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Ravinder Singh Sidhu v. The State of Punjab and Others

Writ Petition (Civil) · 2025 INSC 727Decided 19 May 2025
Writ Petition (Crl.) No. 394 of 2024
Chief Justice · Justice K.V. Viswanathan

Background

The petitioner, in custody since 2018, was Managing Director of a real-estate company (KIDL) that had floated land-allotment investment schemes across the country. After the company defaulted on its commitments to investors, 64 separate FIRs were registered against him in 10 different states for cheating, forgery, and related offences, some also invoking state-specific investor-protection laws. He sought to have all the FIRs transferred to one court, and in the alternative, at least consolidated within each state to avoid the burden and multiplicity of defending dozens of parallel prosecutions.

Decision Breakdown

The Court held that a full nationwide transfer of all FIRs to one location was not maintainable, since a near-identical prayer had already been rejected in an earlier petition by the same petitioner. However, since multiplicity of proceedings for essentially the same set of transactions was not in the interest of justice, and since several states had invoked their own special depositor-protection laws that could not simply be transferred out of the state, the Court ordered that in each state, all the FIRs be merged with the earliest-registered FIR there, treating the later FIRs' contents as witness statements. It laid down detailed directions on how consolidated trials should proceed and clarified that bail already granted in the principal case would extend to the merged FIRs for the same offences.

Lesson Learnt

When a person faces dozens of FIRs across different states arising from one course of conduct, courts can consolidate them within each state (though not necessarily transfer them out of state, especially where local special laws apply) to prevent the harassment and inefficiency of duplicate parallel trials.

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

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