The Dakar Court of Appeal was called upon to decide a legal battle between the Société industrielle des produits alimentaires (Sipa) and Lesieur Cristal, the Moroccan subsidiary of the French group Lesieur, over the ownership of the household product brand "Sabou La Main".

In its ruling delivered on May 22, as reported by L'Observateur in its Tuesday edition, the court sided with the Senegalese company, fully enforcing industrial property law.

The case dates back to July 2013, according to the same source, when Sipa registered the trademark "Sabou La Main" with the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI). A year later, in June 2014, Lesieur Cristal also registered the trademark "La Main." Believing that this registration constituted "a clear infringement of its acquired rights" and opened "the door to a risk of confusion likely to affect its market positioning," the Senegalese company took legal action to oppose the marketing of the products in question.

In response, reports the daily newspaper of the Future Media Group (Gfm), Lesieur Cristal is seeking the cancellation of the "Sabou La Main" trademark, citing the existence of a "Sabou" trademark which it claims to have held since 2004. Sipa then counter-attacks by requesting the cancellation of "La Main" for lack of prior use, but also that of "Sabou", arguing that this name does not have the distinctive character required by industrial property law.

The dispute thus took on "the dimensions of a veritable battle for priority," based on the principle that the first applicant enjoys an exclusive right to their trademark. More broadly, as the Gfm headline emphasizes, it was not simply a dispute over trade names, but "a veritable economic war" for control of a highly competitive market.

However, the newspaper concludes, the Court did not agree with Sipa on all points. It refused to cancel the "Sabou" trademark, owned by Lesieur Cristal, considering that "the arguments based on the lack of distinctiveness of this name were not, in the context of the case, sufficient to justify the removal of this trademark from the OAPI register."