Supreme Court Halts Criminal Proceedings Against IREO and Oberoi Directors

The Supreme Court has halted criminal proceedings against IREO Group Managing Director Lalit Goyal and Oberoi Realty Limited Chairman and Managing Director Vikas Oberoi. These proceedings were based on allegations of cheating, criminal breach of trust, and forgery.

A vacation bench comprising Justices PV Sanjay Kumar and Augustine George Masih has issued a notice to the Haryana government following an appeal against a Punjab and Haryana High Court order.

“The question as to whether the filing of the second complaint would amount to an abuse of process and as to whether the complainant approached the court with unclean hands requires further examination. Issue notice to the respondents… In the meanwhile, there shall be stay of further proceedings in relation to FIR,” the bench stated.

The appeal was filed by the IREO and Oberoi groups, challenging the Punjab and Haryana High Court’s June 6 decision to uphold the registration of the FIR.

The FIR was initially registered at the DLF Phase 2 police station on the orders of the chief judicial magistrate. The complaint was lodged by Advance India Projects Limited (AIPL), alleging cheating, criminal breach of trust, and forgery by IREO and Oberoi groups.

According to the FIR, IREO and Oberoi allegedly conspired to defraud investors who had been investing since 2013, thereby deceiving both the investors and the AIPL Group. AIPL claimed that the IREO Group embezzled approximately ₹1,777 crore, transferring this amount out of the country, with ₹1,376 crore collected as advances from allottees.

AIPL further alleged that IREO collected ₹400 crore from around 70 allottees in the Grand Hyatt Residency Project in Sector 58, Chandigarh, as part of the embezzlement scheme.

The FIR also detailed that AIPL, which had entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with IREO to complete the project and had made significant progress in resolving the litigation, was subsequently cheated when IREO entered into a new agreement with the Oberoi Group in bad faith, violating the original agreement’s terms. This allegedly caused AIPL to suffer losses amounting to thousands of crores.

The case was registered against nine individuals under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), including sections 409 (criminal breach of trust), 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery of valuable security), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (using forged document), and 120-B (criminal conspiracy).