This book shows how a crisis manager handled a disagreement repackaged as a criminal complaint

In Raipur, Chhattisgarh, a dispute over a Rs 30-crore scrap contract between two companies, RK Engineering and Kedhari Traders, began like any standard commercial fallout. Their agreement included a formal arbitration clause that was supposed to keep disputes civil, structured and private.

But instead of invoking arbitration, one party filed an FIR under Sections 406 and 420 of the Indian Penal Code, accusing the other of criminal breach of trust and cheating. There was no violence, no evidence of fraud, but a contractual disagreement repackaged as a criminal complaint.

Once the FIR was filed, the dynamic changed completely. The accused party was suddenly facing reputational damage, custodial risk and enormous pressure to settle. The legal system had been turned into a negotiating tool.

Eventually, the Chhattisgarh High Court intervened. The judges reviewed the FIR and ruled that it was a clear misuse of process. They emphasised that civil disputes, especially those protected by arbitration clauses, cannot be converted into criminal matters to gain leverage.

The FIR was quashed, and the court called it an abuse of the legal process. It was not a headline-grabbing case, but it was a textbook example of how criminal law is sometimes used, not to punish a crime, but to manufacture pressure where negotiation had failed. But in our case, even the identity of the complainant was a mystery, to us at least. I decided I needed to run my own investigation. Within 24 hours, I hired two private detectives known for their leg-work ability. Old-school guys. Between them, they knew how to get information without setting off alarms. I gave them one simple brief. Find out who this complainant was. Trace the name. Track the address listed in the FIR. I wanted to know if he existed, or if he was just a ghost conjured up for this script.

The address mentioned in the FIR was in Gurgaon. The detectives reached there in two days. The house was locked. Neighbours said it had been vacant for months. I asked them to dig deeper. The trail kept breaking. Every lead looped back into silence.

But piece by piece, I started pulling the FIR apart. The timeline was the first flaw. According to the FIR, the complainant was abducted from a sweet shop in Kanpur and taken by road to Ghaziabad. It claimed a journey across nearly 400 kilometres, in broad daylight, through highways filled with toll booths and cameras, with a man tied up and half-strangled inside the car.

I managed to get CCTV footage from every toll plaza on the stretch between Kanpur and Ghaziabad. The car mentioned in the FIR wasn’t anywhere in the footage. There was no record of the vehicle even entering Ghaziabad.

Next, we focused on the CCTV near the sweet shop from where the complainant claimed to have been picked up. The footage told another story. A black SUV, like the one described in the FIR, was parked on the same street, but no one entered it.

Then came the medical report. The one piece of paper that supposedly proved the physical assault. A doctor from Ghaziabad had examined the complainant and noted marks around the neck. But when my lawyer read the medical report, something didn’t sit right.

The injury was described as a horizontal ligature mark encircling the neck. That didn’t align with strangulation by rope. In most such cases, the mark is a complete, deep groove, often accompanied by bruising, abrasions or rope burns. Not a shallow, one-sided discoloration. We checked the doctor’s record. He had a history of issuing injury certificates in high-conflict cases. Suspiciously convenient.

By now, I was sure of two things. First, the complainant was not who he claimed to be. And second, someone had helped him build a legally convincing story with just enough detail to trigger the system.

I compiled everything. The toll booth data, the CCTV footage, the vacant address and the inconsistencies in the medical report. The police officer investigating the case, or investigating officer (IO), had been silent so far. He hadn’t summoned me yet. But that silence could turn into action at any moment.

I managed to get his number through an old contact. I called and introduced myself. Polite, straightforward. I requested a meeting. To his credit, he agreed.

Getting Ramesh to come along and meet the IO was another matter entirely. He was convinced he would be arrested the moment he stepped into the officer’s line of sight. He had already spent eight months in judicial custody during the Taxi Chalao case. I couldn’t blame him. But we didn’t have the luxury of waiting this one out.

After some persuasion, Ramesh agreed to come on one condition. Someone else would go first, meet the IO, gauge the mood and call back. If the environment felt safe, Ramesh would walk in. The advance man went in and called 20 minutes later. The IO had not been aggressive. He asked basic questions, listened more than he spoke. Ramesh finally agreed to come. When we walked into the room, there was a noticeable tension but no hostility or aggression.

The IO listened patiently as Ramesh explained his version. The details were clear. The investor didn’t exist. There was no 50 crore payment. The timeline in the FIR was off. The car movements didn’t check out. The CCTV footage didn’t match the story.

To our surprise, the IO didn’t push back. He nodded slowly, asked a few clarifying questions and took notes. Then he said something that made the air shift. “You’re not the only one who thinks this case is strange.” He promised to get back.

But the question still remained. Who was behind the FIR? And why? The breakthrough came quietly, almost casually, from one of the detectives I had hired. They had finally managed to track the complainant. He wasn’t a big fish, but the man he worked for was … a shark.

