The glitzy award ceremony hosted last Wednesday by the Carreras Sports Foundation at the upscale Jamaica Pegasus Hotel – to honour Jamaica’s outstanding sportsman and sportswoman of the year – might be the last, as the anti-smoking campaign intensifies in Jamaica.

Under mounting pressure to relinquish its multi-million dollar links with some of Jamaica’s biggest sporting competitions, cigarette producer, the Carreras Group, appears resigned to the fact that it is only a matter of time before the 43-year-old award goes up in smoke.

“We have not decided to discontinue the sports awards… but it is something that we obviously realise that we are going to be under pressure to do in the future,” said head of corporate and regulatory affairs at Carreras, Patrick A H Smith.

Smith appeared before Parliament’s Select Committee on Human Resources and Social Development at Gordon House on Wednesday, the same day of the award presentation which was topped by long-jumper James Beckford and hurdler Brigette Foster.

The Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year Award has grown in prestige since it was first won in 1961 by boxer Bunny Grant and table tennis player Joy Foster respectively.

Carreras’ retreat is expected to be voluntary at the outset, as the company fights to withdraw from the sports arena with some dignity. But the reality is that time is running out, with the Government close to enacting legislation which will require that the company withdraw support from all forms of sports.

“As long as we are given the opportunity to continue we will continue, but we have to listen, because the message is absolutely clear that this is not something that we should be doing,” said Smith.

The Carreras executive indicated his company was cognisant of the international campaign to cut all links between sports and tobacco manufacturing companies supported by international bodies like the World Health Organisation, as well as the new regulatory policy being developed by the Government, which could go as far as banning the use of tobacco products in Jamaica.

Over the years, Carreras has sponsored numerous sporting events, including the Rothmans (motor car) rally, the Craven “A” Premier League Football competition for almost 30 years and Rothmans (West Indies) cricket, but has had to withdraw from sponsoring these events because of mounting opposition to its involvement with sports.

The sports foundation’s annual budget is over $6 million, including $3 million to stage the annual sports awards, as well as major donations over the years to sporting bodies, including schools entering the annual Penn Relays in the United States, the Jamaica Netball Association, the Jamaica Hockey Association, the Amateur Swimming Association, the Jamaica Cricket Umpires Association, the G C Foster College’s scholarship programme and the Reggae Boyz.

Mike Fennel, who doubles as head of the Jamaica Olympic Association (JOA) and member of the Carreras Sports Foundation, admitted that it was not a question of whether Carreras would have to stop supporting sports, but how soon.

He told the Sunday Observer that Carreras’ withdrawing from sponsoring the foundation would be unfortunate, because they had been doing a good job of running it. But sporting bodies would just have to find a way to fill the vacuum.

Fennell acknowledged that the sports sponsorship from tobacco and liquor companies over the years has been the most substantial over the years.

“Now, this is going to cause a problem for the sponsorship of sports. However, hopefully, it can be replaced by something else, like has happened in the more developed countries,” said Fennel. “As time marches on we will have to live with these changes, but we live in a dynamic environment and something will replace it, eventually.”

The tobacco sponsorship problem was limited to Carreras’ subsidiary, the Cigarette Company of Jamaica (CCJ), up to the end of 2003. But, with the Carreras Group taking over the manufacture of cigarettes from the subsidiary, effective January 1, 2004, completing the de-conglomeration of the group into a single-product, single-entity enterprise in the process, the situation has become more pronounced.

The takeover was apparently intended to foreclose on any possible future tax claims by the Commissioner, Taxpayer Audit and Assessment, against the group, as Carreras continues to fight a $5.7-billion tax claim made against it last year by the Government’s tax agency.

The Commissioner has argued that monies the CCJ advanced the Carreras Group, between 1997 and 2002, should have been treated as dividend distribution rather than loans, thereby attracting a 33.33 per cent tax.

Carreras has since purchased all the fixed assets used by the CCJ at its Twickenham Park factory in St Catherine, to produce and distribute cigarettes and tobacco products and has repossessed the “Craven A” and “Matterhorn” trademarks from its subsidiary.

“Unfortunately, on May 31, World Tobacco Day, we are told every year that we should not participate in promoting sports,” Smith admitted.

But, ironically, Smith said that his company had no grouse with its detractors in this area. “I think it is a reasonable position. It is within the FCTC convention on tobacco control that companies involved in the sponsorship of sports should come out of it over the course of three to five years,” he added.

In the meantime, he said that Carreras had sought to “rebalance” its corporate sponsorship by, for example, sponsoring projects in the Forestry Department – it has just started work on 10 hectares of reafforrestation – as well as working with JAMAL to provide computers at their locations and deepening its 28-year sponsorship of the Bustamante Hospital for Children to the tune of $2 million per annum.

“What we want to do in the next year-and-a-half is actually engage more with society to find out what are the platforms that they think we can do,” said Smith, a hint perhaps to cash-starved charities that sport’s loss might well be their gain.