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The show must go on, Chhabria had said

Palakunnathu G Mathai

What happens if you die tomorrow, we asked him seven months ago. "The show must go on," he replied, unruffled.

But Manohar Rajaram Chhabria probably had little inkling that his time was drawing to a close. Though a diabetic for over 32 years and a heart patient for over a decade, the chairman of the Dubai-based Jumbo group, Shaw Wallace, Dunlop, Hindustan Dorr-Oliver and a clutch of other companies in India could, at 56, reasonably expect to live longer.

To be sure, he'd become more portly. Once he used to unfailingly walk 6 to 7 km early mornings, even if he'd flown into a new city in the wee hours of the morning.

But he confessed that he'd given up exercising. Now Chhabria seemed more at peace, guffawed more often and had perceptibly mellowed.

Age was catching up with the former non-resident Indian marauder from Dubai who once alarmed the Indian corporate establishment with a string of takeovers in the mid-to-late 1980s.

The peripatetic businessman who hit Kolkata, Mumbai, Dubai, Munich, London, Houston and New York New York, all in a fortnight, was largely staying put in Dubai. "I'm growing old, man," he chuckled in a candid interview in September 2001.

Chhabria had reason to be more relaxed. He said he'd repaid the bank in Hong Kong that he'd borrowed money from to fund his acquisitions.

Most of his Indian companies had turned the corner. Dunlop was still in sick bay, but Shaw Wallace no longer faced 106 winding up petitions and had repaid all its creditors. Hindustan Dorr-Oliver and Mather and Platt were making money, as was Gordon Woodroffe.

He had revived his old dream of buying a distillery in Scotland and of taking Shaw Wallace global. And in line with the recommendations of consulting firm McKinsey & Co he was moving to merge his breweries and distilleries and to make the liquor company competitive in the domestic market.

Even his bitterness over the defection of his younger brother, Kishore, to rival Vijay Mallya's camp was abating, though it had not disappeared altogether. Kishore and Mallya were in court over controlling Herberstons and Kishore had sued for peace with Manu.

The two brothers had been meeting sporadically in Dubai to settle their differences. Kishore had started returning property to Manu and talked of the brothers closing ranks against Mallya - a possibility that Manu didn't entirely rule out either.

What is more, the government's investigative agencies were no longer hot on his trail. The enforcement directorate had been investigating him for allegedly violating the provisions of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act. He said that he'd merely received a show cause notice and that the government had nothing against him. Even so, he'd steered clear of India for five years till he visited India last year.

He attributed some of his tribulations to the media and to business rivals. In January 1989, a leading news magazine had put him on its cover. That brought him prominence in India, he acknowledged, but it also made him a threat to others, he said cryptically. "I suffered," he said.

In fact, he'd become a threat to the Indian corporate establishment well before that story appeared. A Delhi-based industrialist privately confirmed in 1989 that he and other worried businessmen had led a delegation to then Finance Minister S B Chavan and pointed out that NRIs such as Chhabria were not bringing foreign exchange into the country by taking over companies.

Other businessmen sneered at him, referred to his family electronics shop in Mumbai's Lamington Road and said he was still a trader, not an industrialist.

Industrialists also mused that he'd made his money in Dubai by dealing in gold (he did acknowledge that he'd made a couple of million dollars by speculating in the international precious metals and sugar markets).

Yet few then realised that Chhabria had developed the leveraged buy out (LBO) into a fine art, getting banks to finance his takeovers at low interest rates.

He spent Rs 2.70 billion (at the then prevailing exchange rates) in foreign exchange on acquiring overseas controlling interests in companies like Shaw Wallace, Hindustan Dorr-Oliver, Mather & Platt and Dunlop India (with industrialist R P Goenka), with banks lending over half the money.

He also spent another Rs 700 million in rupees on bagging companies like Genelec (which he later hawked). He also mounted a hostile takeover bid on Gammon India and bid for Larsen & Toubro, both unsuccessfully, but that's another matter.

The man who'd left Mumbai in 1973 and set up Jumbo Electronics in Dubai on January 1, 1974 on a capital of 200,000 Dirhams (about Rs 800,000 in the late 1980s) with four Arab partners whom he met at New Delhi's Oberoi hotel had stormed his way into India's list of top 10 business houses. In 1988, the Chhabria group reported sales of Rs 11.09 million and reported pre-tax profits of some Rs 680 million. Then began Chhabria's decline.

He was only too aware that, despite his obvious wealth, he had not made it to Corporate India's inner circle. Some of the criticism must have rankled. In 1988 and early 1989, Chhabria sought to make himself over by attending a three-part course for company owners and presidents at Harvard university. He also tried to professionalise his companies and to stop lacing his language with four-letter words.

But a former employee who worked with Chhabria till 1997 says that he continued to lash out at senior executives. As his companies in India floundered, several senior executives walked out on him And late last year, a relative confided to Business Standard that Manu continued to be suspicious of everyone. He also stayed away from media interviews, aware at last that he was far too transparent, that he'd succumb to his tendency to talk about his business plans.

Yet throughout it all, he displayed flashes of kindness. A business journalist whose son had a medical problem recalls receiving a phone call at 2 am from Chhabria offering to fly his son to London for treatment (the journalist politely declined). And he leaves behind some enduring memories - of the family man showing off his acquisition of Shaw Wallace to his wife and three daughters in the mid-eighties.

What of the future? Will the show go on? He said that he'd not divide his assets among his three daughters, Komal Wazir Chhabria (who's executive director of Shaw Wallace), Bhavika Godwani (who's at Hindustan Dorr-Oliver) and Kiran Chhabria (who works at Jumbo Electronics).

Instead, his shares would remain in the holding company. Yet will his wife and daughters be able to hold his empire together and build on it, or will it all unravel? That's the big question to which there are be no answers right now.

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