The Bar Council of Delhi (BCD) suspended a city-based lawyer from practicing as an advocate for seven years for “betraying” his client and “committing fraud upon the Court” by creating forged and fabricated orders.
An order issued by the BCD’s disciplinary committee earlier this month found Peeush Kulshreshtha guilty of gross misconduct, stating that his conduct had a “grave impact on society as it made people at large lose confidence in the justice delivery system”.
The order came on a complaint against Mr. Kulshreshtha filed by Kamlesh Gupta, through advocates Isha Kapoor and Jai Saini. The panel also directed the accused to pay Ms. Gupta ₹2 lakh as compensation for the damages she suffered.
2009 property dispute
According to the complaint, she and her late husband had in 2009 engaged Mr. Kulshreshtha’s services for a property dispute case, in the course of which he told the couple that two orders had been passed by a local court in their favour.
When the couple’s insistence on being shown the proof, Mr. Kulshreshtha handed them two documents.
However, in 2019, the police got the disputed property vacated and showed Ms. Gupta court orders for the same. When Ms. Gupta confronted Mr. Kulshreshtha, he demanded ₹10,000 to start the mutation process to have the property registered in her name and stalled the work on several instances.
The complainant stated that she was then forced to seek the assistance of Ms. Kapoor and Mr. Saini, who, after a lengthy legal search, found that the two court orders handed by Mr. Kulshreshtha was forged.
Ms. Kapoor also found out that in one of the two forged court orders, the case was never filed.
The complainant’s advocates filed a complaint against Mr. Kulshreshtha with the BCD’s disciplinary committee, which asked him to appear before it.
However, despite the panel issuing 14 notices over the course of 2023, Mr. Kushreshtha did not appear even once during the hearing. His counsel made an appearance on his behalf on only two instances.
‘Mockery of law’
The committee came to the conclusion that the allegations against Mr. Kulshreshtha is “extremely serious in nature”. It observes that by way of creating forged court decrees, the accused did not just play fraud upon his own clients, but being an officer of the court he misused his license as well as “made a mockery of the law and justice delivery system, which in no manner can it be accepted.”
“To sum up, we are constrained to say that no advocate gets a license to do the illegal acts which have been done by the lawyer in the present case to tarnish the image of the noble profession of the legal fraternity,” the committee said.
