A Delhi High Court Judgment Every Litigator Should Read
Documents decide commercial cases. Invoices, GST records, licences, trademark applications, photographs, these do more than support a claim. They usually are the claim. Courts read them to answer three questions: who used the mark first, who built a reputation, and who deserves interim protection.
But what happens when the documents themselves cannot be trusted?
The Delhi High Court confronted that question in More Than Water Private Limited v. NESCO Limited (FAO(OS) (COMM) 123/2026, decided 1 July 2026). The dispute began as a fight over the mark “WATERBOX” for packaged drinking water. It ended as something larger: a ruling on what a court does when both sides hand it fabricated proof.
Neither party escaped criticism. The appellant’s invoices, meant to prove use since 2018, did not survive scrutiny. The respondent’s registration, built on photographs and invoices filed before the Trade Marks Registry, fared no better. In paragraph 28, the Division Bench called the case “a classic example of the ills that have crept into legal proceedings,” and said corporate litigants had “lost any fear of consequences” of relying on false documents.
The message travels well beyond trademark law: a case is only as strong as its weakest document.
How the 2018 Story Fell Apart
Before a court grants an injunction, it asks who used the mark first. That question sent the Bench straight into the appellant’s invoice book.
The appellant traced its rights to 2018, through a predecessor firm, M/s Meera Enterprises, and relied on two invoices from 2020 to anchor the claim. One detail undid them: the invoices carried HSN Code 2710, the code for petroleum oils, not water. Senior counsel for the appellant asked for time to explain it. He returned to Court still unable to.
No GST returns backed the invoices either. The Division Bench treated the gap as more than an oversight. It read the invoices as manipulated, and it declined to build a finding of prior use on them.
A second discovery compounded the damage. The appellant told the Court, in May 2026, that its application for a Central FSSAI licence remained pending, and that the licence would clear its path to sell across India. The licence had already been rejected, on 17 April 2026, weeks before the hearing. The appellant never mentioned the rejection, not in its appeal papers, not in argument. The respondent produced the rejection order itself.
The Court called it what it was: a false and misleading submission.
These two findings decided the appeal. Equity has always asked litigants to come with clean hands. A plaintiff who leans on manipulated invoices and conceals an adverse licensing order forfeits that standing. Citing the Supreme Court’s language in Tommorroland Limited v. Housing and Urban Development Corporation Limited, the Bench held that such conduct alone disentitles a party from discretionary relief, whatever the underlying merits of its trademark claim.
The appellant then tried a fallback: ignore the doubtful 2020 invoices, it argued, and decide the case on the invoices filed from 2023 onward. The Court refused. A litigant does not get to pick which of its own documents a court should forget. Allowing that, the Bench said, would only reward dishonesty in litigation.
A Registration Resting on Fabricated Proof
The Court’s scrutiny did not stop at the appellant.
NESCO had secured its registration for “MY WATER BOX” on a claimed user date of 15 October 2020, supported by photographs and invoices filed before the Registrar. At the hearing, NESCO’s senior counsel made an unusual concession: the respondent would not rely on the 2020 user claim, or even on the registration itself, and would instead rest its defence on actual commercial use dating only from 2025.
That concession might have closed the issue. It did not.
The Bench went back to the documents NESCO had filed with the Registrar and did not like what it found. The photographs, it held, were ex facie fabricated. The invoices for 2020 to 2023 recorded no prices at all, only quantities, an omission the Court called “highly odd” for genuine business records.
The consequence was immediate. The Bench restrained NESCO from relying on its registration against the appellant or any third party for as long as the suit remains pending. NESCO must first prove, at trial, that the photographs and invoices it filed with the Registrar are genuine. Only then can it fall back on the registration. If the documents turn out to be fake, the Court has already indicated what follows: a direction to the Registrar to cancel the registration, and perjury proceedings against NESCO’s officers.
The principle here reaches past this one case. Honesty is not owed to courts alone. It is owed equally to statutory authorities like the Trade Marks Registry. A registration bought with fabricated documents cannot later shield its owner from judicial scrutiny.
Why This Case Reaches Beyond Trademark Law
Most trademark appeals turn on adoption, similarity, and confusion. This one turned on something more basic: could the Court trust either party’s paperwork.
Both sides had leaned on questionable records to build their claims, the appellant on invoices for prior use, the respondent on photographs and invoices for a registration. The Division Bench’s response was blunt. Relying on false documents, it said, “interferes with the administration of justice” itself, because it strips a court of any reliable basis to decide who used a mark first.
The judgment makes a point worth remembering: invoices are not litigation props. They are fiscal records, tied to a company’s GST and income-tax compliance. When a party is willing to alter that record for a trademark case, the concern runs well past the trademark.
The Court stopped short of a final finding that any document was fake. That question waits for trial. But it drew a clear line for the interim stage: documents that look manipulated on their face cannot support discretionary relief, whatever the eventual outcome after evidence.
Perjury Is Now a Real Consequence, Not a Threat
Paragraph 28 carries the judgment’s sharpest line. This was, the Bench wrote, “a classic example of the ills that have crept into legal proceedings where corporate entities like the parties herein have lost any fear of consequences of relying upon false documents in Court proceedings and proceedings before the Registrar of Trademarks.”
The Bench backed the words with a mechanism. Both parties must now prove their invoices at trial, under strict proof. If the appellant’s invoices turn out to be fake, its officers face perjury proceedings. If NESCO’s photographs and invoices turn out to be fake, the Court will direct the Registrar to cancel the registration, and NESCO’s officers face the same exposure.
For litigators, this closes off a strategy that too many treat as low risk: file a shaky document, hope it survives scrutiny, and worry about consequences only if the opponent catches it. This Bench has made clear that getting caught now carries a cost that outlasts the interim order.
Conclusion
This judgment is not really about who gets to sell water under which name. It is about what a court can rely on when it decides who does. By holding both sides to the same standard, and by attaching real consequences (perjury proceedings, possible cancellation of a registration) to fabricated proof, the Delhi High Court has restated a principle courts too rarely enforce: no litigant earns equitable relief or statutory protection on the strength of a false document.
The strongest case is not the one with the most documents. It is the one with the fewest lies in them.
Note: The observations discussed in this article are based on the prima facie findings recorded by the Delhi High Court at the interim stage. The authenticity of the disputed documents is yet to be finally determined during trial.
By Mamta Sharma, Advocate