Altria shareholders meet in Richmond, elect new directors

Shareholders of Altria Group Inc. today voted down several proposals by tobacco-control activists and elected new directors to the company’s board at its annual stockholders’ meeting.

About 300 shareholders attended the annual meeting of cigarette maker Philip Morris USA’s parent company this morning at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

It was the company’s first annual meeting in Richmond since 2003, and its first since Altria spun-off its international cigarette subsidiary, Philip Morris International, into a separate, publicly-traded company in March.

“Today, Altria is a smaller, more focused company” than it was in 2001, when the company had food, beer and tobacco businesses, said Michael E. Szymanczyk, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer.

Altria spun off its Kraft Foods Inc. subsidiary last year. With the separation of its growing international cigarette business this year, the company now draws about 99 percent of its revenue from sales of cigarettes and other tobacco products in the United States, Szymanczyk said.

Among the proposals that shareholders defeated was a resolution seeking to end a youth-smoking prevention advertising campaign the company started in 1998. Tobacco-control activists submitted the proposal, arguing the campaign has not helped prevent children from smoking.

“What it really does is encourages children to smoke,“ argued Lisa Maggio, a nurse from Lexington, Ky., who spoke for the proposal to end the campaign.

Shareholders also elected eight members to the board of directors for Altria. The new directors include former Virginia Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, now the director of the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and Thomas F. Farrell II, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Richmond-based Dominion Resources Inc.