No transaction, no victim, no offence, says Karnataka HC quashing BDA’s allotment letter fraud case against five

A view of the High Court of Karnataka.

The High Court of Karnataka has quashed criminal proceedings against five private individuals, who were named as accused in 2020 along with some officials of the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), on the allegation of illegally preparing letters for allotment of sites in various BDA layouts.

The court pointed out that there is “not a single victim” of forgery in the case and no document that is alleged to have been forged by the accused has been put into execution. Moreover, the court noted that the “seized documents were not even sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory for the purpose of ascertaining forgery”.

Justice M. Nagaprasanna passed the order while allowing the petitions filed by M. Inder Kumar, a movie producer having production company in the name of Rendha – The Cinema People; Vinod Raj C., a broker; Naveen Kumar, a then computer operator on contract basis in the BDA; Mohan Kumar, a computer operator in Redhan, and Lakshmankumar H.R., a joint secretary of the Karnataka Dalita Kendra.

Curiously, the court pointed out that the BDA argued for continuation of the criminal proceedings against the petitioners, while the BDA had not granted sanction for prosecution of its officials against whom the court has already quashed proceedings in the same case for want of sanction for their prosecution.

“Though the High Court had given liberty to the BDA to grant sanction for prosecution of its accused officials, the BDA has not granted sanction as on October 16, 2026,” Justice Nagaprasanna observed while also noticing that site allotment letters seized from the petitioners were all genuine ones and hence they were not sent for forensic test. The BDA had alleged that site allotment letters were found in the office of the movie producer.

“There is no victim that the petitioners have allegedly lured into the transaction with a dishonest intention right from the inception. There is no transaction that has taken place in the case at hand. The allegation itself is that it could have taken place. That cannot become the offence of cheating. The same goes with the offence under Section 406, criminal breach of trust... The petitioners have not even met the threshold of attempting to commit the alleged offences,” the court said while quashing the charge-sheet against them.