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Placido Francisco Pinto v. Jose Francisco Pinto

Civil Appeal · 2021 INSC 581Decided 30 Sept 2021
Civil Appeal No. 1491 of 2007
Justice Hemant Gupta · Justice V. Ramasubramanian

Background

Two brothers had jointly inherited a property in Goa, split into northern and southern portions. The elder brother paid off Rs. 12,000 of debts owed by his younger brother to save the family property from a court auction, and the younger brother then executed a registered sale deed transferring his portion (for a nominal Rs. 3,000) to the elder brother in 1970. Years later, after the elder brother sued for possession, the younger brother and his wife claimed they never intended to sell and that their signatures on the sale deed were obtained without their understanding of the document.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court found that the First Appellate Court and High Court had wrongly invalidated the sale deed: the younger brother had admitted in his own evidence that his debts were cleared by his elder brother and that he voluntarily signed documents at the Sub-Registrar's office, which amounts to admitting execution of the sale deed. The Court held that mere "feigned ignorance" of a document's contents is not legally equivalent to fraud or misrepresentation, especially since no such fraud was even formally pleaded in the lawsuit, and that a token sale consideration between close relatives (natural love and affection) does not make a registered deed void for want of consideration. The Court restored the original trial court decree in the elder brother's favour and dismissed the younger brother's competing suit, giving the occupants two months to vacate.

Lesson Learnt

Signing a registered document at a government office, even without fully reading it, will generally bind you unless you can specifically plead and prove fraud or misrepresentation: simply claiming ignorance of what you signed is not enough to undo a registered sale deed, especially years after the fact.

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

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