Every unpaid depositor filed his own FIR, and the accused faced the same case over and over
The allegations were identical, the accused were the same, and they were said to be acting for the same company. The Allahabad High Court clubs the lot into the first FIR and treats the rest as witness statements.
When a deposit-taking company fails to pay on maturity, every depositor has the same grievance and every one of them can walk into a police station. On 23 September 2026 a Bench of Justice Chandra Dhari Singh and Justice Tarun Saxena dealt with what that produces for the person named in each complaint.
What was sought
The petition asked for a mandamus directing that all subsequent FIRs relating to non-payment of depositors’ maturity amounts be clubbed, consolidated or merged with the first — Case Crime No. 612 of 2024 at Police Station Kotwali Lalitpur, registered under Sections 111, 318, 61(2), 352 and 351(3) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita — treating that as the principal FIR.
It further asked that no further FIR containing similar allegations be registered against the petitioner anywhere in Uttar Pradesh, and that subsequent complaints about maturity proceeds be treated instead as statements under Section 161 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, now Section 180 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.
And where an investigating officer had already filed a police report and a court had taken cognizance, that those cases too be transferred and tried by the court with jurisdiction over the principal FIR.
The relief asked for is unusual in one respect. A prayer that no further FIR be registered anywhere in the State is, on its face, an order restraining the police from receiving complaints — which courts are ordinarily reluctant to make. What makes it arguable is that the complaints are not new allegations but repetitions of one.
The test of sameness
The Court applied the settled approach to multiple FIRs, which asks whether the offences form part of the same transaction.
Where several offences are part of the same transaction, the test of sameness is applied to find whether they are so related to one another on the point of purpose, or of cause and effect, as to result in one continuous action.
Applying it, the Bench found the allegations made by the different complainants in all the FIRs to be exactly the same. They were the same in nature; the accused named in them were said to be working at the behest of the same company or the same person; and on a perusal of all the FIRs the Court could find no difference or distinguishable fact between them.
That is the conclusion the relief follows from. A second FIR is permissible where a genuinely different offence is alleged. It is not permissible as a way of putting the same accused through the same investigation repeatedly at the instance of different complainants.
The Bench recorded that it could find nothing to distinguish one FIR from another on the material before it — which is what converts a series of separate complaints into one continuous course of conduct.
What was directed
All subsequent FIRs and the proceedings arising from them are to be clubbed with the principal FIR, and their contents treated as statements under Section 161 of the Code — Section 180 of the Sanhita.
That formulation preserves what matters to the complainants. Nobody’s account is discarded: each becomes a witness statement in the single investigation, and each depositor remains a witness to the loss he suffered. What disappears is the multiplicity of separate cases.
All subsequent FIRs are to be transferred forthwith to the police station where the principal FIR is lodged, provided a charge-sheet has not already been submitted to the court concerned, so that the investigation in the principal FIR can proceed without delay.
Where a court has already taken cognizance in a subsequent FIR, that case also stands transferred and clubbed, and is to be tried by the court having jurisdiction over the principal FIR.
The writ petition was disposed of on those terms.
The condition attached to the transfer — that a charge-sheet has not already been filed — reflects the point at which an investigation ends and a trial begins. Once a court is seised, the case moves by transfer rather than by clubbing at the police station.
The offences invoked in the principal FIR — under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita provisions on criminal breach of trust, cheating, criminal conspiracy and intimidation — are the ordinary charges in a deposit-default case, and they would be the same in every subsequent FIR.
Why this relief exists
The burden the order removes is real and is not primarily about conviction. A person facing fifteen identical FIRs across fifteen districts must obtain bail in each, answer summons in each, and brief counsel in each, long before any court has decided whether the allegation is true.
The same logic protects the investigation. One case file covering the whole course of dealing, with every depositor’s statement in it, is a stronger foundation than fifteen partial files built separately in fifteen police stations.