U.S. Justice/Tobacco -2:

Conspiring With Unnamed Co.

AP-Dow Jones News Service

WASHINGTON (AP)--A California biotechnology

company agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to

conspiring with an unnamed tobacco company to grow

and improve tobacco with a high nicotine content, court

papers showed.

The criminal information filed here against DNA Plant

Technology Corp. of Oakland was the first charge filed

in the Justice Department's broad investigation of the

tobacco industry. The company agreed to cooperate

with the investigation.

The government cited the tobacco company as an

unindicted coconspirator but refused to identify it by

name.

The tobacco company and the biotech firm devised a

scheme to secretly improve the high-nicotine tobacco in

Brazil and other foreign countries because commercial

growing of such high-nicotine tobacco is banned in this

country by federal regulations, the government said.

It said the tobacco company's goal was to develop a

reliable source of high-nicotine tobacco that it could use

to control and manipulate the nicotine levels of its

cigarettes.

The government charged that in 1983 the biotech

company, known as DNAP, contracted with the tobacco

company, which gave it a strain of flue-cured tobacco,

coded named Y-1, to grow and improve. Y-1 had a

nicotine level of about 6 percent, about twice the normal

nicotine level of flue-cured tobacco, the Justice

Department said.

DNAP was charged with one misdemeanor count of

conspiracy to violate the Tobacco Seed Export law

which prohibits export of tobacco seed without a

permit. The law prohibiting such exports was repealed

in 1991.

On numerous occasions between 1984 and 1991, the

Justice Department said, employees of the two

companies illegally exported Y-1 and other tobacco

seeds to Brazil and other countries, including Nicaragua,

Honduras, Chile, Nigeria, Costa Rica, Argentina,

Zimbabwe and Canada. The aim was to explore whether

these were good locations for growing Y-1 tobacco.

Sources familiar with the tobacco investigation

identified the tobacco company as Brown &

Williamson.

The government said employees of the two companies

illegally shipped the seed by air express, courier and by

smuggling it themselves when traveling to Brazil.

During the Food and Drug Administration's tobacco

investigation in 1994, DNAP concealed information

about its contract with the tobacco company and the

export of tobacco seeds, the court documents charged.

The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor violation is a

fine of $200,000 or twice the monetary gain to DNAP

under the contract.

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