Buying Property On Behalf Of The Wife Is Not Always A Matter Of Benami Transaction: Calcutta High Court

Buying Property On Behalf Of The Woman Is Not Always A Matter Of Benami Transaction: Calcutta high court 

The Calcutta High Court has ruled that buying property on behalf of a woman is not always considered a benami transaction. The court made this ruling in response to a case where a man had purchased a property in his wife’s name, but later claimed that it was his own property.

“In Indian society, if a husband supplies the money for acquiring property in the name of his wife, such a fact does not necessarily imply benami transaction. Source of money is, no doubt, an important factor but not a decisive one,” a division bench of Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Partha Sarthi Chatterjee said in its order.

The court was hearing a case in which a son at the centre of a family assets dispute claimed his late father had given a benami property to his mother.

“The burden of showing that a transfer is a benami transaction always lies on the person who asserts it,” the court observed.

In this instance, the father had purchased and registered the home in the name of his wife, a stay-at-home mother with no other source of income, in 1969. On it, he erected a two-story house. According to succession regulations, his wife, son, and daughter each received a third of the property after his death in 1999. The son lived there until 2011, but when he left, he sought to divide the property between himself, his mother, and his sister, a request that the other two rejected. Later, the son filed a court motion claiming a benami transaction.

To further complicate matters, the mother gave her daughter her half of the property before she passed away in 2019 because she was upset by her son’s behaviour.