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Excerpts from French court pins Seita over smoker death

By Christian Curtenelle, Reuters [12/08/99]

MONTARGIS, France - A French court ruled on Wednesday that French cigarette maker Seita was partly to blame for a smoker's death, opening a new front in the war on tobacco firms just as Seita prepares to merge with Spain's Tabacalera.

The court said Richard Gourlain, who died of cancer of the lungs and tongue at 50, was at fault himself for smoking two packs of filterless Gauloises cigarettes a day for more than 35 years, but that Seita was also largely responsible.

Seita said it was surprised by the verdict and would appeal, but the ruling sent its shares into a tailspin on the Paris bourse and raised the spectre of protracted legal wrangles at a time when Seita is preparing to fuse with Tabacalera.

Industry analysts said it was hard to assess the impact of the ruling beyond the immediate hit for tobacco shares in France and further afield.

But they said it was the first time a suit had got so far in Europe, where efforts to take tobacco firms to task in Britain and on the continent have been proving tougher for plaintiffs than in the litigation-happy United States.

The plaintiff's lawyer, Francis Caballero, said the verdict amounted to a ``half victory.'' French Tobacco Industry Federation spokesman Jean-Paul Truchot said the verdict would not open the floodgates for other lawsuits because the ruling was both complex and personalised.

Another question thrown up is the extent to which the French state is exposed, given that Seita was privatised only in 1995.

The local court south of Paris said in the case taken by his widow that Gourlain was 40 percent to blame himself from the age of 20 onwards, when he had already been smoking for six years.

It said Seita was responsible on the grounds it had not fulfilled it obligations to inform smokers of health risks after 1976, the year France introduced laws obliging companies to put health warnings on cigarette and tobacco packets.

Gourlain's widow is seeking close to three million French francs ($469,000) in damages following the death of her husband on January 7 this year. The court set a three-month deadline for an evaluation of the damages claim.