International Chamber of Commerce

The Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) describes itself as the “world’s largest business organisation”.¹ Founded in 1919 it is one of the key corporate voices that governments and transnational organisations such as the UN automatically consult on business issues. The ICC’s activities range from arbitration and dispute resolution to making the case for open trade and the market economy system and self-regulation. Combatting criminal activity such as corruption or counterfeiting is an increasing focus.

Executive Board

Chair:

• In June 2020, MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga was elected as the new ICC Chair.² Between 2007 and 2012 Banga served on the Board of Directors of Kraft Foods.³ This followed the separation of the food company Kraft from its parent group Altria as they divested Kraft in 2007.⁴⁵

Honorary Chair:

• Banga succeeded Paul Polman, who served as ICC Chair from June 2018 to June 2020 then becoming ICC Honorary Chair.² Polman was CEO of Unilever from January 2009 to 2019.⁶

Other board members:⁷

• Sheikh Khalifa bin Jassim bin Mohammed Al-Thani (Chair, ICC Qatar)
• Fredrik Cappelen (Past Chair, ICC Sweden)
• Nayla Comair-Obeid
• Sebastian Escarrer (Chairman, ICC Spain; Member of the ICC Policy and Commissions and the Corporate Responsibility and Anti-Corruption Committees)
• Daniel Feffer (Chair, ICC Brazil)
• Dario Gallina
• María Fernanda Garza Merodio (ICC First Vice Chair; ICC Regional Coordinator for the Americas; ICC Chair for the Global Networks Committee; ICC Court Governing Body Member)
• Robert Gutsche (Member of the Board, ICC Germany)
• Candace Johnson
• Shinta Widjaja Kamdani
• Giampiero Massimo
• Valentina Mintah
• Xu Niansha (Chair, ICC China Commission on Corporate Responsibility and Anti-Corruption)
• Takeshi Niinami
• Frank Ning
• Patrick Obath
• Anne Veroniqeu Schlaepfer (Vice-President, ICC International Court of Arbitration)
• Harsh Pati Singhania (Past President, ICC India)
• Jane Jie Sun
• Philippe Varin (Chair, ICC France)
• Kok Seng Vong (Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors, Macao Chamber of Commerce and ICC Macao)
• Zabihullah Ziarmal (Founding Member and First Vice-Chair, ICC Afghanistan)

Organisation

The ICC’s World Council is its supreme governing body and is made up of representatives from national committees. Day-to-day administration is carried out by a chairperson, a secretary-general, and an executive board. Members of the latter serve for three years.

The ICC doesn’t publish a full list of members.⁸ However, in a 2012 press release issued by the ICC and reported by PR Newswire it was stated that the “ICC UK’s membership includes a small number of firms from the tobacco sector, contributing less than 4 percent of the organization’s annual income.”⁹

BAT discloses in the EU Transparency Register that it is a member of the ICC.¹⁰¹¹ Its American affiliate, the US Council for International Business (USCIB) has previously listed Philip Morris International as a member,¹²¹³ Imperial Tobacco joined USCB in 2014¹³
Policy areas are looked at by ICC commissions, which have more than 500 business experts advising on policy issues.

The various national committees play an important role in determining ICC actions. This page focuses on the International Chamber of Commerce (UK).

ICC UK

Historical Links Between ICC UK and BAT

Tobacco industry documents reveal a historically established close relationship between British American Tobacco (BAT) and the ICC UK. Key events documenting this relationship include:

1993: When the ICC UK considered setting up an East-West Committee, it offered BAT the chairmanship.¹⁴ At the same time, Ken Etherington, then the Head of Group Taxation at BAT, was also chairman of the ICC UK Tax Committee,¹⁵ a position he had held since at least 1989.¹⁶

1994: BAT was asked if it would like to be represented on the ICC UK committee looking at marketing, advertising and distribution.¹⁷ The ICC’s new director Richard Bate was keen to move forward with BAT by “improving its usefulness for business”.¹⁸ Meanwhile Rothmans International had met with Bate to raise issues around plain packaging and the ICC UK’s committee on intellectual property was meant to monitor the situation. This appears to have been an ongoing effort by the industry over plain packaging in which they had drafted support from a number organisations including the ICC UK.¹⁹

1997: The ICC UK provided a forum for business leaders, sometimes of the tobacco industry, to meet senior political figures. One such example occurred in 1997 when BAT chairman Lord Simon Cairns met UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as part of a delegation.²⁰ Bate reported that:

“One of the initiatives to emerge from this ICC/UN cooperation was the development of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)/ICC investment guides for less developed countries, particularly in relation to Africa. A second initiative was a questionnaire to business executives on the crisis in the Far East, and this was likely to lead to a regular survey of key business issues.”²⁰

1999:Bate met regularly with BAT. At the start of 1999 he had lunch with Shabanji Opukah from BAT²¹ Martin Broughton (CEO of BAT at the time), was also due to attend. The purpose of the get together was to discuss issues regarding the Earthwatch Institute.

