The Iremel-invest company, which owns the Iremel shopping center in Ufa, was able to retain the rights to the trademark of the same name. It was registered in 2019, but the former wife of entrepreneur Marcel Yusupov, Natalya Kryuchkova, first presented her rights to it, and then his son, Roman Yusupov. Mr. Yusupov, who owns the Iremel shopping and entertainment center in Tuymazy, is sure that Rospatent did not have the right to register the disputed trademark, and his mother insisted in the office that she, as the former owner of Tuymazinsky Iremel, had more rights to the disputed designation, than Iremel-Invest. It was not possible to get comments from Roman Yusupov and Iremel-Invest.
The Intellectual Property Court rejected the claim of the son of entrepreneur Marcel Yusupov, Roman Yusupov, against Rospatent. Mr. Yusupov asked to invalidate the decision of the department, which in November 2022 refused to satisfy his objections regarding the registration of the emblem of the Iremel shopping and entertainment centers as a trademark.
Ufa-based Iremel-invest LLC, which owns the building of the Iremel shopping center in Ufa, registered the right to a trademark in November 2019 in three classes of the International Classification of Goods and Services – business management, operation, organization and administration of commercial or industrial enterprises , real estate services, transportation services and so on. The controversial designation is an image of the rising sun over two adjacent mountains, under which the word “Iremel” is written in the original font, and below “shopping and entertainment complex”. The sign is made in green, orange, black color combination.
The complaint was filed with Rospatent by Natalya Kryuchkova, the mother of Roman Yusupov and ex-wife of Marcel Yusupov.
In Rospatent, follows from the decision of the office published on its official website, Ms. Kryuchkova said that in 2015-2018 she owned the building of the Iremel shopping center in Tuymazy (about 170 km from Ufa), and then the ownership was transferred to her son Roman. The building of the Tuymazinsky “Iremel” was opened in 2011.
Iremel-invest LLC was registered in October 2014. Authorized capital – 2 billion rubles. The owner is the Ural Charitable Foundation, created by the first president of Bashkiria, Murtaza Rakhimov. In 2022, with revenue of 215.1 million rubles. the company’s loss amounted to 44.9 million rubles.
Ufa Iremel, owned by Marcel Yusupov, was sold to Iremel-Invest JSC in 2017. As Kommersant-Ufa previously reported, the company received assets totaling 746.6 million rubles. In return, she undertook to close UHBK’s debt to Sberbank for 895 million rubles. Iremel-invest, according to Natalia Kryuchkova, could not have been unaware that her ex-husband and his partners “had other similar shopping and entertainment centers in other cities with the same name and the same signs,” therefore, having registered a disputed commodity a sign that he acted in bad faith. Ms. Kryuchkova insisted that she had the preferential right to register the disputed trademark, as the owner of the “oldest” Iremel. In addition, the word “Iremel” itself is publicly available: this is the name of the mountains in Bashkiria (Big and Small Iremel), and it is also used in the names of hotels, recreation centers, a football club, and so on.
In the arbitration court, Roman Yusupov also stated that Iremel-Invest did not have the priority right to register a trademark.
The court did not agree with the plaintiff’s opinion, in particular, coming to the conclusion that the semantics of the disputed designation in relation to the named services of the classes of the Nice Classification, for which Iremel-invest registered the trademark, “is of an exclusively fantasy nature.” The fact that the disputed word is used in the names of a football team, hotels, and so on, according to the court, suggests that “it is used precisely as the name of any objects that do not correspond to the services of classes 35, 36, 39 of the ICTU of the disputed commodity sign.”
As previously reported by Kommersant-Ufa, Ural had previously financed projects of companies affiliated with Marcel Yusupov, but could not return the money. Thus, for a long time the fund cannot enter the register of creditors’ claims of the Gafuri Bashkir Poultry Complex, which owes it about 4 billion rubles.
It was not possible to contact Roman Yusupov or Natalya Kryuchkova yesterday: their phone numbers are not publicly available.
Iremel-invest asked to call back on Thursday.
The telephone numbers of employees of the Ural Charitable Foundation, known to Kommersant-Ufa, were not answered.
“Iremel is a geographical name of a natural object, and if it is not a registered name of the place of origin of a product, it is not prohibited by law to use it,” the expert noted. – The task of the plaintiff in such a situation is to convince the court of the existence of an inextricable associative link between the trademark and goods or services belonging to very specific classes of the Nice Classification. As far as it follows from the decision of the court, this was not done in the particular case.”