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This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

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Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today has spent more than three decades inside one of the most profitable and controversial business sectors in the world,

known simply as big tobacco. Andrei Kulensopoulos was a highly educated, multilingual and

ambitious young Greek executive when he joined Philip Morris in 1985. He never left. And 10 years ago, after the company split from its US business,

he became CEO of Philip Morris International. In other words, Mr. Cullensopoulos has remained inside an industry

pilloried over the last 30 years for systematically covering up the

highly addictive and dangerous nature of cigarettes.

Now these days, cigarette sales are declining in much of the developed world where

tough regulation and advertising bans have taken hold, but not so much in the developing

world. The company is now making

big efforts to claim it is moving beyond cigarettes to safer forms of tobacco and nicotine

consumption. So is big tobacco a shameful example of corporate greed overwhelming public good?

Well, Andre Cullenzopoulos joins me now here in Philip

Morris's laboratories in Switzerland. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thanks for having me. I want to begin

with a little bit of history. You have been with the Philip Morris organization for more than 30 years.

You lived through that period in the late 80s, 1990s, when it became clear that Philip Morris

and the other big tobacco companies had systematically lied, deceived, and manipulated

the public about the nature of cigarettes, the dangers of

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