SC: A Bad Business Deal Is Not a Crime

Citation: Parag Kishore Satoskar & Others v. State of Jharkhand & Another, 2026 INSC 846 (Supreme Court of India, decided August 12, 2026)

A trader accused a camphor company’s top executives of cheating and criminal breach of trust after the company stopped supplying goods and failed to return over ₹41 lakh he’d advanced under a distributorship deal. The Supreme Court quashed the entire police case, holding that cheating requires proof of dishonest intent right from the start — which was missing here, since the contract was genuinely signed, honored for months, and goods were actually delivered before the relationship soured — and that breach of trust requires money to be held “in trust” for someone else, not simply paid as an advance under a contract. The Court found this was, at its heart, a commercial dispute over pricing and unpaid dues — the kind of fight that belongs in a civil court, not a police station — and warned that using criminal law to pressure payment on a contractual debt is an abuse of the legal process.