Rajendra Ramesh chandra Chaturvedi Nee Rajendra Chaturvedi & Anr. Vs State of West Bengal & Anr. (Calcutta High Court)
The Calcutta High Court quashed an FIR registered under Sections 406, 418, 420, 467, 468, 471 and 120B of the Indian Penal Code, holding that the allegations, even if accepted in their entirety, disclosed at best a civil dispute arising from breach of contract and recovery of money rather than criminal offences.
According to the FIR, the complainant company paid ₹3.30 crore between 2009 and 2010 as advance consideration for two flats in a proposed Mumbai housing project after allegedly being induced by representations regarding the developer’s reputation, approvals and timely completion. Although an agreement for sale was executed in 2011, the project did not commence. The FIR alleged that forged municipal sanction documents were shown in 2013-2014 and, after the developer admitted its inability to obtain approvals, the advance was converted into a loan repayable with interest. Despite repeated acknowledgements of liability, repayment was allegedly not made, leading to the criminal complaint in 2020.
The petitioners argued that the FIR deliberately suppressed earlier proceedings before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) initiated under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). They contended that the insolvency proceedings commenced in 2018 had failed and that the FIR, lodged in January 2020 after changes to Section 7 of the IBC, was merely an attempt to recover civil dues through criminal prosecution. They further submitted that the advance amount had been mutually converted into a loan in 2015, making the dispute a loan recovery matter, and argued that the FIR was filed after an unexplained delay of about eleven years from the original payment.
