The Bombay high court on Wednesday quashed a criminal case against the Khatau cousins — Dilip, Mahendra, Hiten and Bakul — and referred it back to the magistrate’s court for fresh hearing.
The Bombay high court on Wednesday quashed a criminal case against the Khatau cousins — Dilip, Mahendra, Hiten and Bakul — and referred it back to the magistrate’s court for fresh hearing.
On January 12, the magistrate directed the Malabar Hill police station to carry out investigations under Section 156 (3) of the CrPC against the four cousins based on a private complaint lodged by another cousin, Aparna Khatau. The Khatau cousins moved the high court against this order.
Aparna accused Bakul and Hiten of wrongfully transferring to themselves one-sixth of a share in the Khatau Bungalow, which, she claims, belongs to her and her family.
The bungalow with a flat admeasuring 2,998 sqft was pegged at Rs11 crore in May 2008 when Bakul and Hiten executed the Deed of Indenture, she said in her complaint. The going rate in the Malabar Hill area is around Rs60,000-70,000 per square feet on average.
In her complaint, Aparna said she was an heir of the late Sunit Chandrakant Khatau — a beneficiary of the Seth Mulraj Khatau Trust formed on April 27, 1917. The deed specified that the trust would cease to exist when none of Seth Mulraj Khatau’s five sons is alive.
Aparna said her father Sunit and his brother Kiran were sons of Chandrakant Khatau, one of Seth Mulraj Khatau’s five sons. When Kiran died on July 30, 1984, Chandrakant was alive so Kiran’s portion of the share should have gone back to the trust and not to Kiran’s wife Bakul,
she said.
If the trust had Kiran’s portion, it would have gone to her father Sunit and ultimately to his children, including her, she said in her complaint.
But her cousins, along with the other accused, connived and “committed several acts of breach of trust, dereliction of duty and consequently causing wrongful losses to the surviving heirs and beneficiaries”, according to her complaint.
Counsel Parvez Memon who appeared for the accused Khatau cousins told the court that the trust ceased to exist the moment Chandrakant Khatau, one of Seth Mulraj Khatau’s sons, distributed his portion among his sons Sunit and Kiran. Accordingly, it could not go back to the trust because everyone would then be a co-owner of the property. “But whatever be the issue, it is purely civil and not criminal in nature,” he said.
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