"Entire Document is not only a forgery but a clumsy one" Justice Gautam Patel on Forged Order in his name

Justice Gautam Patel of the Bombay High Court has ordered an internal investigation after receiving a complaint from two lawyers that an order has been forged in his name..Advocates Umesh Vasant Mohite and Hetal Arvind Pandya had filed a handwritten complaint before Justice Patel on Saturday, last week. After reviewing the forged document, Justice Patel found that,."There is no manner of doubt that the entire document is not only a forgery but a clumsy one."Justice GS Patel.For starters, the forged order was stated to have been passed on a non-working day. The judge pointed out, "This document purports to be made on December1, 2019. That was a Sunday. No such order could ever have been passed.".Justice Patel proceeded to detail several irregularities in the forged error, from the formatting of the text and typographical errors to the fact that mentioned a fictional High Court division termed the "Revenue and Property Division". .The entire document is a forgery. There is no such order. There are several reasons for this. One, the document purports to be an order in the High Court’s Ordinary Original Civil Jurisdiction ‘In its Revenue and Property Division’. There is no such Division. It purports to be in a Commercial Succession Petition (L) No. 23520 of 2019. There is no such proceeding and there could be no such proceeding as a “Commercial Succession Petition”. There is no Testamentary Petition with a five-digit lodging number.Justice Gautam Patel.The judge was also able to discern that the forged order dated December 1 was post-dated before it was actually uploaded, given that it borrowed from a format used by Justice Patel in numbering a corrected order passed in another case on December 23.."Since the offending document uses this very file name ‘909- CARBPL1501-19-C.DOC’, it necessarily follows that though allegedly dated 1st December 2019, the offending document could have been generated or fabricated only after 23rd December 2019."Bombay High Court.Another "disturbing" irregularity observed was the absence of time stamps that usually accompany Bombay High Court orders and judgments to denote the time of their upload and download from the High Court website. .The judge observed that there is indication that the entire order may have been forged in the Court itself and that the same requires internal investigation. As recorded in the order,."When a previously uploaded order is accessed from a terminal in a Court Room, the watermark is visible but the date and time stamp is not. It may therefore be possible that the entire document was fabricated using some Court Room terminal. This needs to be investigated. I may note that my own staff has brought this to the attention of the Registry several times in the past.".As for the content of the forged order, the Court found that some of the text in the forged error "make no sense whatsoever." .The incomprehensible observations aside, Justice Patel went on to note that the forged order was made to create rights over certain term deposits with Indian Bank and Bank of Baroda in favour of a person who had died fifteen days ago..The deceased man's grand nephew stated that he had got the order from his father, and further that his father obtained it from one, Ashok Vageriya. However, despite enquiries, no such Advocate Vageria could be traced. The Court, however, recorded that the grand nephew provided a phone number claimed to that of the elusive advocate upon enquiries by the complainants. .In any case, the Court proceeded to direct that the Registrar (Legal Research) to initiate criminal proceedings in the matter, and to write to the Indian Bank and Bank of Baroda so that the accounts holding the term deposits involved may be frozen as a precautionary measure. .Justice Patel has also directed for the personal presence of Advocate Vageria and Parth Garodia, the grand nephew of the beneficiary of the forged order, for an explanation regarding the forged document before the Court.