A Delhi Court has rejected a plea filed by a man claiming that he is not capable of paying the interim maintenance since he was without any income. The court noted that the petitioner husband is a ‘man of means’ as he works as the director at a company that has Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli as its ambassador.
Additional Sessions Judge Anuj Agrawal was hearing the petition filed by the husband challenging a trial court order. The trial court has ordered Rs 30,000 maintenance to his estranged wife.
The petitioner had challenged the order claiming that he had nil income and lived on charity.
After the woman’s counsel put the wrapper of the product on record, the court noted, “This court can take judicial notice of the fact that the brand ambassador of said brand is Virat Kohli, the test cricket captain of Team India. Therefore, it looks highly improbable that a company which is running into great losses (as claimed by appellant), was in a position to afford a celebrity of such stature for advertisement of its product.”
Therefore, the husband was held to be a “man of means” having a large business and appeared to be “impersonating himself as a pauper” to defeat the “legitimate maintenance claim” of the estranged wife, the bench added.
The wife had filed a complaint under Section 12 of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act. In the complaint, she submitted that she has been living separately and has no source of livelihood.
The husband had contended that the wife was not entitled to maintenance as she was educated and having considerable income from her business.
“It appears that in the instant case also, appellant/husband withheld his true income from the court. It cannot be believed that a person who was capable of supporting a family by getting married, would all of a sudden become devoid of all sources of income,” the court noted.
The court went on to observe that once the monthly income of the husband had been assessed at ₹1 lakh per month, the interim maintenance of ₹30,000 cannot be unjustifiable or exorbitant by any stretch of the imagination.
