Sharad Kachhalia, a director with Navnit Group, the outfit that sells Rolls-Royces in India, says anyone who works in the super luxury trade has to first get his profile right. The dealer has to reflect a super luxury persona, complete with a service infrastructure backed by trained professionals. “To sell and project luxury, you have to genuinely become it. You can’t fake it,” says Kachhalia. And Chordia seemed to have “it”.

In 2003, chordia set up Precision Imports as Porsche’s exclusive importer in India, and for the next nine years, enjoyed a dream run. By 2012, he was, he says, “part of the Porsche family”. He received letters from managers at Porsche commending him for high sales, and got friendly with senior managers such as Andreas Offermann, who ran sales coordination at the firm from Germany. (There are also letters from the Porsche brass that Chordia shows me, thanking him for fancy holidays in Rajasthan, or gifts of silk and cashmere scarves, or even chopper trips to Pune.)

Then, on May 4 last year, Porsche India released an advertisement in major Indian newspapers and magazines. The visual was a panoramic shot of the five models Porsche sold through Precision—but the copy below was not about Chordia’s company. Instead, it announced that its group representative, Volkswagen Group Sales India, would be the new official importer of all Porsche cars.

Chordia says the announcement came out of the blue, though sources in the industry say he’d been given notice a year earlier. Giving import and distribution rights to a sister company makes sense for Porsche, of course, but Chordia says the company cheated him by taking away what was to be an exclusive import licence. “I have enough letters written to Porsche telling them that they are purposely screwing me over,” he says, claiming that appointing VW Group Sales India was “a dishonest act”.

He filed a petition in June 2012 in a Jaipur court, accusing Porsche officials of cheating, intimidation, and criminal conspiracy, and soon after, the papers were full of the news that the magistrate hearing the case had issued an arrest warrant for Porsche global CEO Matthias Mueller and eight board members (Bernhard Maier, Lutz Meschke, Thomas Edig, Wolfgang Leimgruber, Deesch Papke, George Wills, Angela Kreitz, and Wolfgang Hatz—Wulfgank Hetz according to the warrant).

One year on, nobody in Jaipur wants to talk about the case. A statement from Porsche in January this year, read: “With one exception, the former importer has exhausted all rights of appeal and the civil litigation is now at an end.” When Fortune India asked Porsche, Anil Reddi, who heads its operations in India, did not respond to specific queries regarding the case. However, a spokesperson from Porsche India replied, saying: “Through local attorneys, Porsche AG and Porsche Middle East have applied by way of petition for the annulment of the court injunctions. Indian procedural law prescribes that the arguments of the petition have to be made orally before the court within the scope of a court hearing. The procedure is usually split up into several hearings; none of them have ended yet.”

Even as the Jaipur courts thrash out the pros and cons of the criminal case, there’s an arbitration suit between Chordia and Porsche to be settled in Bahrain. Porsche India is run by Porsche MEA (Middle East and Africa), and all dealership and contractual disputes come under the courts in the U.A.E. Chordia claims that Porsche has issued him notice terminating only two of the three contracts he has with the company. (The number of contracts between Porsche and Chordia could not be independently verified.) Chordia, however, says the case is not yet settled, adding that under U.A.E. law, a principal (Porsche in this case) can terminate a contract with an agent only by mutual consent, or going to the U.A.E. Commercial Agencies Committee in case of gross negligence or other “material reasons”. Porsche did not comment on the arbitration.

Some customers, meanwhile, weren’t exactly enamoured of Chordia. Early in February 2012, Inderpreet Singh Jhelumi, a warehousing entrepreneur in New Delhi, booked a Porsche Cayenne SUV with Chordia. “They were still authorised dealers then,” he says. Precision Imports asked Jhelumi to pay Rs 10 lakh up front and then Rs 50 lakh a month later. The vehicle was to be delivered in a couple of months. Jhelumi made good on the payments but when he followed up in April, he was told the car hadn’t arrived. Disgruntled, he called Reddi; “It’s between you and Chordia. We can’t help you,” Jhelumi says he was told.

Jhelumi spoke to Chordia again in June, after he read about the legal tussle between Porsche and Precision Imports. Chordia asked him for a couple more weeks, then told him that there was a Cayenne that had arrived at the Mumbai Port and could be delivered to Jhelumi. The catch: it was more kitted out than what Jhelumi had ordered. The extras would cost Rs 8 lakh more, and the duties would also be higher because the model was different. Jhelumi checked with his lawyers, who told him “it was worth a shot.” Instead of Rs 70 lakh, Jhelumi shelled out Rs 85 lakh—and still didn’t have a car. Since VW Group Sales was the new authorised importer, Jhelumi tried to get his car through them and asked for an estimated invoice. The price on the invoice was a good Rs 15 lakh lower than what he had paid Chordia. When he confronted Chordia, the salesman was insouciant. “I asked him what he was doing, and all he said was ‘duties’,” says a visibly enraged Jhelumi. He eventually got his car in October, but with the wrong registration certificate. Chordia says the mix-up happened because Jhelumi got the details wrong on his insurance form.

Jhelumi isn’t alone. Shailesh Surve, a doctor who now runs a shipping venture, says he wanted to buy a maroon Porsche Cayenne GTS. He met Chordia in February 2009, and paid an advance of Rs 60 lakh. He didn’t get the car for months, and every time he contacted Chordia, he was given excuses. “The common ones were ‘My father is seriously ill’, and ‘I’m in Rajasthan’ or ‘I’m in Dubai for a meeting with Porsche’,” he says. Finally when the vehicle arrived, it was in December, after the new model for 2010 had been introduced in September. And, he adds, the vehicle came without rear parking sensors. Chordia said he would offer free warranties for five years as he couldn’t make any modifications because of Porsche’s strict norms. Chordia says Surve’s long wait was due to his own inability to make up his mind. “He went from diesel to petrol and then again to diesel, and didn’t know if he wanted the red colour or not.”

The list of unhappy customers is long. Sidharth Mandavia, an electronics recycler, says he paid for a black Porsche Cayenne S from Precision. “It was supposed to arrive in two or three weeks.” Instead it came three months later—and it was a white SUV, says Mandavia. That wasn’t all. The car had barely clocked 3,000 km, when the brake pads wore out. “Brake pads ought to last 15,000 km, at the least,” he says, adding that he had to spend Rs 1 lakh on replacements.

Even high-profile customers like Sullaja Firodia Motwani, the chairperson of Kinetic Engineering, had a rough ride. Motwani had booked a Porsche Cayenne diesel with Chordia. When Chordia didn’t deliver even after a year, she took up the matter with Porsche officials, including Reddi. “In my view, the Porsche model is flawed. They expect you to make full payment with just the details of a chassis and engine number. That exposes the customer way too much,” she says. Motwani, who got a car loan from ICICI Bank, says she made the full payment because she “had faith in the Porsche brand”. Chordia eventually returned the money with interest, but Motwani says she’s disappointed.

When asked about such complaints, Porsche’s Reddi wrote in an e-mail: “The question relates to individual purchaser complaints, which are the responsibility of the dealer concerned.” He added: “Regarding vehicles ordered with the previous importer or his dealers and corresponding delivery timelines, we are sure you will appreciate that this was directly between the customer and the dealer (of the previous importer) and Porsche India was not a party to this.”

Ask Chordia about this, and he gets enraged. “There was a planned holdback from Porsche to constrain supply to India so that they could justify to their board the need to create a national sales company [VW Group],” he says. He claims Porsche “dropped prices by 25% to 30%”, which affected Chordia’s customers, who had booked cars at the higher rates.

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