The London landlord special
The £130,000-a-month flat in Vauxhall, the child hospitalised at Asif Aziz's restaurant, and the residents begging their local council to take back control of their chaotic housing estate.
If you’re one of the 350 people who became London Centric members over the weekend to read the investigation into the mafia connections of the man behind London’s snail farm boom, thank you and welcome!
Writer Nick Harkaway, the author of the new John le Carré novels, read the piece and said: “I may print a copy and keep it in my pocket for those occasions when someone tells me that ‘the real world doesn’t work like that’.” Another reader described it as like “Sunday Sport meets the Financial Times”, which is the highest praise we can imagine receiving.
It’s probably the single strangest story I’ve ever reported and if you’ve been hesitating about taking out a subscription, it’s worth a read. If Guy Ritchie wants the film rights, he knows where to find us.
Today London Centric brings you a special edition featuring a round up of some of London’s main characters — landlords.
London Centric is increasing its property coverage because it explains so much about the city we live in.We’re particularly interested in your stories about service charges, wild price fluctuations, construction trends, planning problems, dodgy landlords, estate agent scams, or anything curious about the London housing market that you think deserves a wider audience. If you’re a property professional, we’d love to hear from you about what the rest of the media is missing.
If you have a story please send an email or a WhatsApp for our journalists to investigate.
Asif Aziz’s knock-off Rainforest Cafe restaurant fined for hospitalising child in food hygiene breach.
We get so many stories in our inbox about landlord Asif Aziz that it’s impossible to investigate all of them without turning London Centric into a newsletter about one man. Whether it’s shutting down central London cinemas, turning some of central London’s most desirable locations into windowless hotels, or repeatedly leasing his units to tax evading gift shops, the actions of Aziz and Criterion Capital leave Londoners feeling like they don’t have control over their own city.
Now we can add another string to Aziz’s landlord bow: His business has been fined £45,000 for serious food hygiene breaches in a central London restaurant following a prosecution by Westminster council. The incident relates to a seven-year-old boy with a severe wheat allergy who was hospitalised in 2021 after eating a supposedly gluten-free burger at the Rainforest Cafe in Aziz’s Trocadero Building in Piccadilly Circus.
Inspectors from Westminster council’s food and health and safety team raided the premises and found “multiple breaches of food hygiene legislation”, including a failure to store gluten-free burger buns separately, inadequate training for staff on how to communicate allergen information to customers, and a lack of equipment for handling gluten-free food.
It’s rare to blame the landlord for a food hygiene issue. But this is a very unusual case.
The Rainforest Cafe’s legal operator went bust in the pandemic, leaving Aziz’s Criterion Capital with an empty unit in its building. Traditionally, this would prompt the search for a new tenant. Instead, Aziz’s company sent in its own staff, reopened the restaurant under the old brand name without permission and started cooking food as if it were still the original Rainforest Cafe.
This eventually landed Aziz in court. Earlier this year London Centric revealed he had paid £150,000 to settle allegations that he and his company had infringed trademarks by illegally “passing off” as another restaurant without permission. According to the court papers, the billionaire Aziz was often personally involved in negotiations about the Rainforest Cafe’s future. If only he’d taken more of an interest in what food his staff were serving customers.
Preposterous property of the week
London’s private rental market is tough at the moment. Many landlords are quitting the business altogether amid tough tax treatment and increased regulation, meaning the supply of properties on the market is being reduced, which is pushing up rent prices.
As such, it’s worth looking at what is available to rent. Which led us to this five-bedroom penthouse flat with an outdoor hot tub in Nine Elms, which went on the market this week for £130,000-a-month, or a mere £1.56m a year.
That said, due to the curious way that property taxes work in the UK, whoever rents it will only have to pay £3,907 a year in council tax.
Anyone who last visited the site a decade ago, when it was the location of the New Covent Garden fruit and flower market, will be amazed by the transformation of the area. The estate agents claims the location of the flat enables you to “experience the absolute best of international culture, entertainment, retail”, by which we assume they mean the Big Sainsbury’s at the foot of the tower, Vauxhall bus station, and Fire nightclub.
The fact that this new-build property is being placed on the rental market suggests there may not be enormous demand for penthouses that were initially being pitched for sale at £38m a piece. In a sign of the likely market, the estate agent suggests getting in touch with its Chinese staff over WeChat.
Yacht a load of bother
If you can’t find a place to stay in London, why not bring your own yacht?
If you were wondering about the identity of the giant vessel that spent the last week parked up in the Pool of London next to Tower Bridge, it’s Kismet, the £250m yacht owned by Fulham FC boss Shahid Khan. It’s also where, as the Express was first to report, mayor of London Sadiq Khan held his 55th birthday last week.
