Financial Times

Books, pencils, erasers, clothes, CDs, VCDs
Counterfeits galore in Sri Lanka
By Iromi Perera
Designer-label clothes in some of the 'hottest' stores in Colombo are among a growing number of counterfeit items here that have drawn the attention of local authorities.

Police Superintendent Ravi Waidyalankara, Head of the Commercial Crime Investigation unit of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) says 30 percent of the goods in the market today are counterfeit products.

His comments were sought by The Sunday Times FT after the Ceylon Pencil Company Ltd, the market leader in pens in Sri Lanka, earlier in the week instituted criminal action against a number of offenders for counterfeiting the company's 'Atlas Chooty' brand pens.

Dilrukshi Kurukulasuriya, the company's HR and Legal Manager, said they had received a number of complaints from consumers about the low quality of their pens. On investigation, they had found a counterfeit brand named 'Altas Choty' was being sold in Pettah. After a complaint was made at the Magistrate Courts Colombo for violating the company's trademark, a search warrant was issued and police raided wholesale establishments in Colombo on February 10.

Around 100 boxes of pens were found and detained by police. The Magistrate ordered owners of these shops to be present in court on March 18. Some 71 boxes were found in one of the premises alone. Ceylon Pencil Company, which began in 1959, is the first company in Sri Lanka to manufacture ballpoint pens in Sri Lanka. Currently, the company manufactures a variety of stationary products, from paper clips to books.

Waidyalankara said people buy these goods as they are cheap and they realize the poor quality of the books only later. He said one of the major challenges that the authorities face when it comes to counterfeit goods is product identification.

He said the rightful owner must identify the counterfeit goods and come forward and inform the authorities as they do not know of every single product that is being counterfeited. "It is a violation of a person's economic right," Waidyalankara said adding that not many people are aware that they have such rights.

The Intellectual Property Act No. 36 of 2003 makes it a criminal offense to counterfeit products, violate copyrights, reproduce CDs etc. Officials say many of the small and medium garment factories that cannot enter the foreign markets produce garments with well-known brand names and these are sold in major retail outlets in Colombo. These garments are sold with their labels cut, and the consumers are led to believe that the garments are the real things, rejected by the factory, when they have actually been produced illegally. Many of the factories use cheap fabric and accessories.

There are also certain websites that advertise branded garments, which deceive people into thinking that genuine brand names are being sold at much cheaper rates.

Bogus CDs
The CID's Commercial Crime Investigation (CCI) unit, armed with 16 search warrants from court, on Thursday raided 14 locations in and around Colombo and arrested 15 people, suspected of being engaged in counterfeiting goods and related activities.

The suspects were arrested from shops in places like Pettah, Colpetty and Majestic City and 2,370 CDs and VCDs, a computer and electronic devices used for reproducing were seized. The suspects were produced in various courts on Friday.

CCI's Ravi Waidyalankara said police would launch more raids in future in a bid to take stringent action against these violators and safeguard the image of the country. "We hope the perpetrators will get a clear and strong message," he said.

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