Among the 14,000 strong army of women and men raising money and awareness for breast cancer at the Swans-St Kilda match on Saturday night was fashionista Carla Zampatti.

This was not the first time that Zampatti’s thoughts would have turned to cancer. In the 1990s she was on the board of cigarette manufacturer Rothmans. One imagines the subject came up once or twice.

So what are we to make of someone who spends recent years helping a tobacco company maximise profits from selling cigarettes and then lends her considerable talents and resources to help reduce the death and misery caused by breast cancer? In 2003, breast cancer killed 2,720 Australians. Lung cancer killed 6,988 (including 2,482 women), with more than 80% occurring in those with smoking histories. There’s even emerging evidence of a possible connection of passive smoking with breast cancer.

Zampatti is not the first tobacco industry insider to have crossed this choppy Rubicon. In 2000, Donna Staunton, former head of the Tobacco Institute and a Philip Morris executive, took a seat on the Board of the National Breast Cancer Centre. At the time Staunton wrote me a private letter saying “I now accept that nicotine is in fact addictive and that smoking is the major cause of preventable illness in society. I cannot relive the past, but I can assure you that I do not intend to again work for the tobacco industry.”

However, neither Staunton nor Zampatti have ever made public apologies or explanatory statements for their well-paid box seat efforts to increase tobacco industry profitability. Civil society expects those who are contrite about their past deeds to do four things: publicly admit their mistakes, promise to never do it again, try to make good the damage done and perform some public act of penance to symbolise their passage from the dark side. But lawyers for line-ups of litigants with smoking caused diseases might pay special attention to such statements, which may explain the silence.

Anyone helping to hold the reins at a tobacco company since the 1960s has done so with their eyes wide open to the consequences of their efforts being successful. Nick Greiner and the late Sir Roden Cutler were two others who took their directors fees for years.

Zampatti’s fashion industry and business connections would have made her a prized catch for Rothmans and BAT which they would have hoped would put some shine on their embattled image. It is self-evidently wonderful that she now is lending her efforts to control breast cancer. But consider the efforts of former tobacco industry insiders like Jeff “The Insider” Wigand and Bill Farone who have provided immeasurable assistance to global efforts to reduce tobacco caused disease by major whistleblowing on their former employers, speaking out in the media and testifying in major court cases.

Simon Chapman is professor of public health at the University of Sydney and for 10 years was a board member of the Cancer Council NSW.