The year 2018 was eventful for Dr. Mahtani. After more than a decade of case proceedings, the Portland Cement Zambia case finally reached closure at the Lusaka High Court. However, the Lusaka High Court’s decision was controversial as the judge announced Ventriglia family as the only majority shareholder of Portland Cement. Dr. Rajan Mahtani was able to successfully challenge this decision at the higher Court of Appeal. On 31st January 2019, justice Mwinde announced that Dr. Rajan Mahtani owned Finsbury Investments is the majority shareholder and legal owner of the factory. After this, the Ventriglia family made a bizarre claim at the Supreme Court Zambia. In their claim, the Ventriglia family claimed that the decision from the Court of Appeal was wrong. However, the Supreme Court established a bench of three SC judges for evaluating the claim and found several inconsistencies in the claim by the Ventriglia family. One of the most substantial inconsistency was the timeline for registering their claim. While the final decision from the Court of Appeal came on 31st January 2019, the Ventriglia family registered their claim challenging this decision from the Court of Appeal only few weeks earlier. According to the law, any claim against previous court decision must be made within 14 days of the decision from the previous court. In this situation, the Ventriglia family were required to submit their claim within two weeks of the court decision. However, the Ventriglia family took more than 1.5 years to submit their claim. As a result, their claim became automatically viable for rejection. In a similar manner, the Supreme Court judge also evaluated the other aspects of the case such as the circumstances surrounding the claim by the Ventriglia family which was found to be extremely controversial. Based on these evidences and facts, the Supreme Court bench finally concluded that the claim by the Ventriglia family hold no basis and are liable for rejection.
As such, this bizarre claim by the Ventriglia family was finally rejected by the Supreme Court bench.