Public Health on Top

Not only in Bangladesh, the British High Commission is backing the UK-based multinational tobacco companies in other countries too. The BATB tax evasion case worth Tk 1924 crores and its settling out of the court was revealed through a Bangladeshi national daily in 2017 which was followed up by The Guardian, an influential daily in the UK, by publishing a report on the same issue. Later, based on Bangladesh experience and sourcing information from British Government under the Freedom of Information feature, the Guardian published another investigative report that revealed the British High Commission had backed the tobacco company in five other countries as well. The report read that, representatives from the Britain Foreign Office and Department for International Trade (DIT) had nine meetings on the tax evasion issue with BATB. It defines how the BATB and other tobacco companies are running their death-marketing initiatives. The state should abstain from such activities to implement the FCTC rightly and make the nation tobacco-free.