More than 47,000 pairs of counterfeit sports shoes found by Customs officials on their way to Algeria are to be destroyed on court order for breaching the sport brands’ intellectual property rights.

The shoes include counterfeit Adidas, Nike, Puma, CAT, and Reebok.

The government is currently looking into the possibility of ending the practice of destroying counterfeit merchandise, donating it to the needy instead.

The move was sparked by charity activist Peter Lloyd, who last year urged the government to stop incinerating “perfectly good clothes” after the courts had ordered the destruction of 52,000 pairs of shoes and 2,736 items of sportswear.

Instead, Mr Lloyd had called for the products to be handed out to others who needed the goods.

The practice is already common place in the UK, where falsified products are rebranded and handed out in shelters under the supervision of the original brand owner.

Mr Lloyd had argued that the falsified logos could easily be removed and made little difference to the end user.

In one of the cases last Tuesday, Puma’s head office had insisted that the counterfeit shoes had the wrong packaging, wrong sized tongue label, wrong imprints and wrong size stickers and so should be destroyed.