Can Sadiq Khan stop Asif Aziz's mass evictions?
We went to the billionaire's home to get answers, as a leading homelessness charity cut ties with the landlord and tenants begged the mayor to save their homes.
Early this morning I found myself standing in front of the south west London home of billionaire landlord Asif Aziz. I was there to make a last-ditch attempt, after all other avenues had been exhausted, to get answers from one of London’s most powerful families about the fate of hundreds of tenants housed by their Criterion Capital business.
Today the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint told London Centric they would cut ties with Aziz, turn down a planned donation from his foundation, and cease to be the charity partner of his ongoing central London Ramadan Lights display with immediate effect. They no longer felt able to associate with a landlord that professes a commitment to housing people while also trying to evict them. We understand moves are also afoot at Merton council to encourage all London councils to cut ties with the family and refuse to pay them for temporary accommodation.
Then this evening, London Centric learned that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who met Aziz at a charity event only last week, wrote directly to the billionaire landlord asking him once again to permanently stop the mass evictions.
The letter, seen by London Centric, states that Criterion has failed to engage with the mayor’s team all week and this “has created an increasingly worrying and uncertain situation for tenants, particularly now that further allegations have been put to us about evictions already underway”.
“The right to a good, safe and stable home is fundamental and I am steadfast in my opposition to the use of Section 21 no-fault evictions, let alone their potential use on a mass scale,” said Khan, asking for an “urgent response” from Aziz.
A U-turn on a U-turn?
When London Centric uncovered Criterion Capital’s plan to carry out the biggest mass eviction in recent London history, it sparked an immediate political row.
On Monday, the day after the story was published, Aziz’s tenants received bizarre door-to-door visits explaining that their evictions had all been a big misunderstanding. They were told they would be allowed to stay in their homes if they recorded videos requesting to remain in the properties. There were celebrations among residents. I wrote that the evictions had been halted “for now” but, having reported in depth on Asif Aziz’s business activities over the last year, wrote that we’d be keeping an eye on the deal to make sure there was no backsliding.
What I hadn’t expected was the backsliding to happen so quickly and so dramatically. Within days, tenants who had been verbally told they could extend their tenancies learned this was no longer the case. Legal representatives of Aziz’s Criterion company denied that a man called “Jason” who had gone door-to-door revoking the eviction notices, even existed. It seemed that our story and the mayor’s subsequent public intervention had halted the evictions – but just for a few days, possibly in the hope the attention died down.
I’d promised the tenants that we would not let up on this story, especially when many of them got in touch to ask us, in the absence of any clear communication from their landlord, whether they still had a place to live.
We sent reporter Liv Facey to try to knock on every door in Criterion’s giant Delta Point housing development in Croydon. What she found, after visiting more than 200 flats, was a vast number of units that had been vacated by private tenants in recent days. It became increasingly apparent that rather than simply planning a mass eviction, the Aziz family’s business had already been carrying it out.
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It now appears the Aziz family have been kicking hundreds of Londoners out of their homes using no-fault eviction notices since January ahead of the Renters’ Rights Act coming into force. According to sources with knowledge of the company’s operations, the objective is to make more money from the flats by renting them out as temporary accommodation to London councils.
In a dark twist, money from the housing blocks affected was then flowing directly into the Aziz Foundation, the family’s PR-friendly charitable arm. The Aziz Foundation then funded the capital’s Ramadan lights and launched a partnership with the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint, who today distanced themselves from the family.
“There is no electrician in the building”
With the assistance of Merton Labour councillor Stuart Neaverson, who has spent the last week trying to help tenants, we also dug into the legal paperwork issued to the Aziz family’s tenants. Neaverson dubbed the family the “cruellest landlords in London” and said the “attempt to put so many people onto the streets is reminiscent of something from Dickensian times.”
Some residents threatened with eviction told us that electrical safety certificates on many of their flats were issued without an electrician actually gaining access to the properties in question.
Every single electrical safety certificate we saw also had identical results, despite being supposedly conducted across flats in multiple buildings that are miles apart. The electrician whose name was on the paperwork, with a signature dated only a few months ago, could not be traced. The business that the certificates stated the electrician worked for had been liquidated three years ago. When I visited the electrician’s stated headquarters on a busy road in Greenwich, I found an abandoned unit. The current leaseholder told me simply: “There is no electrician in the building. The shop is empty.”
“Omar will come and meet you”
Since London Centric first learned of the mass evictions, the Aziz family have failed to acknowledge our multiple requests for comment. Phone calls have been ignored. Emails received no response. Criterion Capital’s head of communications asked us to stop contacting her on a number we obtained for her, saying it was her private line, and declined to offer an alternative phone number. She deleted our public comment from her LinkedIn page asking if the evictions were going ahead.
Criterion Capital is held through a web of off-shore companies based in the Isle of Man. While no one doubts that the Aziz family run the sprawling multi-billion pound London property empire on a day-to-day basis their names have been removed from almost all the legal documents relating to their holdings. The real source of their money is obscured.
