Colorado Attorney General John Suthers announced Thursday that his consumer-protection section has won a major arbitration victory under the $206 billion Master Tobacco Settlement Agreement that the state signed in 1998.
As a result of the arbitration award, Colorado will receive about $9.9 million in withheld tobacco-settlement funds relating to a long-standing dispute over settlement payments in 2003.
Since the agreement was signed, Colorado has received more than $1.3 billion in tobacco-settlement payments.
“This ruling reaffirms our strategy and decision not to sign on to a settlement term sheet offered by the manufacturers last December — a settlement that could have cost Coloradans millions of dollars over time,” said Colorado Attorney General John Suthers in a statement.
“This is an important and financially lucrative victory for Colorado as tobacco use remains a major health problem,” said Suthers.
The arbitration panel, which consists of three former federal judges, issued a 23-page opinion late Wednesday that found that Colorado was not subject to any part of a claimed $1.2 billion adjustment against the tobacco manufacturers’ $6.5 billion payment to the states in 2003.
Some of the manufacturers subsequently withheld a portion of their annual payments to the state as part of the dispute.
The “participating manufacturers” eventually withheld more than $723 million of their 2003 MSA payments into a disputed payments account pending the outcome of the arbitration.
Suthers said that as a result of the arbitration decision, Colorado will receive about $9.9 million of “these wrongfully withheld funds.”
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939, hpankratz@denverpost.com or
