The Global Spirit company, the official importer of Finlandia vodka in Israel, filed a lawsuit against the M. Almog company, which began importing this vodka into the country as part of parallel imports.
The lawsuit alleges that Almog puts Global Spirit branded stickers on Finlandia bottles it imports.
According to the lawsuit, Global Spirit sent a security officer to the Almog store to look for signs of illegal use of stickers, and he saw on one of the bottles a Global Spirit branded sticker, crookedly pasted on top of a sticker in a foreign language.
At the same time, officially imported Finlandia bottles come from abroad with a back sticker in Hebrew, without a standard sticker in a foreign language. In addition, he saw there a roll of original Global Spirit branded stickers for Finlandia vodka. The employee asked the owner where he got the stickers from, and he said the store owner responded by snatching the roll out of his hands, crumpling it up and yelling that he didn’t know what he was talking about. The employee managed to tear off four stickers from the roll and filed a police report about counterfeit stickers.
“Plaintiff’s roll of stickers must and can only be in the possession of plaintiff, and in no case – in any other party, and certainly not in the wholesale supplier of alcoholic beverages. Thus, the very presence of plaintiff’s roll of stickers in defendant’s possession indicates one of two serious possibilities: either we are talking about a roll of counterfeit stickers, or a roll of original stickers that was stolen or otherwise obtained illegally,” the lawsuit emphasizes.