Heineken may see trademark banned

A plastic container with empty bottles of Heineken beers are pictured among beer kegs outside a restaurant in Singapore

A plastic container with empty bottles of Heineken beers are pictured among beer kegs outside a restaurant in Singapore

Published Mar 23, 2017

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Budapest - Heineken beer's trademark red

star may be about to fall foul of Hungary's attempts to purge

itself of totalitarian symbols related to the years of Nazi

occupation and, in this case, the 40 years of communist rule.

The rightist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban,

which faces an election in April 2018, says it is a "moral

obligation" to ban the commercial use of symbols such as the

swastika, arrow cross, hammer and sickle, and the red star.

Parliament began discussing the proposed ban on Monday. The

measure would fit with Orban's style of unorthodox policy

making, which has seen specific, mostly foreign-owned business

sectors, targeted with special taxes and regulation.

Heineken has had a star logo on its beer for most of the

years since it was first brewed in the second half of the 19th

century, changing to a red one in the 1930s. The star is thought

to represent a brewers symbol or the various stages of the

brewing process.

But the red star was also a major symbol of Soviet communism

and used to appear on the crest of communist-era Hungary.

Under the new law, businesses using these symbols could be

fined up to 2 billion forints ($6.97 million) and jail sentence.

A Heineken spokeswoman declined comment on the draft bill.

Read also:  Cheers to Heineken

Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs also declined

comment, but did not rule out the possibility that based on the

law, Heineken beer with its current logo could be banned.

Last week Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen, who jointly

submitted the bill with Orban's chief of staff Janos Lazar, was

quoted as saying that the red star in Heineken's logo was

"obvious political content".

At the same time, Semjen did not deny that the ban was

linked to Heineken's legal battle with a small, partly

locally-owned beer maker in Romania's Transylvania -- home to

hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians -- over the use of a

popular brand name there.

After the World War Two Heineken changed its star from red

to white with only a small red border. Over the years the red

border of the star of all export labels gradually became more

prominent, until 1991, when it became completely red again.

Unlike Nazi symbols, communist symbols are not banned in the

Czech Republic or in Romania. In Poland, there was a discussion

regarding communist symbols, but the Constitutional Tribunal

ruled the symbols could be used.

The red star also features in badges of famous soccer teams

like French club Red Star FC or the famous Red Star Belgrade

club.

REUTERS

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