Calcutta High Court refuses to intervene into Messi event fiasco at Salt Lake Stadium
Telegraph | 23 December 2025
A division bench of Calcutta High Court on Monday refused to intervene — at this stage — into a police probe related to the December 13 Lionel Messi fiasco at the Salt Lake Stadium.
The order by a bench of acting Chief Justice Sujoy Paul and Justice Partha Sarathi Sen came on a batch of public interest litigations — moved by the leader of Opposition in Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari, and two others — seeking judicial intervention into the stained spectacle that had to be cut short.
The division bench said that the investigation was at a preliminary stage and that the court would not intervene at this stage. The next date for the hearing has been fixed on February 16, 2026.
During the hearing, counsel for the Bengal administration said that the central government was in charge of the security of the Argentine superstar and that the state only provided the “logistical support.”
The petitioners sought a court-monitored probe into the incident as “huge transactions were involved in organising the event”.
Adhikari’s counsel Billwadal Bhattacharya said: “Since August, the key organiser of the event, Satadru Dutta, with the help of state police and administration, had collected crores of rupees from the general public, assuring that Messi would be present in the stadium. It was state-sponsored cheating. So an independent agency should be asked to probe into the entire episode.”
Senior advocate Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya and advocate Sabyasachi Chatterjee argued on behalf of two other petitioners. Bhattacharya claimed that since DGP (Rajeev Kumar) has been showcased, the police had no right to conduct any probe into the issue.
Dutta’s counsel, Indranil Roy, alleged that the police were not cooperating.
Appearing for the state, senior advocate Kalyan Bandyopadhyay declined to agree that the state administration was in any way responsible. “Since so many dignitaries came to the city, the state had only provided their security.”