Zambian tycoon Rajan Mahtani built a bank, lost a cement plant and sued Bob Diamond. He says he still has not been paid what he is owed.

In 1986, a 38-year-old Zambian accountant of Indian origin named Rajan Lekhraj Mahtani did what no one of his background had done before: he started a bank. Not a foreign subsidiary. Not a state institution. A private commercial bank, built from scratch, in a country where banking had been the domain of either the government or colonial-era foreign lenders. He called it Finance Bank Zambia.

Thirty-nine years later, he is still in the news. Still in court. Still fighting.

The beginning

Mahtani was born on February 14, 1948, in Zambia, where his family of Indian origin had settled during the British colonial period. The Indian community in post-independence Zambia occupied a commercially active but politically exposed position. They ran businesses, traded, provided credit. They did not found banks.

He built his credentials methodically. He qualified as a Fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants, then obtained a PhD in Commercial Law from the London Institute of Business Studies. By the time he founded Finance Bank in 1986, he understood both sides of a balance sheet and had enough legal training to read the documents that would one day define his most consequential disputes.

Finance Bank grew steadily through Zambia's privatisation era of the 1990s, as the government dismantled its socialist economic model under IMF and World Bank guidance. Private credit expanded. Finance Bank expanded with it, building a network that would eventually reach 73 branches and more than 1,000 employees, making it Zambia's largest indigenous private retail lender.

The cement deal that went wrong

If Finance Bank was Mahtani's public triumph, Zambezi Portland Cement became his most public embarrassment. The two stories are intertwined, and understanding one requires understanding the other.

The Ventriglia family arrived in Zambia from Italy in 1957. Patriarch Antonio Ventriglia built Ital Terrazzo, a successful stone and tile manufacturing company, and established deep roots in Ndola, the Copperbelt's industrial capital. In 2005, the family decided to move into cement manufacturing, founding Zambezi Portland Cement Company to capitalise on the surging demand from Zambia's construction sector. They needed serious financing. They approached Rajan Mahtani, who was at that point the powerful chairman of Finance Bank and a man they considered a family friend.

Mahtani delivered. He syndicated a $100 million loan from the European Development Fund and Kenya's PTA Bank, giving the Ventriglias the capital they needed to build what would become one of Zambia's primary cement producers, with an annual capacity eventually exceeding 300,000 metric tonnes. In exchange, Mahtani said the family had verbally agreed to sell his investment vehicle, Finsbury Investments Limited, a 58 percent controlling stake in the cement company at a discounted price of $60 million, in recognition of his financial arrangement work.

He never paid the $60 million.

What followed was a decade of brutal litigation. Mahtani, through Finsbury Investments, asserted majority ownership of Zambezi Portland Cement on the basis of the oral agreement and a series of share transfers that the Ventriglias disputed from the outset. The family insisted the shares had never been legitimately transferred, that the certificates were fraudulent, and that no binding agreement had been concluded.

In April 2015, the Ventriglias did not wait for the courts. They walked into the Zambezi Portland Cement factory in Ndola and took physical control of it. The move was widely described in Zambian media as a forcible takeover. Mahtani responded by seeking a winding-up order for the company from the High Court in Lusaka, an aggressive legal manoeuvre designed to force resolution. He also had his attorney, John Sangwa, present a Bank of Zambia document in court proceedings, an act that led to both men being arrested in 2010 on charges of forgery and presenting a false document. Those charges were eventually dropped, with the acting Director of Public Prosecutions later found to have improperly supported the arrest.

The cement legal war finally reached its conclusion in May 2018. The High Court of Zambia awarded full ownership of Zambezi Portland Cement to the Ventriglia family. The ruling was definitive on the central question: Mahtani had been unable to produce original signed copies of the share transfer certificates. A spokesperson for Zambezi Portland Cement put it plainly. "Mahtani has been unable to produce the original signed copies of the share transfer certificates because they simply do not exist and he never paid for the shares. As such, complete ownership of the company firmly rests with the Antonio Ventriglia family."

Mahtani appealed. In 2019, the Court of Appeal overturned the High Court ruling and upheld his shareholding, producing one of the more whiplash-inducing reversals in Zambian commercial legal history. But by that point, physical and operational control of the factory was firmly with the Ventriglias, who had invested a further 23 million euros into expanding production capacity. The legal victory in the appellate court did not translate into operational control of anything.

The sale of Finance Bank

While the cement war was consuming legal attention across Zambia, Mahtani was also navigating the end of his banking career. His daughters had no interest in running Finance Bank, and by 2015 he had decided to sell.

The buyer was Atlas Mara, the African banking vehicle co-founded by Bob Diamond, who had departed Barclays in 2012 following the LIBOR interest rate scandal. The deal valued Finance Bank Zambia at approximately $215 million. Negotiations took place in London, Dubai and New York. Mahtani signed the sale and purchase agreement.

The relationship collapsed within a year of completion. Mahtani alleged Atlas Mara had breached the terms of the deal, arguing he received far less than what the agreement entitled him to and that the bank had been deliberately devalued during and after the transaction. Atlas Mara's position was that the additional sums Mahtani sought were contingent on conditions neither party had agreed were met.

In 2023, Mahtani and former co-shareholders sued Atlas Mara in the English High Court, seeking up to $100 million or approximately £80 million in damages. After a full trial, Judge Christopher Butcher dismissed the case in February 2024. Mahtani announced he would seek permission to appeal. Diamond was not a party to the case.

The Malawi fight

Mahtani's Mahtani Group of Companies had also controlled Finance Bank of Malawi, a separate institution the Reserve Bank of Malawi closed in 2005 over alleged irregular foreign exchange transactions and Know Your Customer failures. He contested the closure for twenty years. In February 2026, Malawi's Supreme Court of Appeal ruled in his favour, finding the closure had been excessive. The damages assessment now before a registrar involves a claim of $551.9 million plus accrued interest, a sum that dwarfs many years of Malawian government revenue and has alarmed the country's fiscal authorities.

The pattern

Across his seven decades in business, a recognisable pattern has emerged in Rajan Mahtani's commercial life. He identifies an asset or opportunity. He arranges financing or provides a service. He asserts ownership, often through oral agreements or share transfers that the other party disputes. He litigates extensively. He wins some rounds and loses others. He does not stop.

He has described himself as a Christian, a patriot and a man targeted by conspirators. His critics, and there are many, describe a businessman who accumulated wealth through political proximity and contractual structures that other parties found impossible to enforce against him.

He is 78 years old. He is still fighting in at least two jurisdictions simultaneously. Whatever else Rajan Mahtani is, he is not done.