Bombay HC quashes FIRs against former Maharashtra DGP Sanjay Pandey

The Bombay High Court quashed multiple FIRs against former Maharashtra DGP Sanjay Pandey and others, terming them “abuse of process” driven by personal grudges. The court held the allegations vague, unsupported and part of a malicious prosecution attempt

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court has termed multiple FIRs against former Maharashtra DGP Sanjay Pandey, senior advocate Shekhar Jagtap and others a result of ‘personal grudges’ while quashing the criminal proceedings.

Dismissing the cases against Pandey and others, a bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Suman Shyam on Wednesday called the criminal proceedings an “abuse of the process of law”.

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In the reasoned order available on Thursday, the court asserted that the allegations made by the complainant against the former director general of police (DGP) and others were “vague and lack particulars”. The allegations are speculative and have been proved to be false in view of the ‘C’ Summary (closure) report filed by the police, the bench said.

Businessman Sanjay Mishrimal Punamiya had filed multiple complaints in 2024, alleging a massive criminal conspiracy involving Pandey, Jagtap and senior police officers like Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Sardar Patil and inspector Manohar Patil.

Punamiya had claimed that the accused had forged Jagtap’s appointment letters in 2021 to falsely position him as a special public prosecutor in various extortion and fraud cases to keep him in prolonged judicial custody.

He alleged that the police machinery was misused to pressure him into implicating former Mumbai police chief Param Bir Singh and a few political figures. Pandey, along with others, coerced him into giving false statements by threatening to unlawfully reopen old cases and fabricate false FIRs to trap him, he claimed.

The businessman also claimed that while he was admitted to a hospital, officers, citing Pandey’s instructions, pressured him to falsely implicate the then Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Eknath Shinde, the CM at the time, in an Urban Land Ceiling scam in exchange for dropping charges against him.

However, the high court noted that Punamiya himself was embroiled in a web of criminal cases involving extortion, coercion, and theft of confidential state documents, leading to deep-seated enmity between the parties.

The court also pointed out that the complainant was a “habitual litigant” and that proceedings under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, had been initiated against him in an appeal filed by him.” “The allegations in both the crimes  outcome of a desperate and vengeful mind and the second respondent seeks a fishing inquiry into a matter which does not require any inquiry at all,” the court said.

The bench emphasised that “the process of law cannot be misutilised for oblique purposes and a criminal proceeding which is manifestly attended with malafide can be quashed.” Considering the facts of the case, the court held that the FIRs against the petitioners are “an abuse of the process of law”. Therefore, all criminal proceedings arising therefrom are quashed, it said.