U.S. COMPANY CHARGED WITH PLOT TO DEVELOP HIGH-NICOTINE TOBACCO

WASHINGTON (AP) AD A U.S. 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.

It is the first charge filed in the Justice Department's broad
investigation of the tobacco industry. The charge was laid against DNA
Plant Technology Corp. of Oakland, Calif. The company agreed to co-operate
with the investigation.

The government cited the tobacco company as an unindicted co-conspirator
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,
the government said. The two companies sent seeds to Canada and other
countries to see if they would be suitable places for growing high-nicotine
tobacco.

It is illegal to commercially grow high-nicotine tobacco in the United States.

The government 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 said the biotech company, known as DNAP, made a deal with
the tobacco company in 1983.

The tobacco company gave DNAP a strain of flue-cured tobacco, coded named
Y-1, to grow and improve. Y-1 had a nicotine level of about six per cent,
about twice the normal nicotine level of flue-cured tobacco, the Justice
Department said.

On many 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 Canada, Nicaragua, Honduras,
Chile, Nigeria, Costa Rica, Argentina and Zimbabwe. The aim was to explore
whether these were good locations for growing Y-1 tobacco.

DNAP was charged with one misdemeanor count of conspiracy to violate the
Tobacco Seed Export law, which prohibits exporting tobacco seed without a
permit. The law prohibiting such exports was repealed in 1991.