Runwal Constructions tried a jurisdictional argument that, on paper, looked neat enough. The Maharashtra Real Estate Appellate Tribunal, MahaREAT, is the body meant to hear appeals under the RERA Act, and its chairperson and members were appointed by a government resolution dated 8 May 2018. Runwal's case was that once that resolution issued, the Maharashtra Revenue Tribunal, which had been hearing RERA appeals in the interim, lost its authority to do so. If that argument held, a batch of orders the Revenue Tribunal had passed against the developer in the Runwal Infinity project, also known as Runwal Sanctuary, in Nahur, Mulund, would fall away for want of jurisdiction.
Justice Madhav J. Jamdar was not willing to treat an appointment on paper as the same thing as a functioning tribunal. The chairperson and members named in the May 2018 resolution did not take oath and start hearing matters until 24 December 2018. Between those two dates, the Revenue Tribunal, which had been designated to handle RERA appeals until MahaREAT was ready, continued to do its job, and the court held that it was entitled to. A tribunal comes into existence, in the court's reading, when it is actually constituted and functioning, not on the date a government order names its members.
The underlying dispute goes back to a Maharashtra Revenue Tribunal order of 1 November 2018, passed by the Tribunal's President acting in the capacity of the designated appellate authority. That order went against Runwal and in favour of homebuyers in the Runwal Infinity project, directing payment of interest for the delay in handing over possession. The rate fixed was 10.05 per cent per annum, running from 1 February 2014 until possession was actually given, and Runwal's second appeals to the High Court challenged both that order and the jurisdiction of the authority that passed it.
By the time the matter reached the Bombay High Court, Runwal was running two separate lines of defence: first that the Revenue Tribunal had no business hearing the appeal after May 2018, and second that the interest relief itself should not stand. The court rejected both. Having found that the Revenue Tribunal's jurisdiction survived until MahaREAT was functionally in place in December 2018, there was no basis left to disturb an order passed within that window. The merits challenge fared no better, and the interest award in favour of the homebuyers was left undisturbed.
The court's language on delay was pointed. Builders, it said in substance, cannot hold on to buyers' money indefinitely and then resist paying for the delay by raising a jurisdictional technicality years after the fact. Having dismissed all eleven connected second appeals, the court also imposed costs, a lakh of rupees each in two of them and ten thousand rupees each in the remaining eight, payable within four weeks. Reports at the time of the ruling indicated that possession of the flats in question still had not been handed over, years after the Revenue Tribunal's original order.
For developers facing older RERA appeals that happen to have passed through the Revenue Tribunal rather than MahaREAT, this ruling closes off a line of attack that depended on treating the May 2018 appointment order as the moment MahaREAT became operative. Anyone looking to revisit a Revenue Tribunal order from the transitional period between the appointment and the oath-taking will need a different argument, because the Bombay High Court has now said in terms that the gap between naming a tribunal's members and the tribunal actually sitting is not a jurisdictional vacuum that a litigant can exploit after the fact.
There is also a practical signal here for homebuyers' counsel handling execution of old orders against developers who have resisted payment for years on one procedural ground or another. A jurisdictional objection raised at the execution stage, long after the appellate order has become final, is not an easy route to reopen a settled dispute, and this judgment gives buyers' lawyers a clean precedent to cite whenever a developer tries exactly that manoeuvre against a Revenue Tribunal order passed in the window between May and December 2018. Given how many RERA matters from Maharashtra's early transition years still carry Revenue Tribunal orders in their history, the number of disputes this single ruling can resolve, without a separate round of litigation on jurisdiction, is larger than the eleven appeals actually decided.