Recently, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate released the “Typical Cases of Procuratorial Organs Punishing Crimes Endangering Food and Drug Safety in Accordance with the Law.” The case in which Lusheng Law Firm represented a well-known multinational health supplement company in handling a case involving multiple persons in the production and sale of counterfeit and substandard products bearing counterfeit registered trademarks was honorably selected.
Lusheng’s Selected Case
Representation of a well-known multinational health supplement company in handling a case involving multiple persons in the production and sale of counterfeit and substandard products bearing counterfeit registered trademarks
Brief Case Overview
The right holder is a well-known multinational health supplement company. The defendant He, together with Guo, formed, starting from 2023, a criminal syndicate spanning multiple regions. Through the procurement of raw materials, commissioning of counterfeit production, bottling and labeling, online sales and other stages, they produced and sold on a large scale various health supplements, including brands owned by the right holder, and sold them nationwide via e-commerce platforms. Among them, the defendants Pang and Su were specifically responsible for key stages such as bottling, labeling and coding of semi-finished products. By the time the case was uncovered, He and others had produced and sold more than 120,000 bottles of counterfeit and substandard health food, with sales amounting to more than RMB 8 million.
In September 2024, the Shanghai Railway Transport People’s Procuratorate instituted a public prosecution against the defendants He and Guo for the crime of producing and selling counterfeit and substandard products, and against the defendants Pang and Su for the crime of counterfeiting registered trademarks, and filed a criminal incidental public interest civil action. In June 2025, the Shanghai Railway Transport Court sentenced the defendant He to fifteen years’ fixed-term imprisonment and a fine of RMB 4 million for the crime of producing and selling counterfeit and substandard products; and sentenced the defendant Guo to eight years and six months’ fixed-term imprisonment and a fine of RMB 800,000. For the crime of counterfeiting registered trademarks, the court sentenced the defendant Pang to four years and six months’ fixed-term imprisonment and a fine of RMB 300,000; and sentenced the defendant Su to one year and four months’ fixed-term imprisonment and a fine of RMB 10,000. The judgment ordered all defendants to apologize to the general public, issue food risk warnings, and bear the costs of harmless disposal. After the first-instance judgment was pronounced, none of the defendants appealed, and the judgment has become legally effective.
Lusheng Law Firm represented the right holder and assisted the law enforcement and judicial organs in the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of the criminal suspects.
Typical Significance
I. Achieving precise full-chain crackdown and tiered handling of counterfeiting and sale of counterfeit products in the health supplement sector
The criminal chain in this case was long, with many stages and numerous persons involved, covering core raw material supply, production of finished product packaging materials, bottling of counterfeit and substandard products, warehousing, shipment and other production and sales stages, and was characterized by a wide distribution of personnel scattered across various industries. The procuratorial organ and the public security organ worked in close coordination, digging deeply from the downstream sales end to the upstream production source, comprehensively collecting key evidence, and thereby achieving the full-chain destruction of the criminal network.
II. Promoting refined determination by judicial organs of the division of labor and responsibilities within the criminal syndicate
In this case, the counterfeiting syndicate was tightly organized, with numerous stages from raw material procurement and counterfeit production to bottling and labeling and online sales. With respect to key stages directly involving the commission of acts of counterfeiting registered trademarks, such as bottling and labeling, for which Pang and Su and others were specifically responsible, the judicial organs, based on the relevant evidence, accurately determined that they constituted the crime of counterfeiting registered trademarks. This refined distinction based on the nature of the conduct precisely pursued the legal liability of infringers at each stage and provided an effective model for combating organized trademark infringement crimes.
III. Professional legal support facilitating full-chain crackdown on infringing acts and effective relief of rights
In the face of challenges such as the criminal syndicate destroying electronic evidence and difficulties in determining the amount of the crime, the case-handling organs proceeded from multiple dimensions to trace the source of infringement, lock in the criminal network, and accurately calculate the scale of infringement, thereby ultimately achieving not only criminal sanctions against the principal infringers, but also, through incidental public interest civil actions and the promotion of platform governance, imposing obligations on the infringers to make public apologies and pay disposal costs, and prompting the delisting of the infringing products and closure of the shops. This realized a three-dimensional crackdown on infringing acts and comprehensive protection of the right holder’s interests from the criminal, civil and social governance perspectives.