“The complainant is the personal security officer of a businessman who was recently involved in another scam,” the private investigator told me.

That changed everything. I passed this information to Ramesh, who told me that while he was in jail for the Taxi Chalao case, he had met this scamster businessman who was being held for fraud in the telecom sector. The scamster promised Ramesh that he would arrange bail for him in the blink of an eye if he agreed to pay the right amount. The “right” amount meaning Rs 8 crore. He claimed to have the right contacts in the High Court and influence in Delhi.

Ramesh had agreed out of desperation. But before the arrangement could play out, the Supreme Court granted Ramesh bail on a different petition. The fixer had delivered nothing.

So Ramesh decided to pay nothing. The man didn’t take that well. Instead of confronting Ramesh, he had found another route. He filed an FIR through his personal security officer, using him as a proxy complainant. A man with no face, no business history and no connection to the project. That was who had accused me of attempted murder. Not an investor but a pawn in someone else’s game of leverage and revenge.

I pulled together everything we had. The ghost address, the toll footage, the CCTV, the fabricated medical report and, now, this connection to a known conman. We put everything together in a concise brief. Documents. Timestamps. Video stills. Then I reached out to someone who mattered. The police commissioner of the city had a reputation for pragmatism. I arranged a meeting and requested him to take a fair look at the facts.

In the meeting, I recounted the story the FIR had told. Then I laid out the story our investigation had uncovered. He listened carefully, asked a few pointed questions and made notes without reacting. When I showed him the link between the complainant and the man Ramesh had met in jail, there was a subtle change in his posture. A quiet acknowledgement that the direction of the case was no longer straightforward. He promised to look into it. And for once, someone actually did.

Within a fortnight, the tone changed. The IO became more transparent. The pressure subsided. Two weeks later, a closure report was filed. The FIR, they concluded, was baseless. The case would not proceed. Phew.

There was no moment of victory. But Ramesh breathed easy now. I went back to work the next morning, as if nothing had happened. But it had.

For weeks, I had carried the weight of a false allegation built to destroy. And I had seen how easily the system could be hijacked to serve that goal. A police complaint, if crafted cleverly, had the power to frame anyone, even without evidence. Truth came later, if at all.

This case came close to ruining us. Somewhere else, the same machinery was being used more openly and more brazenly by people who had turned the system itself into a business.

In Kanpur, a few years later, the police uncovered an extortion racket run by a practising lawyer who understood exactly how complaints are drafted, which sections create fear and how police procedure reacts to certain words. Working with him was an aide who handled outreach and negotiation, and a small group of proxy complainants who existed largely on paper. Their targets were not random. They focused on businessmen with pending disputes and local leaders affiliated with a major political party, people for whom arrest or public allegation would be more damaging than any financial settlement.

The entry point was always the same. An FIR. The complainant would appear cooperative but vague, offering just enough detail to trigger action without locking himself into facts that could be verified too easily. Once the FIR was registered, the system did the rest.

The calls that followed were never direct. No one demanded money on record. Instead, the language was suggestive. This section carries jail time. That section can be added. Arrests are possible. Remand is unpredictable. Then, almost as an aside, a way out would be hinted at. If the target agreed, the case could weaken. The complainant could lose interest. Statements could change. All of it, of course, required “resolution”.

When investigators finally intervened, they found the same pattern repeated across multiple files. FIRs clustered around the same police stations. Medical reports issued by the same clinics. Negotiations running in parallel through informal channels. Everyone involved knew how the system reacts to an FIR loaded with non-bailable sections. The police eventually arrested the people behind this racket. As later reported in media investigations, the pattern revealed how procedural fear can be monetised.

Reading about that case later, I realised how close we had come to becoming just another line item in someone else’s operation. But we were saved by preparation and action, and the ability to dismantle the lie before it hardened into procedure. That experience reshaped how I think about risk. Because the most dangerous threats in business today are not always crimes. Sometimes, they are accusations engineered to sound just real enough to destroy.

These experiences taught me that the real threat is not always the crime itself. Sometimes, it’s the illusion of one, weaponised by people who understand how to make a lie sound true.

In business, you prepare for risk, market volatility, regulatory changes and project delays. What you don’t prepare for is a well-orchestrated lie dressed up as a criminal charge. I had always believed that the facts were enough, that truth would eventually prevail. What I learned is that in certain environments, truth alone is not a strategy. You need patience, precision and the courage to confront shadows without blinking.

You also need to recognise that the silence that follows is not a sign that things are okay but a warning. Because if it happened once, it could happen again. I was well prepared for what had come my way. As any CXO should be.

Excerpted with permission from Relax, It’s Only a Raid: Confessions of a Crisis Manager, Vineet Relia, Juggernaut.