The Surat District Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate’s Court slapped a penalty of Rs 25,000 on a lawyer on Friday (April 11) in an alleged extortion case involving Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty and her family. One person of interest in the case is underworld don Fazl-ur-Rehman alias Fazlu, who was also separately alleged to have kidnapped billionaire businessman Gautam Adani in 1998 and was later acquitted. Here is what to know. The case In 1998, Shilpa Shetty signed a one-year contract to model in a TV advertisement for the Surat-based Prafful Sarees. However, the ad continued to be aired even after a year. Shetty termed it a breach of contract and filed a legal notice against company owner Pankaj Agrawal. Her parents allegedly asked him to pay Rs 80 lakh after the ad was broadcast for four years. Agrawal then lodged a complaint at Surat’s Umra police station in 2003, alleging he received a call from Fazl-ur-Rahman, then based in Malaysia. The don demanded Rs 2 crore from the businessman on behalf of the actor, Agrawal said. The case FIR names Shetty’s parents Surendra and Sunanda, Shetty’s then personal secretary Dilip Palsekar, Rehman, and two of this aides under IPC sections 385 (offence of putting a person in fear of injury to commit extortion), 386 (extortion by putting a person in fear of death or grievous hurt), 387 (crime of extortion through the threat of death or grievous hurt) and 34 (criminal action committed by several person with shared common intention). Sunanda, Surendra and some others accused in the case were arrested that year and released on bail. Charges were framed in the case in 2010 and the trial began in 2013. Palsekar and Surendra Shetty died a few years after the trial commenced. Over the years, investigating officers recorded Sunanda and Surendra Shetty’s statements and collected voice clips of their conversations with Pankaj Agrawal. They also obtained a recording of the conversation between Rehman and Agrawal. The penalty On February 15, the Surat district court issued a non-bailable warrant against Rehman and Sunanda Shetty for not being present in court and fixed the hearing for April 11. Rehman’s lawyer Anish Khyali told The Indian Express, “My client Fazlu Rehman remained present in the court in the last week of March, and later Sunanda Shetty also remained present in the court, following which their non-bailable arrest warrant was cancelled.” On April 11, complainant Agrawal was to depose in court on a piece of evidence related to an alleged phone conversation between him and an accused named Ashraf, an aide of Rehman, in the court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate. Additional Public Prosecutor A T Parmar was also in court. Advocates for two of the four accused were present, while Sunanda’s lawyer, Minesh Jhaveri, was absent and a junior represented him as a “proxy”. Rehman's lawyer Khyali was also out of town and was represented by a junior. Khyali applied for an exemption of appearance, saying he recently underwent heart surgery. The court accepted this. Audio clips of ‘extortion’ Several audio clips were played in court as evidence. Sources said Parmar took Agrawal’s deposition based on the recording of a phone conversation he had with Ashraf. Sunanda Shetty’s proxy lawyer objected to this, claiming that Pawmar was not noting the details of what was said in the recorded audio conversations. The judge then questioned who had hired him, to which he replied he was representing Sunanda. The judge checked the vakalatnama (the legal document authorising a lawyer to represent a party in court) and found no signature of the proxy lawyer. The court then slapped a Rs. 25,000 penalty on the lawyer. The case is due to be heard next on April 30. Role of Fazl-ur-Rehman Rehman, 58, goes by the aliases Fazlu, Ching Chong, Tanvir, Ali, and Chandra Mandal and was suspected to have worked for many underworld gangsters based in Dubai. Originally from Darbhanga, Bihar, Rehman first came into the limelight following the kidnapping of businessman Gautam Adani in 1998. All the accused in that case, including Rehman, were acquitted in 2018. It was alleged that the accused sought Rs 15 crore as ransom, and after they received the amount, Adani and one Shantilal Patel were released. His lawyer Kunal N Shah said that Additional District Judge D P Patel acquitted him and another co-accused named Bhogilal Darji, as the prosecution had failed to establish the kidnapping and their roles in it. Rehman was in Malaysia for a long time and is now on bail and back in India.
