Jump to full article: New York Times, 2008-08-01
Author: IAN AUSTEN
Intro: Two Canadian tobacco companies agreed to pay criminal fines and civil penalties totaling about 1.15 billion Canadian dollars after admitting Thursday that they had aided cigarette smugglers.
An eight-year investigation of Imperial Tobacco Canada and Rothmans, Benson & Hedges by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police covered events beginning in the late 1980s. At that time, high Canadian taxes intended to discourage smoking prompted a wave of cigarette smuggling from the United States that continued for several years.
Under the settlement reached with the federal government and all of Canada's provinces, the companies acknowledged in a guilty plea on Thursday that they had known that cigarettes sold to wholesalers in the United States were swiftly returned to Canada for sale on the black market. . . .
Much of the cigarette smuggling took place through a Mohawk Indian reservation that spans the international border along the St. Lawrence River near Massena, N.Y.
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