Mere Engaging Of Reputed Counsel Does Not Imply Sufficiency Of Funds: Delhi HC [Read Judgment]

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday refused to accept denial of maintenance to a woman merely on the ground that she had engaged reputed Counsel for her application and had thereby spent huge amount of money in the process.

"...the mere fact that a party engages counsel of repute does not ipso facto imply that the said party has sufficient funds. It is a known fact that counsels may appear for various reasons not limited to payment of fee," Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva observed.

The Court was hearing a Petition filed by one Ms. Sonia Gupta, challenging an order passed in May, 2017 whereby her application for interim maintenance had been rejected by the Trial Court.

The sole reason for the rejection of the application was that the Petitioner had claimed to have spent Rs. 3,00,000 per month in engaging reputed lawyers. With this information, the Trial Court had concluded that she must have enough corpus to pay them and hence, did not need to be provided maintenance.

The High Court, however, did not agree with this and opined that the Trial Court had passed the order "without considering the merits of the case of the parties on mere on suppositions and assumptions".

Ruling that the impugned order was unsustainable, it then remitted the matter back to the Trial Court for reconsideration of the application in accordance with law.