It has invested about £13.5m in the Altria Group, £3.6m in Philip Morris, £3.5m in Imperial Tobacco and £3.4m in Japan Tobacco, according to the BBC.
The news has attracted criticism from campaign groups, who point to KCC's prominent role in the Kent Alliance on Smoking and Health. KCC welcomed a government programme to cut smoking earlier this year, saying in a statement that the habit was "one of the biggest and most stubborn challenges to the health of our residents.
However John Hanratty, public sector pensions expert at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that the council had done nothing wrong.
He pointed out that the amount represented 1% of KCC's total pension fund investment and that the council had a duty to act in the interests of and get the best return for its members.
KCC runs a pension fund on behalf of 350 public bodies in the country. It has more than 20,000 pensioners and 26,000 active members including KCC staff, teachers and other local government workers.
A KCC spokesperson said that external fund managers were used by the council to manage total investments of £2,350m.
"We have a financial responsibility to obtain the best possible return on investments of the pension fund, to keep down costs of the scheme as far as possible for us as an employer and ultimately for Kent taxpayers," the spokesperson said.
"To meet this responsibility we do not impose restrictions on the companies that our external investment managers can or cannot invest in. However, we do monitor the activity undertaken by investment managers and, as with all our investment, we work to the UN principles of Responsible Investment."
The debate on how public pension fund money should be properly invested has gone on for many years. The High Court considered the matter in a series of cases in the 1980s, Hanratty said.
"The general conclusion from those cases is that social and ethical criteria are a consideration for pension schemes but they are not the sole criteria and funds have to diversify their assets to achieve the best return with the most appropriate level of risk for their members. [Local governments] are parties to a number of responsible investment initiatives and forums to try to ensure that their assets are invested responsibly but to rule out all investments which special interest groups consider unethical or 'bad' would rule out practically all investment options," he said.
"Kent's position is that it has a duty to diversify its assets and the holdings in the companies named constitute less than 1% of its total investment portfolio. As the courts have ruled, Kent Pension Fund has to act - and, in the Fund's view, is acting - in the interests of its members."
