After fake government offices, toll plazas and hospitals, now, a fake court & judge have been busted in Gujarat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaaepqvLB0I. On 21st October 2024, the Gujarat Police arrested a 37-year-old man named Morris Samuel Christian after Ahmedabad’s Bhadra civil court registrar / judge, Hardik Desai filed an FIR against him under The Arbitration and Conciliation Act of 1996, IPC 420 - cheating, IPC 170 - pretending to hold any office as a public servant), IPC 419 - cheating by personation and IPC 120B - criminal conspiracy. According to the complaint, Morris hailed from Gandhinagar and had been running a bogus arbitration tribunal (arbitration committee) in Vasna, Ahmedabad for more than 5 years since March 2019 despite not having an Arbitration Contract.He posed as the tribunal’s presiding officer and passed orders in favour of people who paid him for a favourable outcome, especially in the land deals of Gandhinagar without having any legal right or power to resolve conflicts. One such case was of a petitioner named  Thakor Babuji Chhanaji in 2019 regarding the rightful ownership of a piece of government land - a plot in Ahmedabad’s Paldi area worth crores of rupees belonging to Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). Morris ruled in favour of Chhanaji, passing an order to the Collector of Ahmedabad to transfer the government plot to Chhanaji. When the order & documents were submitted to the Bhadra civil court for execution, the authorities raised doubts about them and filed a police complaint. During the long investigation, the Gujarat Police uncovered Morris’s reality. They learnt that Morris himself had filed the case with the help of his friends to get ownership of the Paldi plot to later sell it for profit. The police also discovered that Morris targeted people whose cases of land disputes were pending before the civil courts and conned them into paying him a fee to resolve their cases by impersonating himself as a court-appointed official arbitrator. He then called these clients to his office in Vasna, which he had designed to look like a civil court. His friends posed as court staff and lawyers while he posed as the judge, creating a complete court-like environment. As the judge, Morris passed many orders that transferred valuable government land into private hands. This is not the first time Morris has been arrested. He was behind bars for 3 months in 2007 for a similar offence. According to Anil Kella, advocate and chairman of Bar Council of Gujarat's finance committee, "Morris claimed he had a degree from some international law university and a license from 'International Bar Council'. He practised in different courts by forging certificates and degrees. No such council existed." The Gujarat Police is currently identifying & studying all the cases in which Morris issued orders and further investigating how he continued to successfully keep up his appearance deceiving courts and other authorities into recognising his verdicts. 

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• morris samuel christian
• fake court in ahmedabad

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