Letter to ordinary shareholders (May 2006)

22 May 2006

Dear Shareholder,

Please find enclosed your 2005 final dividend cheque/notification of direct payment and a copy of the 2006 chairman’s AGM report.

I wanted to take this opportunity to write to you as we have been contacted by a small number of our shareholders who have been recipients of unsolicited approaches from companies who, it would appear, have obtained personal details of these shareholders from Gallaher’s share register.

Firstly, I want to reassure you in confirming that Gallaher Group Plc has never, and will never, provide or sell any information regarding any of its shareholders to a third party (save if legally required to) – so these unsolicited callers are not getting this information direct from Gallaher.

However, the Companies Act (section 356) states that ‘a register of members; shall during business hours be open to the inspection of any member, and of any person, and that any member of the company or other person may require a copy of the register’. In addition, shareholder information is also available from Companies House – although this will not always be up-to-date.

I am afraid, therefore, that should someone want to look at our share register – then they can do so, and obtain your details this way. We do only allow our share register to be available in paper format, and never give permission for it to be supplied in electronic format. By doing this, we hope that it makes it more time consuming and, as a consequence, more difficult for someone wanting to use this information for an unsolicited mailing, for example.

If you have been the recipient of one of these approaches (and, as an example, we are aware of people calling claiming they are ringing on behalf of companies such as ‘Zurich’ and ‘Blackheath & Company’), then please be aware that these calls are in no way whatsoever anything to do with, or endorsed by, Gallaher.

Finally, I should like to thank you for your continued support of Gallaher Group Plc.

Yours faithfully,

Claire Jenkins
Director, investor relations

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