After fake government offices and fake toll plazas, a man set up a bogus court where he posed as a judge and passed orders in Gujarat. Police suspect that the "court" might have been functioning for the last five years as the accused, Morris Samuel Christian, passed an order in favour of his client in a case related to a government land way back in 2019.
Christian allegedly cheated people by posing as a judge of an arbitral tribunal and passed favourable orders claiming he had been appointed as an arbitrator by a court to adjudicate legal disputes, police said.
His fake court was busted after a complaint was filed by the registrar of the city civil court in Ahmedabad.
How The Court Functioned?
A preliminary probe revealed Christian used to trap people whose cases regarding land disputes were pending before the city civil court. He used to take a specific amount from his clients as his fees for solving their cases.
Christian would first establish himself as an official arbitrator appointed by the court, call his clients at his Gandhinagar-based office, which was designed to look like a court and pass a favourable order as the presiding officer of the tribunal. His accomplices used to stand as court staff or lawyers to create an impression that the proceedings were genuine.
In 2019, Christian had passed an order in favour of his client using the same modus operandi. The case was related to a government land under the district collector while his client had staked a claim on it and wanted to add his name to revenue records related to the plot in question located in the Paldi area.
Without any authority or order issued by any court under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, Christian told his client he has been appointed as the "official arbitrator" by the government. The conman then initiated fake proceedings at his 'court' and passed an order in favour of his client, directing the collector to add his client's name in the revenue records of that land, it said.
To implement that order, Christian through another lawyer, filed an appeal in the city civil court and attached that fraudulent order passed by him. The court registrar Hardik Desai recently found out that neither Christian is an arbitrator nor is the order of the tribunal genuine.
The Karanj police lodged an FIR and arrested the accused. He is already facing a cheating complaint filed with the city's Maninagar police station in 2015.
Last year, police busted a bogus toll plaza built on private land in Gujarat’s Morbi district barely 600 meters from the National Highways Authority of India’s (NHAI) official toll plaza.