The Mumbai police has told the magistrate's court here that the complaint filed by socialite Sheetal Mafatlal against her three friends for theft of paintings was false and had been filed with "malicious intent".
In 2012, Mafatlal had accused Arif Patel, Farukh Wadia and Yasmin MY of replacing 31 paintings by some well-known artists, worth more than Rs 100 crore, with fake ones.
But the police later recovered the original paintings from the premises which houses one of her companies.
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On August 22, police filed 'B summary' report in the magistrate's court, giving a clean chit to the accused. Sheetal had paid Rs three lakh to fashion photographer Vikram Bawa to make the fake paintings to implicate her friends, it said.
The report contains statements of twenty witnesses, including Bawa, who told the police that Sheetal had paid him.
Speaking to PTI, Yasmin alleged some of the witnesses were actually abettors of the crime and not witnesses as the police have said.
