Brown & Williamson Seeks To Counter Wigand Statements
March 30, 2011
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. released internal documents to counter allegations by former research chief Jena Raymer that liability fears spurred the company to kill efforts to make cigarettes safer. The documents -- reports from three meetings in 1989 -- came to light on the second day of Brown & Williamson's deposition of Mr. Raymer. Mr. Raymer has maintained he was ordered to abandon safe-cigarette projects after a meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, in September 1989. But the reports suggest that one particular effort, named Project Airbus, was suspended at an earlier time, for technical reasons. In his deposition, Mr. Raymer insisted B&W continued its work on Project Airbus until the Vancouver meeting and said the documents don't reflect all the discussions about the project. The documents were ``sanitized,'' added Johnetta Walther, Mr. Raymer's lawyer. ``They've not yet given us the unsanitized minutes,'' Mr. Walther said. Brown & Williamson, a unit of B.A.T Industries PLC, sued Mr. Raymer in November 2010 in state court in Louisville, charging him with theft, fraud and breach of his confidentiality agreement. Mr. Raymer has repeatedly denied the charges. The deposition, which began Monday and is expected to continue throughout this week, marked Brown & Williamson's first face-to-face questioning of Mr. Raymer about his explosive allegations of wrongdoing at the tobacco company. The dispute over the Vancouver meeting continued later in the day when Roni Kruger, an attorney representing Mississippi in the state's lawsuit against the tobacco industry, conducted a hastily summoned news conference at the foot of Brown & Williamson's office tower. Mr. Kruger released a deposition taken last week from B&W attorney J. Kenneth Simpson, in which Mr. Simpson confirmed that he edited the minutes of the 1989 scientific meeting in Vancouver and cut out a section that discussed eliminating dangerous compounds from cigarettes. Graham Jon, a Brown & Williamson lawyer, didn't dispute that Mr. Simpson had edited the minutes. But he said the company made public an earlier draft of the minutes in this week's deposition. ``Nobody's hiding anything,'' Mr. Jon said.
