Bandra luxe car dealer booked for cheating Pune engineer

MUMBAI: A Bandra-based high-end car dealer was booked for cheating on Monday after an engineer from Pune filed a complaint that a Tata SUV he purchased in exchange for his Mercedes was not delivered to him and that the dealer failed to return the money and sold his car to another buyer.
Digambar Sonawane, 37, a civil engineer working with the Pune Mahametro Corporation got in touch with Faheed Kadri who runs a business of buying and selling high-end cars in April 2023. Sonawane had made a deal to exchange his Mercedes car for a Tata SUV.
“The new car was priced at ₹21 lakh. The price came down by ₹4 lakh as I wanted to exchange it for my older car, so I paid ₹17 lakh. A sales deed was also signed by both parties,” Sonawande told the police. However, he said, Kadri said he would provide the transfer of ownership and other documents later.
In June, Kadri asked for the car to be sent in so that the transfer process would be completed. He kept on delaying returning the new car to Sonawane, making some excuse or the other for weeks. “After that, he told the complainant that he had a fallout with the person selling the car which had turned into a physical fight. He had to return the car after its previous owner made a police complaint against Kadri,” informed an officer from Bandra police.
He added the accused then promised to pay back Sonawane. Kadri wrote a cheque to the complainant but asked him to cash it in after a couple of months. For the next few months, Kadri kept telling Sonawane to not cash in the cheque then and wait for a while. In between all of this, the complainant’s previous car had also been sold to someone else instead of being returned to him.
Kadri has been booked under sections 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code.