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Madras HC Imposes Cost On Advocate For Filing Frivolous PIL & Wasting Court’s Time

The Madras High Court on Wednesday imposed a fine of Rupees Twenty Thousand on an advocate for filing frivolous petition and directed to deposit the fine amount in Chief Minister Public Relief Fund within one week.

The petitioner herein is a practising advocate, has filed the instant interest litigation petition, seeking a direction to the State Government to develop a Mobile App and Website for selling liquors before opening of all the retail liquor selling shops of Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation Ltd (TASMAC) throughout Tamil Nadu and also sought directions to TASMAC to stop all cash sales.

The Additional Advocate General said that the petitioner is in the habit of filing such frivolous public interest litigation petitions and earlier in one such writ petition, a cost of Rs.10,000/- was imposed by the court  upon him, to dissuade him to file such frivolous so called public interest writ petitions for whatever extraneous reasons he may have. He has not disclosed this fact in the present writ petition. Upon the initial observations made by the court, the petitioner sought leave of the court to withdraw this writ petition.

The case was heard by the division bench comprising of Justice Vineet Kothari & Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana, who observed that such a series of alleged Public Interest Litigation writ petitions are filed unnecessarily by a professional and a practising Advocate, thus were constrained to observe that filing of such frivolous petitions are nothing but wasting the time of the court rather than serving a real cause of public relating to TASMAC liquor sale and the same have been dealt with by this court in the earlier batch of writ petitions and therefore, the High Court did not found any reason for the petitioner to keep on filing fresh public interest litigations for the same cause.

The Madras High Court in order to effectively dissuade the petitioner from filing such kind of petitions unnecessarily, imposed a cost of Rs.20,000/- on the petitioner and directed him to deposit in the Chief Minister Public Relief Fund, within a period of one week.

Before parting away the bench said that “We expect the petitioner to observe a sense of professionalism while espousing the public cause in the public interest litigation petitions, in future.”

-India Legal Bureau

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