Another attempt to ‘mislead’ court: Delhi HC imposes Rs 1 lakh cost on litigant who misrepresented himself

In orders passed earlier in these cases, Justice Pushkarna has deprecated this “concerning trend”, and imposed costs between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1 lakh on these “unscrupulous” litigants.

In the latest case, responding to a specific query by Justice Pushkarna on October 29, the petitioner Arun Sood said that his submission that he was the owner/occupant of the property “was only a typographical error”.

The misrepresentation of Sood’s status was flagged by one of the respondents named in the petition. Sood had approached the HC to challenge an eviction order passed against him.

“The aforesaid submission…is wholly unacceptable. The explanation as sought to be given…is only an afterthought and a lame attempt by [Sood] to overcome the blatant error committed in making false submissions before this Court, clearly with a view to mislead this Court,” Justice Pushkarna recorded in her order.

The court noted that “in case [Sood] was neither the owner nor the occupier of the property in question, [he] would have had no locus to file the…writ petition and the same would have been dismissed at the first instance”. The petition was entertained because Sood had “wrongly put forth before this Court that he was owner/ occupier of the property in question”, the order said.

The petition was “clearly an attempt to mislead this Court”, the order said. The court pointed out that “When a party files a writ petition, the…party is enjoined upon to approach the Court with clean hands and not to suppress any facts or mislead the Court in any manner”.

Instead, Sood had approached the court “with an oblique motive and for mala fide purposes”, the order said. Sood, it said, was “clearly guilty of suppressing the actual facts…and of portraying wrong facts before this Court, with the intent of obtaining orders in his favour”.

This transgression, the court said, was “an abuse and misuse of the process of law” in order to “settle his personal scores with the actual owners of the property”, and imposed a cost of Rs 1 lakh on Sood.