A final Turkish judgment has held that a trademark owner cannot be charged storage fees arising from the custody of counterfeit goods after they have been seized in criminal proceedings. Significantly, the court found that the trademark owner was the victim of the infringement and that the proper addressee of the storage fees was the owner of the counterfeit goods.
Background
The dispute concerned 264,740 units of counterfeit Colgate toothpaste weighing approximately 27.7 tonnes.
After the goods were detected at customs, a criminal complaint was filed on behalf of Colgate-Palmolive Company and the Criminal Court ordered their seizure. An expedited destruction procedure was subsequently initiated within the criminal proceedings.
The goods remained in the Customs Directorate’s anti-smuggling warehouse between 2020 and 2023. The Customs Directorate later assessed a substantial amount in storage fees against Colgate-Palmolive Company.
The judgment
Following the administrative challenge, proceedings were brought to annul the storage fee assessment.
On June 30 2025, the Gaziantep 3rd Administrative Court annulled the Customs Directorate’s decision.
The court emphasised that Colgate-Palmolive Company was not the owner of the counterfeit goods. Rather, it was the trademark owner whose intellectual property (IP) rights had been infringed and was therefore the victim of the underlying offence. The court expressly held that the proper addressee of the storage fees should be the owner of the counterfeit goods and that imposing the financial burden of their storage on the victim of the infringement was unlawful.
The court also considered that transferring the financial consequences of the infringer’s conduct to the victim was incompatible with the principle of personal criminal responsibility.
The Ministry of Trade appealed, relying principally on Article 109 of the Turkish Customs Regulation, which provides that goods detained on suspicion of infringing IP rights are stored under customs supervision at the rights holder’s risk and expense. The ministry further argued that the criminal proceedings against the owner of the counterfeit goods and the administrative measures taken under customs legislation were legally distinct.
On March 5 2026, the 4th Administrative Chamber of the Gaziantep Regional Administrative Court unanimously found the first-instance judgment lawful and dismissed the ministry’s appeal. No further appeal is available and the judgment is final.
Implications for rights holders
Article 109 remains an important part of Türkiye’s border-enforcement regime. However, the Colgate judgment demonstrates that it cannot be applied so as to make a trademark owner liable for the storage of counterfeit goods once those goods are being held under a criminal seizure order.
Goods seized in criminal proceedings are retained under the control of the public authorities for the purposes of the investigation, preservation of evidence, and, ultimately, destruction. At that stage, their custody no longer results from a measure controlled by the rights holder but from their status within the criminal proceedings.
The ruling does not make Article 109 inapplicable to all storage costs arising in IP matters. Its effect is narrower: storage costs arising from the continued custody of counterfeit goods seized in criminal proceedings cannot be imposed on the trademark owner that is the victim of the infringement.
Significance
Effective border enforcement depends substantially on rights holders identifying suspected counterfeits, filing criminal complaints, and cooperating with public authorities.
Requiring those same rights holders to bear substantial storage costs years later would impose a serious financial burden on the party combating the infringement and could discourage enforcement, particularly in cases involving large consignments or lengthy criminal proceedings.
The final Colgate judgment therefore provides a strong legal basis for challenging similar storage-fee assessments, although each case will continue to depend on its own facts and procedural history.
Greater legislative clarity around Article 109 would nevertheless improve legal certainty and consistency in practice.
Until such clarification is introduced, the final Colgate judgment delivers a clear message: the rights holder is the victim of the offence, not the debtor for the storage of the infringer’s goods.
