Nissan (NSANY) is planning to sue the main campaign advocating the U.K.’s withdrawal from the European Union—an proposition generally referred to as “Brexit”—over a leaflet that suggested the car-maker supported the so-called Brexit.
The Vote Leave leaflet, distributed to British homes, used the logos of Nissan, Toyota, Vauxhall, Unilever (UL), GE (GE), and Airbus (EADSY) to claim the companies would all “stay in the U.K. Whatever the result of the referendum” that will take place this Thursday.
Nissan, which asked the Vote Leave campaign in vain to stop using its logo without permission, will now ask the High Court in London for an injunction. According to the BBC, the company’s executives have in fact advocated the U.K. Remaining in the EU.
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The firm said it wanted to stop the campaign “making any further false statements and misrepresentations concerning Nissan.”
“We were extremely disappointed to discover that the Vote Leave campaign had been using the Nissan name and logo in their literature and on their website without our permission. We immediately requested that they stop doing so,” the company said in a statement. “It has since come to light that the Vote Leave campaign [continues] to use our logo and trademark despite our repeated requests for them to stop. Permission to use our name and logo was not requested. If it was, it would not have been granted.”
GE, Unilever, and Airbus also made an official complaint to the U.K.’s Electoral Commission about the leaflet, with the companies’ chief executives saying the literature was “highly misleading to British voters” and an “act of bad faith towards our companies.”
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Unilever spokesman Merlin Koene told Coins2Day that Vote Leave had still not responded to the company’s complaints, despite receiving a letter from Unilever last week. “We’re taking legal action in complaining now to the Electoral Commission at the moment, and beyond that we’ll just have to see,” he said.
Vote Leave had not responded to a request for comment on the Nissan suit at the time of publishing.
According to the polls, the pro- and anti-Brexit campaigns are roughly neck-and-neck, just days before the referendum. The Brexiteers were in the lead until the assassination last week of anti-Brexit member of parliament Jo Cox.
