In Brief
A property dispute involved an agreement to sell dated 04.02.1988 without proper stamp duty. The seller later denied the agreement and when the buyer sought specific performance, the trial court initially allowed secondary evidence of the agreement but later reversed this, barring the evidence under Section 35 of the Stamp Act, which prohibits admission of unstamped documents. The Supreme Court held that Section 35 applies only to documents chargeable with duty at the time of execution. Since the 1990 amendment making agreements with possession chargeable to stamp duty was not retroactive, the 1988 agreement was not liable to duty and therefore Section 35 did not bar its secondary evidence. The Court allowed the buyer to present secondary evidence under the Evidence Act and distinguished a prior precedent involving a document that was actually chargeable with duty.
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