Hyderabad: The Telangana High Court has slapped a fine of Rs 15 lakh on advocate Rapolu Bhaskar and petitioner Pulipati Srinivas, a cloth merchant from Shadnagar, for deceiving the court and causing distress to innocent parties.
They repeatedly filed lawsuits on the same matter, hoping for favourable rulings while hiding the fact that they had previously lost similar cases. The court was irked with the lawyer’s behaviour in filing unnecessary petitions and withholding information.
Justice Nagesh Bheemapaka emphasised that lawyers have a duty to the court and should not blindly represent clients engaging in unethical conduct. He urged lawyers to refuse clients who insist on such behaviour. The case involved Pulipati Srinivas, who had borrowed Rs 30 lakh from a cooperative credit society but defaulted on payments, leading to the auction of his property in Shadnagar.
Srinivas sought to halt the auction, claiming discrepancies in interest calculations and a lack of proper notice from the cooperative society. Bhaskar argued that despite previous court orders to stay the auction, it proceeded without notification on October 12, 2023.
During the court proceedings, Justice Bheemapaka discovered that the interim stay order had been lifted by the court in July 2023, allowing the bank to conduct a fresh auction.
Additionally, it emerged that Bhaskar had filed another writ petition in 2023 challenging the notices, which directed the petitioner to vacate the property and conduct an open auction on October 12, 2023. This second petition was dismissed as irrelevant.
The judge criticised both the counsel and the petitioner for failing to disclose these crucial facts and for approaching the court again without transparency.
“Any person approaching the court must come with clean hands, and if he or she withholds some vital material in order to gain an advantage over the other side, then the individual would be guilty of playing fraud, which cannot be countenanced,” Justice Bheemapaka said, according to a local daily.
Despite previously being fined Rs 1 lakh in a separate petition, the counsel continued the same behaviour, prompting the court to impose exemplary costs of Rs 15 lakh on both the petitioner and the counsel.
