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Yogesh Upadhyay & Anr. vs Atlanta Limited

Transfer Petition (Criminal) · 2023 INSC 150Decided 21 Feb 2023
Transfer Petition (Criminal) Nos. 526-527 of 2022
Dinesh Maheshwari · Sanjay Kumar

Background

Yogesh Upadhyay and his firm M/s Shakti Buildcon bought a crusher plant from Atlanta Limited for about Rs 1.89 crore under a June 2019 agreement, payable by seven cheques. The first cheque was honoured but the remaining six bounced on "stop payment" instructions. Atlanta presented two of the cheques through its bank at Nagpur and filed two complaints there, and presented the other four through its bank in New Delhi and filed four complaints in the Dwarka courts. The buyers asked the Supreme Court to transfer the two Nagpur cases to Dwarka so that all six cases from the same transaction could be tried together; Atlanta objected that Section 142 of the NI Act, with its "notwithstanding" clause, gives the Nagpur courts exclusive jurisdiction and overrides the transfer power in Section 406 CrPC.

Decision Breakdown

The Court traced the history of cheque-case jurisdiction: K. Bhaskaran (1999) allowed filing wherever any of the five ingredients occurred, Dashrath Rupsingh Rathod (2014) restricted it to where the drawee bank is located, and the 2015 amendment inserting Section 142(2) restored jurisdiction to the court where the payee's bank branch (where the cheque was presented for collection) is situated. Filing the two cases at Nagpur was therefore proper. However, the Court rejected the argument that the non obstante clause in Section 142(1) excludes Section 406 CrPC: that clause existed even before 2015 and only governs how cognizance is taken (complaint by the payee, within one month, before a Magistrate of the required rank), not the Supreme Court's power to transfer. Citing A.E. Premanand (2004), where cheque cases from one transaction were consolidated, it held that the power to transfer under Section 406 CrPC remains intact for Section 138 offences whenever justice requires. Since all six cases arose from one transaction and four were already in Delhi, the two Nagpur cases were transferred to Dwarka to avoid contradictory findings.

Lesson Learnt

A cheque-bounce complaint is filed where the payee's bank branch is located, but that does not prevent the Supreme Court from consolidating multiple cheque cases from a single transaction in one court. Litigants facing several Section 138 cases over one deal can seek to have them tried together to avoid inconsistent outcomes.

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

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