This Stoli's for ... Me

After warming up on small-game targets like the oil and gas industries, the Kremlin has its sights set on a truly key national asset: Stolichnaya vodka.

And just as Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was famously mowed down in Putin's pursuit of Yukos, it looks like the fight to make Stoli's overseas trademarks state-controlled will have a citizen victim of its own.

A Moscow court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Yury Shefler, head of SPI Group, the current holders of Stoli's international trademarks.

The state-owned company Soyuzplodoimport (try saying that five times drunk) already controls Stoli trademarks within Russia. It took those away from SPI in 2002.

Now lawyers for ... er ... the company ... claim that when Shefler bought the rights back in the '90s, he forged and destroyed documents in order to get the brand for a fraction of its market value, according to the Associated Press reports.

Furthermore, that the seller had no right to sell the rights anyway, as they had been "wrongly privatized" to begin with.

But simple trademark violations weren't juicy enough on their own. Government prosecutors have successfully opened a criminal investigation of Shefler, focused on not only intellectual property grievances but also on whether he had threatened the life of Soyuzplodoimport general director Vladimir Loginov.

If Loginov has his way, overseas trademarks will be put into government hands before you can say "polonium." After all, Stoli's latest ad campaign focuses on the "authentically Russian" pedigree of the vodka. What's more Russian than state control?

by Liz Gunnison