2000: In summer 1999, Broughton met ICC UK chairman Sir Philip Watts at Wimbledon. Watts suggested Broughton join the ICC UK’s governing body²² and, following short negotiations over how much work that would entail, it was agreed he would join in 2000.²³ In a note to BAT staff explaining the decision a list of the membership benefits was given, including:

• preferential access to the UN and its constituent organisations as the ICC is the UN’s preferred business partner
• access to World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings at which the ICC Delegation has observer status
• enhanced corporate profile within the UK and internationally
• a neutral platform on which to access key stakeholders in the UK and internationally such as ministers, senior officials, diplomatic and business communities
• direct input into ICC agenda of issues important to BAT at a global corporate level (intellectual property rights, self-regulatory structures, corporate social responsibility, competition policy, trade and investment, the role of Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), etc.)
• access to ICC Early Warning System on trans-national issues²³

While these negotiations between the ICC UK and Broughton were continuing, Bate supplied BAT with a list of tobacco companies who were members of the ICC.²⁴ Thirty-six were named from across the globe, including two branches of the now-defunct Tobacco Institute. In a covering note, Bate wrote:

“I know that Reemtsma have been very active with us in Germany. Indeed, we helped them to fight a court case in which they were being prevented from using their brand name on non-tobacco products, a battle which I believe they lost, but I am not sure.”²⁴

At the time, the ICC already had a BAT staff member in a crucial position as Stephen Walzer was chairing its committee on Law and practices relating to competition.²⁵ The committee’s three key priorities were described as:

“Firstly, to contribute business input to the work of the WTO and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on competition and trade. Secondly, to ensure that governments take business concerns about confidentiality of corporate information into account when cooperating in investigations of anti-competitive practices and mergers. Thirdly, to convince the European Commission to meet business needs in new policy and legislation.”²⁵

Although Broughton joined in 2000, he had already made it clear that he could only attend one meeting. However, a letter from the following year shows he considered the ICC a valuable advocate for some of his company’s (BAT) concerns.²⁶ In the letter, Broughton responds to a request from ICC Secretary General Maria Livanos Cattaui to know what more it could do to help business:

“As you may know, the World Health Organization (WHO) is currently preparing an international framework convention on tobacco control (UN FCTC) – a process from which the tobacco industry has been officially excluded. Despite the tobacco industry not having been granted observer status, several anti-tobacco non-governmental organisations have and have also been invited to submit texts for negotiation by the delegations. In order to redress the current imbalance of representation, we would like the ICC to become involved in the negotiating process in much the same way as you have with climate change, leading the business and industry representation.”²⁶

Broughton goes on:

“The ICC’s participation would go some way to addressing the worrying anti-business trends that many companies have identified within the UN and multi-lateral system. Several agencies appear to be exploiting their UN status and grant-giving capacity to exert inappropriate pressure on national governments and industry alike. You recalled the case of Nestle and UNICEF, I would draw your attention to the enclosed press cuttings which relate to a Board Director of Imperial Tobacco.(This refers to resignation of Derek Bonham as head of GlaxoSmithKline which the newspaper said was due to shareholder pressure over his joint chairmanship at Imperial Tobacco²⁷ On a more positive note, I think that the ICC could also play an important, strategic role in helping to promote the positive contribution business is making to address the issues surrounding sustainable development labour standards and economic globalisation.”²⁶

Broughton concludes that his industry faces a “lack of awareness” about its “responsible face” but that it is working hard to address this. ‘This’ may partly refer to BAT’s corporate social responsibility agenda, which was moving into high gear at that point.

Tobacco Links: Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP)

The ICC’s lobbying aided tobacco companies’ opposition to plain packaging proposals.

The ICC set up the Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP) group, ²⁸ which produced or promoted reports and meetings sympathetic to the tobacco industry.²⁹³⁰

In 2009, an ICC conference featured keynote speeches by British American Tobacco and Philip Morris International representatives, ³¹

With regard to plain packaging laws, BASCAP had a special section on its website listing its efforts to get the plans softened.³² In 2011 the ICC’s Secretary General, in a letter to the Australian trade minister, condemned the country’s proposed tobacco packaging ban.³³ It based its objections, published in various press articles, on how such a ban would affect copyright and encourage counterfeit products and smuggling.³⁴ To this end, the ICC also promoted a Deloitte report commissioned by BAT about the potential unintended impacts of plain packaging which supported industry arguments against the policy.

The ICC also lobbied the European Commission in respect of revisions to the 2001/37/EC Tobacco Products Directive. In December 2010, BASCAP’s Jeffrey Hardy wrote to the European Commission to express the organisation’s “concern regarding the possible inclusion of the plain packaging for tobacco products … our views pertain to extenuating impacts on intellectual property rights and counterfeiting and not the health-related aspects”.³⁵ The letter outlined how BASCAP was “concerned that plain packaging would increase the prevalence of counterfeit goods in the market and reduce brand owners’ ability to take action against such activity, besides undermining the ability of consumers to make informed purchasing decisions.”

In October 2012, the EU Health Commissioner the letter had been addressed to, John Dalli, was forced to resign after an anti-fraud enquiry linked him to an attempt to influence tobacco legislation on behalf of Swedish Match.³⁶

TobaccoTactics Resources

• Global Trademark and Intellectual Property Rights Groups
• EU Tobacco Products Directive Revision
• Plain Packaging