Unilever rejoinder, our reply

Unilever Bangladesh Ltd sent a rejoinder to the report "Anyone can import, market Unilever products: HC" published in The Business Standard on 27 October 2022, saying the report mentioned "wrongful, distorted, and unfounded facts". 

The rejoinder says the report has "impacted" the reputation of Unilever in Bangladesh and provided "wrongful information" to the consumers of Bangladesh.

The company said, "The report wrongfully mentioned that there is no bar to the import and marketing of Unilever's products from abroad by another Bangladeshi businessperson or company." 

The rejoinder also elaborated two of Unilever's writs in 2006 "challenging the actions and omissions of Customs and other government agencies for not taking necessary measures to prevent unauthorised third parties from importing Unilever products".

But the said report is related to a third writ filed by the company in 2010 covering six Unilever products.

The rejoinder says, "The said report dated 26.10.2022 was in relation to the judgement provided by the larger bench of High Court Division on 25.10.2022 which relates to W.P 8301/2010 which only covered 6 of Unilever products and not all. Moreover, the writ petition was dismissed on the ground of maintainability. This dismissal of the writ petition doesn't render unauthorized import legal in anyway whatsoever and unauthorized the parties are not free to import any of Unilever products."

The company notes, "We were also surprised that no comment was taken from Unilever or its appointed lawyer on the issue and only comments of DAG was taken into consideration and one-sided representation was made which failed to showcase the entire story."

Our reply

The Business Standard report quoted the court all through the story.

However, we still regret not specifying only six Unilever products the High Court said could be imported "by any licensed company or person".

After the judgement, we repeatedly approached the Unilever appointed lawyer and the company's chief financial officer for more detail, but to no avail. They neither picked the phone calls nor replied to our text messages.

Therefore, we had to run the story based on the media briefing of the deputy attorney general on the judgement.