Belarusian Ministry of Justice forbids calling firms ‘best’ and ‘first’

• 18.05.2010, 13:02

Giving firms names that may cause unfair competition is forbidden in Belarus.

In accordance with Ministry of Justice’s ruling #31 of May 14, “names of legal persons containing superlative forms of words allowing to position a legal entity as the leader in a certain field (business sphere) basing on its names such as ‘best’, ‘first’, ‘only’, etc, in any grammatical gender, case, number shall not be accepted for approval,” AFN news agency reports.

Besides, approval of names of legal persons, containing the names of already existing legal persons, will be carried out only with the permission of the existing legal person.

“For example, the name ‘Atlant-Brest’ will be approved only with the permission of Atlant company,” the Ministry of Justice explained.

“The adopted ruling will facilitate improvement of naming process for newly created economic persons in order to prevent unfair competition and violation of the rights of already existing legal persons,” the authors of the document think.