The Supreme Court has observed that courts cannot act as recovery agents and deprecated the trend of turning civil disputes into criminal cases by parties in dispute.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh, while observing that threat of arrest cannot be leveraged for recovery of outstanding amounts, said this is a trend of recent times, where parties lodge criminal cases to recover money, which is a purely a civil dispute.

These observations were made by the apex court on Monday in a criminal case arising in Uttar Pradesh, where the bench noted that kidnapping charges were alleged against an individual, in a dispute over recovery of money.