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A big victory for Big Tobacco yesterday with huge implications for Wall Street and for investors. The Illinois Supreme Court throwing out a 10 billion dollar verdict against Philip Morris. Er, The victory is in itself, er, obviously very important, but it makes it more difficult for so-called light cigarette cases to proceed against tobacco companies. And I actually think this is kind of the right move by this court here, because if you're gonna have a legal tobacco industry, um, these kinds of suits really don't make a lot of sense. The plaintiffs here are alleging not health damages but economic damages, saying the companies misled them by advertising the light cigarettes were more safe. But the FTC had mandated that the companies could advertise light cigarettes this way. And in fact, the plaintiffs were suing these companies under the RICO Act, which seems like a bit of stretch. Altria, which owns Philip Morris, the tobacco company in question here, er, wants to spin off its Kraft unit, and it's going to be unable to do that, because plaintiffs were trying to make it, prevent it from doing that, wanted to gather those assets and sue against that, you can see here Altria's stock, on a tear, up 32% and spiking at the end from the news just the other day.
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