percent of Russian boys and girls from grade 7 to grade 10 are smoking. According to a 2009 Global Adult Tobacco Survey, the smoking rate among Russian women ages 19 to 24 is now among the highest in the world -- 37.9 percent.

Russian teens could not avoid the cigarette industry if they tried. In Russia, tobacco companies manufacture certain cigarette brands to look like candy. Some offer peach and bubblegum flavors. "They are everywhere," explained Maria Skatova, press secretary of the Russian Coalition for Tobacco Control. Cigarette ads appear in glossy magazines, in movie theaters. Cigarette brands are advertised on backpacks. Companies run sales promotions -- for example, if you buy three packs, you could win an iPad."I noticed a Marlboro ad in a hospital for children," Skatova said. Ireena Slavina, the reporter from the town of Nizhny Novgorod, said her own son started smoking when he was about 12. His brand was Pall Mall, a BAT product. "I felt pain at the moment when I found my son is a smoker," she said. Last week, her son, now 20 years old, told his mom he has quit.



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