LIPETSK, October 7. /TASS/. Candy factory belonging to Roshen corporation and located in the city of Lipetsk, some 380 km to the south of Moscow, has resumed operations after an outage that lasted three weeks, the Deputy Director General of Roshen Russian company, Oleg Kazakov, told TASS.
Roshen corporation belongs to Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko.
Earlier reports said the Lipetsk factory suspended its operations for fourteen days September 15 because of overstocked warehouses, since the population of the region and retail chains refused to buy the candies made there.
Initially the management believed it would restart several production lines on September 29, September 30 and October 1 but it rescheduled the resumption of operations of several lines to October 7. The rest of the lines will be launched October 13 and October 20.
The previous time the factory stopped its operations in March. Sources said then the outage might have been caused by a lawsuit on the part of the Russian confectionary industry manufacturing association Obyedinennye Konditery.
In 2010, the latter holding company launched lawsuits against all the confectionery producers in Russia for the misuse of old Soviet trademarks. The Lipetsk factory was accused of using the Singing Swallow trademark.
The factory’s Director General, Taissiya Voronina told TASS in spring 2014 that it had stopped the output of litigious products but was still facing some lawsuits, the claims under which totaled 2.4 billion rubles - something unprecedented for the Russian confectionery industry. However, production operations were resumed later.
Roshen purchased the Lipetsk factory in 2001. At present, it puts out several types of hard boiling, toffees, gumdrops, and pastries.
The factory has two production facilities, one in the city of Lipetsk and the other in the village of Sentsovo. Roshen data says the company has a 7% share in the Russian market of candies.