Bail obtained during winter vacation after hiding a writ court refusal goes back to Karnataka High Court

Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu found a GST accused hid parallel bail attempts, remitted his bail plea, kept him on interim bail, and set a rule on vacation listing.

Mohammed Kamran, accused of a ₹43 crore GST input tax credit fraud, pursued release in December 2025 in three places at once. He had a bail petition pending in the Karnataka High Court, filed a fresh bail application before the Sessions Court, and brought a writ petition challenging his arrest. The Sessions Court rejected his application. The writ court refused interim release on 22 December. Later that day his lawyer had the bail petition listed during the winter vacation, and on 26 December a Single Judge granted bail without being told of either refusal. On 16 October 2026 the Supreme Court held that he had abused the process of law and suppressed material facts. Justice Dipankar Datta, writing for a bench with Justice Sheel Nagu, did not cancel his liberty. It revived the bail petition and sent it back to the same judge, with Kamran on interim bail in the meantime.

The complaint and the arrest

The Senior Intelligence Officer of the Directorate General of Service Tax Intelligence filed a private complaint before the Special Court for Economic Offences, Bengaluru. It alleged that Kamran, as proprietor of M/s MK Traders, issued invoices without supplying goods, availed fraudulent input tax credit, falsified documents and accounts, and gave false information to evade tax. The alleged loss was ₹43,08,22,936. The charges were under Section 16(2)(b) read with Sections 132(1)(b), (c) and (f) of the CGST Act, 2017, punishable under Section 135. The department also said he had resisted a search of his residences and fled, and a separate FIR was registered for that.

Kamran was arrested on 16 September 2025. The trial court and the Additional City Civil and Sessions Judge rejected successive bail applications. His petition before the High Court was first listed on 12 December 2025. The Court directed service on the department's standing counsel and gave two weeks for objections. The winter vacation began on 20 December.

The department's grievance

Additional Solicitor General N. Venkataraman argued that the department had effectively not been heard. The panel counsel present on 26 December had no instructions to argue on the merits and asked for an adjournment because the engaged standing counsel was not available. The adjournment was refused and the matter was heard during the vacation. He also relied on the writ petition, No. 38771 of 2025, filed on 22 December, in which Kamran told the writ court that his pending bail petition under Section 483 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 was not an efficacious remedy and asked to be released. Interim release was refused that day, and the writ petition was dismissed on 7 July 2026. The Single Judge hearing the bail petition was never told about the refusal.

For Kamran, senior counsel S. Nagamuthu said the absence of counsel had not been raised before the High Court, that counsel had asked for an adjournment only faintly and then argued the merits, and that the department had not filed objections within the two weeks allowed. On the merits, he said investigation was complete, the offences were triable by a Magistrate and carried at most five years, and Kamran had been on bail for over nine months.

What the hearing recording showed

The Court said it would normally have dismissed the petition at the outset. It issued notice because the case raised judicial propriety and uberrima fides, the utmost good faith expected of a party seeking discretionary relief. On 10 September 2026 it allowed further affidavits. Kamran filed a pen drive with the video recording of the 26 December hearing, and the bench watched it and read the transcript.

The bench found something in both accounts. The department's counsel did make some submissions on the merits. But counsel had first asked for an adjournment because standing counsel had been engaged, and argued only as an officer of the Court once that was refused. The department was therefore not wholly unrepresented, but it was not represented by its standing counsel either.

Forum shopping and suppression

The bench was more concerned with Kamran's conduct. He filed the High Court bail petition on 9 December 2025 and a similar application in the Sessions Court the next day, which was rejected while the High Court petition was pending. On 22 December he filed the writ petition and was refused interim release. A memo for listing the bail petition was filed later that day. Neither the Sessions Court rejection, his fourth, nor the writ court's refusal was disclosed to the Single Judge.

The Court described this as forum shopping and as suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, suppressing the truth and suggesting falsehood. An accused may challenge an arrest or seek bail, but pursuing parallel remedies while keeping every court unaware of the others is an abuse of process. The Court added that the vacation listing itself was a problem. The petition had been listed two weeks ahead, not for a specific vacation date or before the Vacation Bench, so it should have come up after the court reopened. Getting it listed without proper notice to the department was an attempt to steal a march and mislead the Court. It also recorded that the department had not filed objections, perhaps because the time was too short.

Order, and a note for registries

The bench said that if the arrest had been for a heinous offence, it would have taken a much stricter view. It did not set the bail aside. It set aside the part of the 26 December order that disposed of the bail petition, so the petition is revived in the High Court. Instead of regular bail, Kamran remains on interim bail on the same terms. The department has two weeks, peremptorily, to file a counter-affidavit, and Kamran one week to reply. The same Single Judge is to decide the petition on its merits, preferably by the end of 2026, and interim bail continues until then. The appeal was disposed of.

The Court added guidance for High Court registries, subject to each court's rules. Where a bench directs listing two weeks later and that date falls during a vacation, the registry should ordinarily calculate the two weeks excluding the vacation. A petition should be listed during the vacation only if the bench made it returnable on a specific vacation date or directed listing before the Vacation Bench. The Court said this would ensure uniformity and prevent litigants from being prejudiced by an inadvertent act of the court.