ROME, June 10 (Reuters) – Italy’s competition authority on Wednesday slapped a \u20ac7 million ($8.1 million) fine on Philip Morris’ \u200cItalian unit over allegedly misleading marketing for non-combustion \u200ctobacco products.<\/p>\n
Philip Morris Italia said it would appeal against the decision, which \u200bit called “erroneous and flawed on several levels.”<\/p>\n
The authority said it had conducted a “complex investigation prompted by a complaint from the Ministry of Health” into the way Philip Morris Italia \u200cpromoted increasingly popular combustion-free \u2060products, such as heated tobacco or e-vapor devices.<\/p>\n
“Expressions and claims such as ‘smoke-free’, ‘smoke-free products’ and ‘building\/planning\/accelerating a \u2060smoke-free future’ (…) mislead consumers \u2013 including minors \u2013 into believing that the products are harmless to health and\/or less harmful than \u200bother tobacco \u200bproducts, particularly traditional cigarettes,” the \u200bauthority said.<\/p>\n
“The evidence gathered (…) \u200cactually 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 of nicotine,” said the regulator, which opened its probe in October \u200c2025.<\/p>\n
Philip Morris Italia said the terms \u200bchallenged by the competition authority \u200bwere accurate and “fully compliant” \u200bwith Italian law and the relevant European \u200cUnion Directive, which uses the \u200bterm “smokeless” to define \u200btobacco products that do not involve combustion.<\/p>\n
It accused the authority of “contributing to confusion about tobacco and nicotine products \u200bwith a \u200cdecision suggesting there is no difference between smokeable and \u200bsmokeless products.”<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8648 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Alvise Armellini, Mirko \u200bMiorelli, editing 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 on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14507,5,16563,16564],"class_list":["post-23681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-competition-authority","tag-italy","tag-philip-morris","tag-tobacco-products"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23681","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=23681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}