I went to the registered office of Criterion Capital in the windowless Zedwell hotel in Piccadilly Circus – in the Trocadero building where the family rents shop units to tax-evading gift shops – and requested a meeting with their management.
For a brief moment it seemed I might be given a meeting with Omar Aziz, the founder’s son who now runs the operation in London after his father moved his tax domicile to Abu Dhabi.
I was told he was upstairs: “Omar will come and meet you.” Then, after a long wait in which several people walked downstairs and appeared to scope me out, the offer was rescinded.
“Mr Aziz, are you making hundreds of people homeless still?”
All of this is how I found myself outside the Aziz family home at dawn on Friday morning. At 8am on the dot the figure of Omar Aziz walked out of the Jacobean mansion in south west London where he lives.
“Mr Aziz, are you making hundreds of people homeless still?”, I shouted from the other end of a long courtyard.
For a brief second he stared at me as he got into his chauffeur-driven BMW, then it sped out through the gates and into central London.
Today, some of those who partnered with the Aziz family are distancing themselves. The homelessness charity Centrepoint told London Centric: “The Aziz Foundation invited us several weeks ago to become the beneficiary of their annual Ramadan Lights celebration. We accepted the invitation because it is a well-known and popular annual event, and the proposed donation would have supported our vital work with young people experiencing homelessness.
“Following media reports this week, we reviewed the partnership and decided to end it, to decline the proposed donation, and not to pursue any further relationship. This is the right decision on behalf of the young people we support and in line with our mission to end youth homelessness.”
“It is not befitting of our city”
There is one person who does seem to have previously enjoyed comparatively easy access to the Aziz family: Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. He has been a regular at the family’s social events. He has repeatedly pressed the button to launch the Ramadan Lights that the Aziz family funded using some of the money from the tenants they have evicted. The mayor’s presence at the Aziz family’s charitable events has given them legitimacy in London society and photo-ops that they promoted on social media.
This evening Sadiq Khan again condemned the Aziz family’s mass evictions. But was the wool pulled over his eyes earlier in the week? And how far will he go to ensure the biggest mass eviction in the capital’s recent history is stopped?
The tenants who are facing homelessness say it’s now up to Khan to take the lead. In addition to the U-turn on evictions, they are now receiving urgent requests from Criterion to gain emergency access to their flats to check supposed electrical faults, water leaks, and problems with the roof that have never previously been raised as concerns. Some of them have told London Centric they have doubts about the validity of the potential structural problems which have suddenly been discovered by their landlord after eviction notices were issued.
Resident Alessio Ambrosj said that Criterion had “shown us the true meaning of ‘delay, deny, defend’.”
“From hot water issues, to non-operational lifts in an 18‑storey building, to extreme temperatures in the flats and more, I have been appalled by the way Criterion has been allowed to operate,” he said. “It is not befitting of our city. I respect the mayor’s work and what he represents for this city and want him to intervene to put a stop to Criterion.”
Dalila Parisi, who is facing eviction, said she’d had to call Criterion 60 times in a bid to find out if she was still being made homeless. She said it was baffling that Khan was committed to fighting homelessness yet “he’s friends with this guy”.
Right now, London’s worst ever mass eviction appears to be back on. There are questions over the validity of the legal paperwork that has been given to tenants. There are questions over who will profit from the temporary accommodation that the Aziz family plan to put in the buildings. There are questions over whether hundreds of Londoners will still be out on the streets.
The Aziz family won’t answer London Centric’s questions.
Will they respond to the mayor?
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UPDATE: We have received letter from Carter-Ruck Solicitors, acting on behalf of Asif Aziz and Criterion Capital.
In the letter, Carter-Ruck objects to London Centric’s “unrelenting focus” on Asif Aziz. They say the billionaire believes London Centric has “an obsession” with him and has therefore “lost all proper objectivity”.
The letter states that Aziz has reported London Centric editor Jim Waterson to the police for turning up at his company’s office and his house. The legal letter does not make it clear on what basis the referral to the police was made. (London Centric had previously made multiple attempts to contact Criterion Capital on this story through multiple channels and not received a response.)
Carter-Ruck states that:
It is wrong to describe the issuing of section 21 notices as “making people homeless” because they are part of a “lawful and commercially acceptable” process, while homelessness is a “complex social issue” that cannot be directly linked to the end of a tenancy.
It is wrong to say that “hundreds” of residents of Britannia Point are being evicted, as eviction notices have only been served on 130 households in that building. (The legal letter does not provide comment on the number of households affected in other properties.)
It is wrong to claim that Criterion ever halted the process following the intervention of Sadiq Khan earlier in the week, despite many residents being told on that same day that they would be allowed to stay.
The process will be going ahead: “Our firm instructions are that this process has not been ‘halted’ at all, and our clients do not have any intention of doing so.”
Astonishing digging from London Centric. Shows the absolute importance of having local news in a city like London
More brilliant work! Keep piling the pressure on.