Mumbai tenant fined 5 L for abusing court remedy
The Supreme Court has imposed an ‘exemplary’ fine of Rs 5 lakh on a Mumbai tenant who had kept filing petitions in various courts for the past 33 years to stall his eviction from a shop ordered first in 1984 and that too despite losing on every forum.
A Bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar also ordered him on Wednesday to vacate the premises within a week or be ready for heavier fine if he filed any application to further delay handing over of the possession to the landlord. It dismissed his petition against the Bombay High Court order to vacate the premises by April 30, 2014 and not to create any third party interest or alienate the premises and part with its possession in any other manner.
The CJI said an example needed to be made. "You say the judiciary does not deliver? You keep litigating. You should be punished because the litigant will otherwise not know what is the directive of the court. The message must go."
"You are destroying the court, the legal system…. We will impose exemplary cost. It will be a very, very exemplary cost. You better get the hell out of it." Dnyandeo Sabaji Naik, the perennially litigating tenant, has seven days to clear out or face both civil and criminal contempt proceedings.
This is not the first case when CJI Khehar has been harsh on those abusing the judicial process. He imposed a fine of Rs 10 lakh on a Rashtriya Janata Dal (Lalu) MLA from Bihar, Ravindra Singh, for wasting "precious judicial time" through frivolous litigations. It had also imposed Rs 1 lakh fine on a Maharashtra professor for similar reasons. The three-judge bench also rapped senior advocate V Mohana for taking up the cause of Naik, who had given Bombay High Court a written undertaking in 2014 to vacate the premises but chose to move a review petition instead.
Naik has been occupying shop No 8 situated on the ground floor of Bhatia Bhavan, D S Babrekar Marg, Opposite Gokhale Road at Dadar in Mumbai since 1968.
The court rejected Mohana''s plea for ‘mercy’ against such a high fine (Naik has been paying rent). " Mercy? What mercy? You don''t deserve any mercy," Justice Khehar said. "You ( Mohana) are appearing for a client who gives an undertaking to a court through an affidavit that he would vacate by April 2014."
The Bench''s reaction came on advocate R Anand Padmanabhan, appearing for landlord Pradhya Prakash Khandekar, submitted that the tenant had a habit of giving undertakings to courts and then backing out. The latest was his petition in the Apex Court after his advocate assured the High Court to vacate the premises.
The apex court, however, did not agree with the advocate''s plea to punish Naik for committing civil and criminal contempt by violating his 2014 undertaking to the High Court. The Bench which also included Justices D Y Chandrachud and Sanjay Kishan Kaul said it would for now only evict Naik. The 1984 eviction order was passed by a rent control court in Mumbai.
Justice Kaul cited how Naik had claimed to be running a dry cleaning business from Khadekar''s premises to argue that eviction would hurt him economically, but had told a labour court he was not carrying out any business to defeat a wage claim by workers. "You have given a false statement in the labour court. Court has no meaning for you. That is the unfortunate situation," Justice Kaul regretted.
The landlord, father of Pradhya Khadekar, was unable to run his laundry at the shop due to health reasons and so he gave the business of the Kismat Laundry to Naik on an oral agreement on August 1, 1968 on a monthly royalty of Rs 250. The old man was, however, forced to approach the rent control court in Mumbai to get back the shop''s possession after Naik started defaulting in payment of the royalty.