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M/S Z Engineers Construction Pvt Ltd v. Bipin Bihari Behera & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2020 INSC 196Decided 14 Feb 2020
Civil Appeal No. 1627 of 2020
Justice S. Abdul Nazeer · Justice Hemant Gupta

Background

In a partition suit, the plaintiffs' case rested on powers of attorney given to their representative. The defendants (the appellants here) objected that these powers of attorney were insufficiently stamped and should legally be treated as a "conveyance", attracting much higher stamp duty, because, under an Orissa stamp-law amendment, a power of attorney counts as a conveyance if possession of the property was transferred along with it. Both the trial court and the Orissa High Court rejected this objection, reasoning simply that the documents were registered and therefore properly stamped, without examining whether possession had actually passed.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that whether a power of attorney amounts to a "conveyance" requiring higher stamp duty turns on the factual question of whether possession was actually transferred at or around its execution: a question that cannot be answered just by reading the document, but requires evidence. Since that evidence had not yet been fully examined, the Court set aside both the trial court's and the High Court's orders, and directed that the stamp-duty objection be decided together with the final judgment in the main partition suit, once evidence on the possession question has been led by both sides.

Lesson Learnt

Not every procedural objection needs to be, or even can be, decided immediately; when resolving an objection depends on disputed facts, courts can properly defer it to be decided together with the final judgment, after full evidence is on record.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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