‘I asked myself, why is he going public?’: working with a Big Tobacco whistleblower

The whistleblower at the heart of our Philip Morris investigation, Shiro Konuma, was taking a huge risk when he came to us with his story. He was giving us confidential information on one of the biggest tobacco companies in the world. Going public with his claims was a life-changing decision.

As a journalist, too, this is a big deal. All sources need to be dealt with sensitively, but whistleblowers especially so. And this one was speaking out against a multibillion-dollar international company. Our journalists have extensive experience working with whistleblowers, from global banks to national governments. But as they’ll all tell you, reporting a story like this can be a nerve-racking experience.

For an investigative reporter, the aim must always be to scrutinise every element of the story, and from every angle. So when I heard that a former Big Tobacco employee wanted to talk to the media, the first question I asked myself was: why?

Why was he doing this? Who stood to benefit? Did he have an axe to grind? And did he have any evidence to back up his claims?

It’s hard to overstate how rare it is for former tobacco employees to speak out publicly. They’re often bound by strict non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and breaking them can have serious financial consequences. My experience with Big Tobacco has been that, on the rare occasions anyone does speak, they do so strictly off the record.

Only a handful of people have previously blown the whistle publicly on Big Tobacco. I wanted to talk to one of them. So I got in touch with Jeffrey Wigand, who had worked for Brown and Williamson (a subsidiary of British American Tobacco) in the 90s. His experience was gruelling: he received death threats and was followed in the street. Private investigators dug up dirt on him and fed it to the press.

“They’re going to try and crucify [Konuma] and make him a devil.” Wigand told me.

I had agreed to meet Konuma face-to-face in London prior to a longer on-the-record interview, and I relayed Wigand’s warnings. But Konuma remained adamant that he wanted to be named in the story.

Konuma believed the information he gave us should be made public. We agreed. It showed that the company had made six-figure payments to fund scientific research at a top university without the proper disclosures being made.

Philip Morris told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) that Konuma’s allegations were investigated thoroughly at the time and found to be without merit.

The research centred around a product, Iqos, that Philip Morris markets as a less harmful alternative to cigarettes. But many experts – Konuma included – say this is unproven.

Konuma’s background helped. He is a trained doctor who had spent two decades working for the Japanese foreign ministry. At Philip Morris Japan, he was director of medical and scientific affairs. So he was clearly qualified to make some judgements on the information he was giving us.

What’s more, we weren’t just taking his word for it. Many of his claims were backed up by extensive internal documents – some of them confidential – which he provided to us.

In a complicated investigation like this, that’s the holy grail. Emails showing Konuma raising his concerns. And an internal “business objectives” document that laid bare just what Philip Morris had been planning behind closed doors – and how it was a world apart from the company’s public pronouncements.

To verify some of his other allegations, though, we needed to speak to people who had been working for Philip Morris at the time.

When approaching a company’s former employees, it’s generally easy enough to find at least a handful who agree to speak “on background”. This means that what they tell you can’t be used directly in the story, but it helps you understand the lay of the land. Others might agree to give you information to be used directly, on the condition that their name is kept out of it.

With Philip Morris, though, it was hard to find anyone willing to talk at all. Many of the people we approached were extremely nervous about the company finding out they had spoken to a reporter.

We knew that reaching out to former employees ran the risk of tipping off the company that we were investigating. So we had to balance our requirement for information with the need to keep the story under wraps. As it turned out, the company had been keeping tabs on who we’d contacted, and would later accuse us of trying to solicit information from them. But we did manage to speak to former employees who were able to verify claims in our story.

It wasn’t just industry insiders who were apprehensive about speaking to us. To properly understand the nature of the allegations, we needed input from legal experts – specifically, lawyers who knew about US bribery rules.

Expert opinion like this tends to be quite easy to come by; people want to be quoted in the press as a specialist in their field. But here, some of the lawyers became anxious about speaking on the record when they heard the allegations were related to a tobacco company.

Throughout this process, we also had to remain conscious of the risks to our whistleblower. We didn’t think it was out of the question that Philip Morris could be watching its former employee; the company knew he had already taken his evidence to the Japanese authorities. And if they were watching him, they could be watching us too.

This might sound dramatic, but some big companies devote serious resources to corporate intelligence. In the past, we’ve reported on tobacco companies spying on their competitors.

Philip Morris told TBIJ: “As a company, we uphold the highest standards for integrity and respect for our employees, including former employees.”

Quotes like the one above are given to us as part of our right-of-reply procedure. As we’re gearing up to publish a story, we get in touch with all the organisations and individuals involved, laying out our allegations and asking them for a response. It’s a vital part of the process: it gives them the chance not only to justify their position but to set us straight on anything we’ve got wrong.

Philip Morris’s response did not engage with the detail of our allegations and questions completely. We explained why we believed in our reporting. The emails went back and forth. Finally, they sent us a statement which we included in our story.

We also got a curveball from one of the universities at the centre of our story. We’d asked them about six-figure payments made by Philip Morris to a consulting firm overseeing research carried out by their scientists, without the university knowing.

But the university responded by saying they had known about the payments all along. This wasn’t what we were expecting – and it potentially blew a hole in half our story. We asked to see evidence.

The next day, the university rowed back on what they had said 24 hours before. It turned out there had been no official record of the arrangement after all. The story was back on track.

Over the months I spent on this story, I frequently chatted with Konuma late into the night. He’s self-confident and sure of his reasons for going public. He feels the company’s actions behind closed doors are not consistent with what it tells consumers. He also thinks that the company puts its profits over public health. He feels it’s his duty as a doctor to tell people about how the company behaved. And he’s also nervous about how the company will react.

“I don’t look anxious,” he told me once, “but I am very anxious.”

As time went by, the pressure on Konuma grew. He wanted the story out there. And being interviewed over and over again was painstaking for him. Things sometimes got tense.

But when it came down to it, he believed the story needed to be made public. I agree with him. The products sold by tobacco companies kill millions of people every year. So the ways they conduct their research – the results of which are used to market these products – should be candid and transparent. Their methods need to be given proper scrutiny. Hopefully this story goes some way to doing that.