Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper has published an audio recording of a conversation in which the friend of an EU commissioner requests a bribe of 60 million euro from Swedish Match in exchange for action to end the ban on snus. 

The proposal was made by the businessman Silvio Zammit, a friend and collaborator of the EU health commissioner John Dalli, during a phone call with a representative of Swedish Match. 

“At first I did not think it was true, but when I realized that the offer was credible, I felt a mixture of anger and despair,” a Swedish Match representative told DN. 

“It had been a long political process where for years, we had tried to explain the role of snus in reducing smoking and then it boiled down to the dirty issue of bribes. All our good arguments became meaningless. At the same time, I understood that all opportunities to get the export ban lifted were destroyed.” 

Read the whole article (in Swedish and paywalled) here.