The Madras High Court has directed the producer of Rajinikanth-starrer Kochadaiiyaan to pay ₹2.52 crore, within four weeks, as compensation to an advertising agency that had financed the photorealistic motion capture movie in 2014, or end up serving a six-month simple imprisonment sentence in a cheque bounce case.
Justice Sunder Mohan passed the orders while partly allowing a criminal revision case filed by J. Murali Manohar and his production house, MediaOne Global Entertainment Limited, against the conviction and sentence imposed on them by a metropolitan magistrate in 2021 and confirmed by a city civil court in 2023.
According to the complainant, Abirchand Nahar, of AdBureau Advertising Private Limited, his firm had entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with MediaOne Global Entertainment on April 25, 2014 for extending a loan of ₹20 crore for the post-production work on Kochadaiiyaan.
The production house had reportedly told the financier that the sale of the lease rights of the movie for a particular area would fetch nothing less than ₹20 crore, and promised to pay 20% of the sale proceeds or a minimum guaranteed profit of ₹2.40 crore to the financier before selling the rights to any third party.
