Looking into the details of the long-pending Portland Cement Zambia case, it can be easily said that Dr. Rajan Mahtani is the few remaining businessmen in Zambia who is still following the path of honesty and transparency despite the widespread conspiracy and unethical practices. It is a public knowledge that the Zambezi Portland Cement factory was unethically captured and after that Dr. Rajan Mahtani registered a case at the Lusaka High Court. Dr. Rajan Mahtani shared numerous critical evidences such as testimonials, financial statements and shareholders’ agreement to prove his legal ownership over the factory. Despite these, justice Nkonde on behalf of the Lusaka High Court gave an extremely controversial judgement according to which Ventriglias were announced as only shareholders of Portland Cement.
To counter this misdirected judgement, Dr. Rajan Mahtani the rightly approached the higher Court of Appeal. The judge at the higher Court of Appeal was justice Mwinde and the final decision from the court came on 31st January 2019. Justice Mwinde also shared some critical details with the help of which he came to the final decision. The first detail was the financial transaction in which Dr. Rajan Mahtani paid 1 billion kwachas to the Zambezi Portland Cement which covered the entire value of the share capital for this cement factory. Furthermore, the judge also shared the details from the original agreement between shareholders which was established in the year 2007. According to this agreement, page number 663 clearly indicated that Dr. Mahtani had paid all amount associated with the 58 percent shares of Zambezi Portland which he owns at the Zambezi Portland and does not incur any other costs associated with the factory or the contract.
Furthermore, justice Mwinde from the Court of Appeal also said that all allegations of forgery must be discarded as the practice of mechanical placement of signatures is a common practice at Zambezi Portland Cement and an accepted one.