A car tracking company was ordered on Wednesday by a consumer court to pay more than Rs1.8 million in damages.
The damages were awarded for losing the record of a vehicle theft, misleading the petitioner by providing false information about the stolen car’s location and being uncooperative in the owner’s efforts to recover the vehicle.
The company was ordered to either recover the stolen vehicle or pay the petitioner its cost (Rs1.775 million), reimburse the cost of the tracker (Rs40,000), litigation charges (Rs20,000), and compensation for offering substandard services (Rs50,000).
The damages are among the largest awarded by the court that was set up in 2007. In 2009, a company had been ordered to pay Rs1.8 million as damages.
A consumer court had ordered another vehicle tracking company in April to pay Rs1,509,430 in damages.
Petitioner Rasheed Ahmed Siddiqui had filed petition, stating that in January, 2009 he had purchased a Honda Civic VTI Prosmatic Oriel. He said he had then installed a Rs40,000 tracker in his vehicle, which he bought from Tracking World.
A few days after he bought the car, four armed men snatched his car at gunpoint on Raiwind Road. He was also deprived of Rs40,000 in cash.
Siddiqui said that he had called the tracking company and informed them about the theft. A company official kept updating him about the location of the car. The petitioner said that accompanied by a police team, he had followed the company’s directions but had not found his car.
He was then told that the car was on the Lahore-Islamabad motorway, even though that night the motorway was closed due to fog. The petitioner said that he had later learnt that the respondent company had no record of his car being stolen and had deliberately misled him about the vehicle’s location.
The respondent’s counsel said that the company relied on a third party for locating a stolen vehicle. The company representative, he said, had passed on whatever information he had been given by the third company. He said that the petitioner was asked if he wanted to jam the car’s engine, an option that Siddiqui chose not to use. Siddiqui, he said, was given a complete report on the location of the stolen vehicle, which included maps and photographs.
The petitioner’s counsel then produced an audio recording of a conversation between the petitioner and a company operator, in which Siddiqui directed the operator to jam the engine. The operator told Siddiqui that there was a technical problem because of which the engine could not be jammed.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 5th, 2012.
COMMENTS (5)
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this looks fake and fixed!
Very encouraging to know consumer courts give such speedy justice. Great job
Bravo the consumer courts.......... atleast the ray of hope for speedy justice is not lost..........
the courts must protect consumers and it is land mark judgement, the purpose for the establishment of consumer courts was to provide speedy and inexpensive justice to general public.