The Madras High Court has found Golden Tobacco Limited guilty of contempt of court and directed four of its directors to undergo simple imprisonment for a period of two weeks in a civil prison. The court imposed lesser punishment since the directors A.K. Joshi, Jaskaran S. Khurana, Bharat B. Merchant and Kokila Panchal were aged.
A Division Bench of Justices S.S. Sundar and P.B. Balaji delivered the verdict on a contempt of court petition moved by ITC Limited in 2019 accusing Golden Tobacco and its four directors of continuing to imitate the trade mark ‘Gold Flake’ for their cigarettes despite an interim injunction granted against it by the High Court on July 26, 2018.
The Bench, however, made it clear that its order imposing punishment would come into force only with effect from July 15, 2023 in order to enable the directors of the company to prefer an appeal before the Supreme Court.
