Maintaining Legal Distance Between B&W And Bat

The briefing paper discussed above also notes the importance of maintaining some legal distance between Brown and Williamson and BAT, to protect the larger organization from involvement in a US lawsuit:

The BAT group must preserve the independent corporate status of B&W. A smoking and health plaintiff could bring B&W's parent or parents into a case if the parent exercised such control over B&W as would support a plaintiff's argument that B&W was not an independent business entity. B&W's net assets should not be reduced below a level commensurate with B&W's operations as an independent entity. Similarly any substantial reduction or dilution of pension plan assets, or dividend up or pledge of assets, would invite a court to pierce the B&W corporate entity and hold BATUS or even BAT responsible for B&W's liabilities. Also, BATUS' or BAT's detailed direction of B&W's marketing plans could lead a court to the same result [emphasis added]. {2228.02, p. 2}

While there was concern that BAT might be dragged into US lawsuits because of its ties to B&W, the attorneys at B&W worried that the company might receive scientific information from BAT that would be useful to a plaintiff in litigation, and as described earlier in this chapter, they tried to devise methods for preventing the discovery of such information by a plaintiff. One might say that these two closely linked corporations were giving new meaning to the expression "hands across the sea."