MSI and PMI

This site is principally dedicated to providing coverage of current events surrounding the legal proceedings which were initiated by MSIntelligence (MSI) against Philip Morris International (PMI) in the New York Supreme Court on November 2nd, 2020.

Additionally, we relay various media articles which dealt with our complaint as well as others which take an informed look at the tobacco market.

The company, MSIntelligence, and its manager, Raoul Setrouk, have for 25 years maintained a close collaboration with the group, Philip Morris International, on a number of fronts.

Following several years as a distributor of PMI tobacco products, Raoul Setrouk became a consultant for the company in 2000. These consulting projects, which spanned more than 10 years, consisted of implementing various strategies in order to combat emerging problems such as counterfeit tobacco products and to assess the market shares of what PMI considered to be the illicit tobacco trade. Numerous investigations have been carried out on all continents with the sole aim of enabling PMI to achieve its commercial and legal objectives.

In 2002, faced with the growth of these illicit markets and the difficulty in assessing the scale of this phenomenon and the effect on PMI brands, Raoul Setrouk proposed to PMI a study methodology of the Empty Pack Survey (EPS). This resulted in the creation of the company, MSIntelligence, and the development of its many tools.

From its inception to the present day, this methodology has been used as the primary method for assessing the illicit tobacco market.

The dispute

The main focus of the current proceedings is the spoliation by PMI of the intellectual property of MSI as well as the development of unfair competition.

Indeed, although having fully developed, financed and evolved this methodology as well as its various tools, MSI was gradually dispossessed of them for the sole benefit of PMI - which also shared them without any authorization from other market survey agencies.

In addition, and in defiance of its own partnership agreements, PMI has encouraged unfair competition between MSI and other agencies.

The context

The chronology and diversity of the missions carried out by MSI for PMI is necessary in order to better understand the merits of MSI's requests.

We therefore made the decision to make public a certain number of facts to support our requests which will consequently shed new light on the practices and methods of PMI which directly contradict the image that the company strives to project in the media and public opinion.