In late March, a group of sixteen European NGOs sounded the alarm over suspected tobacco industry influence at the heart of a key EU advisory body.
The public health coalition notably points to a recent report from the European Economic and Social Committee’s (EESC) that echoes industry talking points in the debate over the ongoing revision of the EU’s Tobacco Excise Tax Directive (TED).
Tellingly, the EESC warns against “excessive increases” on the grounds that they could fuel illicit trade, thereby recycling one of the tobacco industry’s oldest false narratives arguments against stronger regulation, while disregarding World Health Organization (WHO) guidance on this policy’s unmatched effectiveness in curbing tobacco use.
With the WHO European region leading global tobacco and nicotine consumption, the TED revision represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bolster EU tobacco control, resist industry influence and decouple the case for effective taxation policy from the illicit trade debate. In this endeavour, French MP Frédéric Valletoux recently offered a strong path forward for France and Europe to tackle the growing parallel trade enabled by Big Tobacco, which keeps smoking rates high while draining fiscal revenues that could be reinvested in national health systems.
Valletoux’s parallel tobacco trade warning
Among the European countries most exposed to illicit tobacco flows, France is arguably best placed to call Big Tobacco’s bluff. In a February letter addressed to French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu – and revealed by La Tribune Dimanche– Frédéric Valletoux, chair of the National Assembly’s Social Affairs Committee, calls out cigarette manufacturers’ role in fueling the parallel trade through the “organised oversupply” of countries bordering France.
With this missive, MP Valletoux has rightly identified parallel tobacco resulting from the industry-fueled oversupply as the main driver of the EU’s broader illicit market, with Big Tobacco flooding lower-tax neighbouring markets serving as an efficient way to weaken the impact of France’s high excise taxes. Valletoux notably points to the damning example of Luxembourg, which receives around 5 billion cigarettes a year despite domestic consumption of just 600 million, with this eightfold surplus feeding the parallel markets in France, Belgium and Germany. Meanwhile, France is supplied with only 25.5 billion cigarettes when the market should normally receive around 41.5 billion, with the remaining 16 billion bought abroad.
This is no minor market distortion. Published in October 2025, a joint report by French Customs and Interministerial Mission for Combating Drugs and Addictive Behaviours (MILDECA), found that the parallel tobacco trade costs the French state €4.3 billion in lost tax revenue each year, while destabilising the tobacconist network and weakening anti-smoking efforts. As Valletoux notes, this plague of cheap tobacco keeps smokers trapped in addiction, draws younger users in through lower prices and in turn worsens tobacco’s annual social cost, estimated at €156 billion in France alone.
Clearing the air on counterfeits myth
Crucially, the Customs-MILDECA findings also puncture one of the tobacco industry’s most useful myths to obscure its facilitation of the parallel trade. As Valletoux’s letter highlights, this report reveals that 80% of France’s parallel tobacco market comes from purchases in neighbouring countries, while counterfeit cigarettes and informal street resale make up only a marginal share. The only other official quantitative study conducted in the EU, in Ireland, has reached the same conclusion.
When two official studies from two EU member-states point in the same direction, the credibility of the annual KPMG report on illicit tobacco consumption is bound to come into question. Indeed, the industry has spent years overstating the role of counterfeiting while drawing attention away from cross-border oversupply, enlisting lobbying support from the KPMG reports it funds to the tune of €11 million every year, according to the CNCT.
This practice is not unique to France. In early March, the Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control (GGTC) published a report concluding that across many countries, the tobacco industry routinely deploys illicit trade as a weapon against tax increases and anti-smoking measures. Interestingly, the report also flags the repeated criticism of the KPMG studies targeting its methodological weakness and striking lack of transparency.
Moreover, as the GGCT report’s authors note, contraband products largely originate in manufacturers’ own supply chains, with an independent review of Philip Morris International’s methodology finding that as many as two-thirds of illicit cigarettes worldwide are produced by the tobacco majors themselves, before entering informal markets through oversupply and deliberate leakage.
Given the damning findings of both the GGTC and Customs–MILDECA reports, KPMG’s next report, due in June 2026, will reveal whether the tobacco industry’s narrative can still be credibly sustained. Should its figures again prove distorted or misleading, serious questions will have to be asked about whether a report used systematically as a tobacco industry lobbying tool violates the lobbying rules outlined in Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC).
Europe’s only path forward
In pushing back against this tobacco industry manipulation, France has already taken a vital first step. With the support of the French Government, the National Assembly unanimously adopted on 26 November 2025 a European resolution tabled by Frédéric Valletoux calling for the implementation of the WHO Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products. Non-binding though such resolutions may be, this one sends a clear political signal and positions France at the forefront of Europe’s anti-tobacco effort.
The urgency is hard to overstate. As MP Valletoux has argued, the Protocol should have been implemented by the EU and its member states from 25 September 2018. Instead, under tobacco lobby pressure, the Commission failed to take the steps needed for enforcement, creating a deadlock that has allowed the parallel trade to flourish, particularly in countries with stronger tobacco control rules. Yet, contrary to Big Tobacco’s claims, the policy remedy is encouragingly simple.
As Valletoux asserts, the only viable starting point is the robust enforcement of the WHO Protocol, ensuring real independence from the industry and effective guardrails against its interference. In his letter to the French Prime Minister, Valletoux calls for this step’s completion by 1 January 2027, leaving ample time for France to establish a new cigarette traceability system fully independent from manufacturers, in line with Article 8 of the Protocol. At present, tobacco companies still select and pay the IT providers responsible for cigarette sales data in the EU, in violation of the WHO model that requires traceability systems to be controlled by states.
According to Valletoux, an exemption request, regularly used to accelerate the implementation of public health measures, could allow the WHO Protocol to apply in place of Articles 15 and 16 of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD). Supply controls should also be addressed directly, with a decree setting the volumes manufacturers are permitted to deliver each year. With Valletoux showing the way forward, the French government should now take this position to Brussels and work with the Commission to secure a far more robust tobacco control framework grounded in the WHO FCTC and its Protocol. Anything less will mean continuing to surrender public health and revenue to Big Tobacco once again.
Read more:
EU must take bold tobacco control stand amid industry’s latest influence campaign
