ROME, June 10 (Reuters) – Italy’s competition authority on Wednesday slapped a \u20ac7 million ($8.1 million) fine \u200con Philip Morris’ Italian unit over \u200callegedly misleading marketing for non-combustion tobacco products.<\/p>\n
It said it had \u200bconducted a “complex investigation prompted by a complaint from the Ministry of Health” into the way Philip Morris Italia promoted increasingly popular combustion-free products, such \u200cas heated tobacco \u2060or e-vapor devices.<\/p>\n
“Expressions and claims such as ‘smoke-free’, ‘smoke-free products’ and ‘building\/planning\/accelerating a smoke-free future’ (…) \u2060mislead consumers \u2013 including minors \u2013 into believing that the products are harmless to health and\/or less \u200bharmful than \u200bother tobacco products, particularly \u200btraditional cigarettes,” the \u200cauthority said.<\/p>\n
“The evidence gathered (…) actually indicates that current scientific and clinical knowledge does not support the claim that these products are less harmful or harmless, not least because of the presence \u200cof nicotine,” the regulator added.<\/p>\n
Philip \u200bMorris Italia did not immediately \u200brespond to \u200ba request for comment.<\/p>\n
When the Italian \u200cprobe was launched in October \u200b2025, the \u200bcompany said its communication was “factual, truthful, and fully consistent with Italian and European legislation, \u200bwhich associates \u200cthe absence of smoke with the absence \u200bof combustion.”<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8648 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Alvise Armellini, \u200bediting by Gavin Jones)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ROME, June 10 (Reuters) – Italy’s competition authority on Wednesday slapped a \u20ac7 million ($8.1 million) fine \u200con…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23674,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14507,16565,5,16563,16564],"class_list":["post-23673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-competition-authority","tag-italian-unit","tag-italy","tag-philip-morris","tag-tobacco-products"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}