Multinational Chairman's Group

Referred to by the Daily Mail in 2003 as 'discreet', the Multinational Chairman's Group is extremely obscure.

The Guardian has reported that the group was the means for British American tobacco to prise open a meeting with Stephen Byers over the issue of smuggling:

A few days later, however, everything changed. Mr Broughton was able to go over Mr Byers' head, as a member of a shadowy group of privileged lobbyists - the "multinational chairman's group", whose members include BP, Shell, the drinks firm Diageo, Unilever, and Vodafone.

Mr Broughton was on the shortlist of those invited to eat bacon and eggs with the prime minister in the Downing Street stateroom overlooking the rose garden.

Mr Byers, too, had been summoned to the breakfast table by Mr Blair on March 14. The company chairman seized the opportunity, button-holing the minister who had been avoiding him. After shaking hands in No 10, Mr Byers was left with no alternative but to change his tune. "In the margins of that breakfast briefing," as an official note records, "the secretary of state agreed to [a] meeting".

That afternoon, BAT's lobbyists rang the department in triumph: "Mr Broughton has secured a meeting with the secretary of state".

Mr Millson later boasted : "It was said we have been very successful in getting the one-to-one meeting with Byers ... There are few companies that have achieved this."

"Dear Martin", Mr Byers wrote back, in warmer nomenclature than before. He apologised for the "error" in redirecting his earlier letter.

The secretary of state had been pressured into a private meeting with a firm into which he was trying to order an official inquiry. By contrast, ASH, the anti-smoking campaigners, say they asked for a similar meeting with Mr Byers, and were refused.

Mr Broughton followed up with intensive lobbying of No 10, sending Mr Blair a long letter demanding that he cut taxes on cigarettes, and hinting that smuggling would continue unabated into Britain if he did not cooperate: "The chosen tax policy contains within it the seeds of its own destruction."

In April, he told BAT shareholders at the annual general meeting: "There is really no need for a DTI investigation."

Whitehall refuses to release the minutes of the subsequent meeting with Mr Byers. But we obtained BAT's version from their archive, which they have been forced to disclose in settlement of a US lawsuit.

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