4th Smirnov Brand to Hit the Vodka Market By Alla StartsevaDec. 05 2000 00:00 A fourth Smirnov vodka brand will enter the market this week and will almost certainly join the already complicated legal battles raging between its three rivals. Boris Smirnov, founder and 50 percent shareholder of the Trading House of the Descendants of P.A. Smirnov, said Monday that the St. Petersburg group Niva-Alliance will start production of vodka under the Boris Smirnov brand. He said Monday at a news conference he had made the contract with Niva-Alliance because he needed money to fight the legal battles surrounding the trading house. The vodka will be produced in the same bottle by the same [Smirnov] recipe, he said. Only the label will change, it will not be nameless anymore, he said. Niva-Alliance is going to produce 500,000 bottles a month and then increase production to 3 million bottles per month, Smirnov said. The first Smirnov vodka was produced by Boris Smirnovs great-grandfather, Pyotr, who founded his distillery in 1860 and eventually became official purveyor to the imperial Russian court. The family lost control after the 1917 revolution when private ownership was abolished. After perestroika, Boris was involved in restarting local production of the Smirnov trademark, as the Trading House of the Descendants of P.A. Smirnov. Boris Smirnov said his former partner and uncle, Andrei Smirnov gave his 50 percent stake to three offshore Cyprus companies backed by Alfa Group for 154 rubles ($5.50). Boris Smirnov does not recognize the deal. Andrei Smirnov could not be reached for comment. In addition, Smirnov has been fighting a protracted legal battle with the makers of Smirnoff, the international vodka brand controlled by United Distillers and Vintners, a subsidiary of Britain-based food and beverage giant Diageo PLC. Police on Nov. 4 raided the offices of the trading house in central Moscow to enforce a court order naming Sergei Yuzefov as the companys general director. Smirnov refused to leave the office and did so only on Friday after he had a heart attack and was hospitalized, Smirnov said. The same day bailiffs visited the Ost-Alko distillery in the Moscow region town of Chernogolovka, which has been producing Smirnov vodka for the past five years. They presented a Nov. 23 ruling by the Moscow arbitration court that prohibits Ost-Alko from producing Smirnov vodka. It complied with the order. The ruling was made after Alfa-Eko filed a lawsuit. The case will be reviewed Dec 14. An Alfa-Eko spokesman, who asked not to be named, denied Smirnovs allegations, saying Alfa-Eko wanted the trading house to succeed. Smirnov is one of the nations best brands and Alfa-Eko wants to make it a national leader, the spokesman said. Alfa-Eko started its own production of Smirnov vodka at the beginning of September in the Moscow region town of Krasnoznamensk and announced that it had produced about 1 million bottles in its first month. It plans to increase production to 3 million bottles a month next year. Valery Dzhermakyan, first deputy director for expertise at the Russian Agency for Patents and Trademarks, said Monday that Boris Smirnov was the first producer of Smirnov vodka in Russia so the trademark belongs to him. Eugene Arievich, the legal co-counsel for the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights and partner at Baker & McKenzie, which represents the interests of UDV, said the dispute around Smirnov trademark is due only to weak Russian legislation court proceeding continue to be plagued with repeated violations of procedural and substantive Russian law and international practice, and that is the only reason why UDV cannot win its case.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 09:33:16 +0000
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