Rohan Khatau, Battling Fraud Charges, Forays Into Real Estate With Mega Project

Not many businessmen can claim to have walked away from a century-old family legacy and started fresh. Rohan Khatau is trying to do exactly that — though the road ahead is anything but smooth.

Khatau, who co-owned the Cable Corporation of India (CCI) along with Hiten Khatau, finds himself in the middle of a serious legal storm. In February 2024, Mumbai Police's Economic Offences Wing (EOW) registered an FIR against both men, along with other office-bearers of CCI, accusing them of cheating an Andheri-based cable and wire supply company of Rs 14.23 crore. The charges slapped on them — IPC sections 420 (cheating), 406 (criminal breach of trust), and 120B (criminal conspiracy) — are not minor. They point to what investigators believe was a deliberate act of financial deception.

The story behind the case is telling. By 2022, CCI — once a well-known name in India's power and control cable manufacturing sector — had fallen on hard times. Its plant in Malegaon MIDC had shut down, unable to sustain operations. It was around this time that the complainant, the chairman and managing director of an Andheri-based firm, entered the picture. Seeing an opportunity, he expressed interest in acquiring CCI's cable and wire division.

What followed was a series of meetings, a memorandum of understanding, and eventually a formal framework agreement between the two parties. But CCI, unable to fulfill its old and delayed orders on its own, reportedly urged the complainant to step in and supply cables and wires — the idea being that once the backlog was cleared, the sale would go through cleanly, without any liabilities hanging over the deal. The accused also allegedly assured the complainant that clearing these old orders would fetch CCI around Rs 39 crore, making repayment of dues entirely feasible.

Trusting these assurances, the complainant supplied goods worth Rs 14.23 crore between February and June 2022 — under purchase orders that fell outside the original framework agreement. The payment, however, never came. When the complainant began digging, he allegedly found that CCI had indeed earned healthy income from fulfilling those old orders — but the funds had been siphoned away from the company's accounts rather than used to pay outstanding dues. The complaint was filed, the EOW stepped in, and the case has been under investigation since.

For a family name once associated with industrial enterprise, it was a damaging turn of events.

Yet, even as the legal proceedings continue, Rohan Khatau appears to have set his sights on an entirely different horizon. According to reports, he has made a foray into real estate — a sector that, in many ways, could not be more different from manufacturing cables. It is a move that raises eyebrows, particularly given the timing. With fraud charges still being probed by one of Mumbai's most feared investigative units, launching a high-profile real estate project is a bold — some might say audacious — decision.

In interviews, Khatau has spoken about leaving behind the family business and charting his own course, framing it as a personal reinvention rather than a retreat. Real estate, he has suggested, is where he sees opportunity and where he intends to make his mark independent of the CCI chapter.

Whether that reinvention succeeds will depend on multiple factors, not the least of which is the outcome of the EOW investigation. The agency is currently examining whether funds were deliberately diverted, whether the accused acted in criminal conspiracy, and critically, whether there are other victims beyond the Andheri-based firm who may have been similarly defrauded. DCP Pankaj Atulkar, who is overseeing the case, has publicly urged anyone who believes they were deceived to come forward.

For now, Rohan Khatau occupies a curious position - a man trying to build something new while an unresolved legal cloud from his past hangs directly overhead. In Mumbai's cut-throat business world, that is not an unusual situation. But it is rarely a comfortable one.

How the courts ultimately view the allegations against him will go a long way in determining not just his legal fate, but also the credibility of his ambitious new avatar as a real estate developer.