THOMA THOMAS Vs. PARAMESWARAN NAIR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE Plaintiff is the revision Petitioner.

(2.) THE order under challenge is one by which the court below has found that the document, based on which the suit is instituted, is a bond and not an agreement and hence the Plaintiff is liable to pay stamp duty under Article 13 of The Kerala Stamp Act. However, only a sum of Rs. 3 has been paid as stamp duty treating the document as an agreement. The court below therefore has held as follows:

(3.) THE cumulative effect of these sections is that the question as to whether or not an instrument chargeable with duty, has however, been insufficiently stamped, in so far as court proceedings or proceedings akin thereto are concerned, comes up for consideration, only when the party concerned takes steps to tender the said document in evidence. The court has then and only then the power to consider whether the document has been duly stamped. To put it differently, mere production of the document in contradistinction to tender the document in evidence, is not sufficient to impound the document chargeable with duty, however insufficiently stamped. Investigation to decide the issue whether the document is liable to be impounded under Section 33 thus cannot be had until it is tendered in evidence although the document had in the meantime been produced before the authority concerned. The Lahore High Court in the decisions in Ujjal Singh Sunder Singh v. Ahmad Tar Khan : AIR 1936 Lah 985 and Harjimal and Sons v. H.S. Palta and Sons, A.I.R. 1947 Lah 319 has expressed the same view.