Supreme Court Breaks Its Own Three-Month Limit, Delivers Judgment More Than Two Years After Reserving It
The Supreme Court has delivered a judgment more than two years after reserving it, drawing attention to an apparent contradiction between the Court’s own recent effort to curb delays in pronouncing judgments and the prolonged pendency of the matter before it. The judgment was delivered on September 7, 2026, by a Bench comprising Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra in a case involving pharmaceutical major Sanofi India Limited and a CBI corruption and cheating case.
The judgment had been reserved on May 15, 2024. It was ultimately pronounced more than two years later, despite the Supreme Court having, only a few months earlier, laid down a three-month outer timeframe for constitutional courts to pronounce reserved judgments.
The case concerned allegations arising from the purchase of medicines by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mysuru. The CBI case involved alleged irregularities resulting in a claimed loss of approximately ₹3.53 lakh to the government. Sanofi India had approached the Supreme Court seeking quashing of the criminal proceedings. The Bench declined to quash the case.
The 99-page judgment nevertheless has significance beyond the immediate dispute because it examined an important question concerning corporate criminal liability. The Supreme Court held that a company, despite being a juristic person, can be prosecuted without necessarily requiring the natural person responsible for its affairs to be separately identified or arraigned at the initial stage.
At the same time, the Court clarified that merely alleging that a company committed an offence or possessed the required criminal intent would not be sufficient. The allegations must prima facie indicate that some natural person acted on behalf of the corporation, that the conduct was connected with the alleged offence and that the surrounding circumstances do not make the existence of the required mens rea inherently improbable.
The timing of the judgment has become particularly significant because of a major ruling delivered by a Supreme Court Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant on May 29, 2026. In that judgment, the Court addressed prolonged delays in the pronouncement of judgments by High Courts and directed that a reasoned judgment should ordinarily be pronounced within a maximum period of three months from the date it is reserved.
The May directions were framed against the background of cases in which judgments had remained reserved for prolonged periods, including criminal matters involving personal liberty. The Supreme Court emphasised that excessive delay after completion of arguments can itself undermine the rights of litigants and weaken confidence in the judicial process.
The mechanism prescribed by the Court was intended to make prolonged reservation more difficult. Where a judgment remains pending beyond three months, the Registrar General of the concerned High Court is required to place the matter before the Chief Justice. The Chief Justice can then require the concerned Bench to pronounce the judgment within an additional two weeks. If the judgment remains outstanding, the Chief Justice may assign the matter to another Bench for fresh hearing and disposal.
The contrast with the Sanofi matter is therefore striking. While the Supreme Court has demanded institutional discipline from High Courts in dealing with reserved judgments, one of its own Benches took more than two years to pronounce the decision in a case that had been reserved in May 2024. The development has consequently raised questions about whether similar principles concerning judicial delay should also apply internally within the Supreme Court.
The issue is not entirely new for the Supreme Court. Earlier in 2026, several judgments delivered by different Benches had reportedly remained reserved for 11 months or longer. This suggests that prolonged reservation is not confined to one particular Bench or one category of litigation.
The Supreme Court itself addressed the problem more than two decades ago in Anil Rai v. State of Bihar. In that 2001 decision, the Court examined the consequences of judgments being kept reserved for extended periods and laid down safeguards intended to discourage such practices. It had, among other things, recognised a mechanism under which litigants could approach the Chief Justice when a judgment remained reserved for more than six months.
The present development consequently highlights a broader institutional challenge. Judicial timelines are not merely matters of administrative efficiency. A judgment that remains reserved for years leaves parties uncertain about their legal position and can prolong criminal proceedings, commercial disputes, regulatory uncertainty and other consequences flowing from the unresolved case.
The Sanofi litigation itself had already been pending for more than seven years. Proceedings before the Bengaluru CBI court had reportedly remained stayed following a Supreme Court order passed in 2019. The prolonged reservation of the final Supreme Court judgment therefore added another layer of delay to litigation that had already remained unresolved for several years.
The case also demonstrates why timely pronouncement is particularly important in criminal proceedings involving corporate entities. Until the Supreme Court clarified the applicable principles concerning corporate criminal liability, the parties remained uncertain about whether the prosecution could proceed against Sanofi on the allegations placed before the Court. The eventual judgment now provides guidance on the threshold for prosecuting corporations while leaving the underlying criminal proceedings intact.
There is, however, an important distinction between the Court’s three-month direction and the circumstances surrounding the Sanofi judgment. The May 2026 directions were specifically directed at High Courts, and the latest report does not indicate that the Supreme Court has formally applied that three-month framework to its own Benches. The issue is therefore better understood as an institutional inconsistency or irony rather than a finding that the Sanofi Bench violated a binding three-month rule expressly applicable to itself.
The development nevertheless places renewed focus on the principle that justice delayed can become justice denied. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasised that litigants should not be left indefinitely waiting for the legal consequences of a hearing that has already concluded. Its latest judgment in the Sanofi case now provides an unusual illustration of the very problem the Court has recently sought to address elsewhere in the judicial system.
The immediate legal consequence is that Sanofi India’s challenge to the CBI proceedings has failed, allowing the underlying prosecution to continue. The broader institutional question, however, is likely to remain: if three months is considered an appropriate outer limit for constitutional courts to pronounce reserved judgments, what mechanism should ensure that the same principle is consistently reflected in the Supreme Court itself?