Personalised cufflinks, murder claims, and chemical storage in the community centre: The housing estate begging its local council to seize back control
By Sophie Wilkinson and Polly Smythe
Residents of a south London housing estate marched on their local council headquarters last week, asking it to overthrow their “corrupt” management board amid a series of a bizarre claims.
Brixton’s Loughborough Estate is run by a board chaired by Peter Shorinwa, who has renamed one of the community halls after himself, flown overseas on fact-finding missions, and oversaw the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of pounds on “gifts for residents”. Pictures shared with London Centric show the board handed out cheap cufflinks and bags embossed with the estate management company’s letters after questions were asked about where the money for gifts had gone.
In a brochure sent to residents, Shorinwa previously alleged that Lambeth Council attempted to have him murdered as part of the battle for control of the estate. The council has denied attempting to kill Shorinwa.
Shorinwa is the longstanding chair of the Loughborough Estate Management Board (LEMB), a resident-elected organisation which in 1995 took over maintenance of the estate from the local council. At the time, the transfer was seen as a way to give residents power over their own future by enabling them to vote for representatives to manage the estate as they saw fit.
A growing number of residents, who are mainly social housing tenants, are now desperate to reverse that decision. They believe that millions of pounds of service charges have been used to build a private fiefdom for Shorinwa. Residents voted in favour of abolishing his board earlier this year but nothing has changed. They are now begging Lambeth and central government to intervene.
Shorinwa’s management board spent £46,390 on an overseas trip for board members “during which time they considered a number of issues” impacting the south London estate. It also allocated a budget £374,141 for “gifts to residents”.
After residents began asking questions who was receiving the “gifts”, they began receiving cheap branded cufflinks, leather pouches and tote bags, all featuring the initials of Shorinwa’s management organisation.
The estate, which sits between Loughborough Junction and Brixton stations, is instantly recognisable to commuters on nearby Thameslink, London Overground, and Southeastern routes into Victoria station. Built in the post-war social housing boom, it is home to more than a thousand households.
Last Wednesday residents delivered a petition featuring 200 signatures to Lambeth’s town hall, asking for emergency intervention from politicians. They claim that one of the estate’s community centre, which previously hosted events and provided warm spaces for elderly residents, has been rented to a commercial shipping company. Residents noted last year that barrels marked up with the words “Xylene”, a flammable solvent, were being stored there. Meanwhile, a separate space that used to host a youth boxing club for the estate has been converted and leased to the Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church, without residents being consulted.
This week London Centric visited Loughborough Estate, which was recently used as the backdrop to a video by the major label musician Sekou. We found stacks of fridges in one carpark, a playground with a slide featuring steps going up but no slide going down, and a general state of disrepair.
We heard stories of homes have been afflicted by mould, leaks and vermin. One family said that after complaining to management about a faulty boiler for a decade, it broke last winter and they were left with no hot water, gas or heating for 11 days. Another woman said her flat has been flooded with sewage six times since January, to the point where “we have had to pull our carpets up, disconnect our downstairs WC and pay thousands on emergency plumbers”.
Residents thought they had deposed the management company back in February when a referendum saw 68% vote in favour of abolishing the existing system. But the vote was declared null and void after the existing management claimed they hadn’t administered the poll to abolish themselves properly. Lambeth council then said it cannot get the management to re-run any ballot until it completes its own investigation into the estate’s affairs. This report has still yet to be seen, with protestors demanding its release, saying they have been left in limbo.
John-Paul Ennis, former mayor of Lambeth and Labour councillor for Brixton North, told the protesters that the audit will be made public in November, and that while “I understand how frustrating the process can be…things are happening” an “ongoing legal process” had got in the way of “some of the finer details” being shared. Neither the management board nor Lambeth council responded to a request for comment.
Letters sent by Shorinwa to residents describe those organised the protest as “unhealthy, unacceptable, unbecoming, self-seeking and anti-social” people who are “trying to create pandemonium and dissatisfaction”. For now, all the disgruntled residents have to hold onto are the embossed bags paid for with their own service charges.
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Now read this:
The snail farmer of London, his mafia friends, and a £20m vendetta against the taxman
It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy.
Corrections to the email edition. Two mistakes for which I apologise and will be flagging in the next edition. I'm really sorry about that - we own up to our errors quickly at London Centric.
1) The email version of this edition had an item which confused Lewisham shopping centre with Catford shopping centre in Lewisham. That's pretty unforgivable and on me.
2) Apologies for the wrong photo at the end of the email edition — I thought it was a particularly arty and unusual shot of the Loughborough Estate I hadn't seen before that made the towers look very different. Turns out it was particularly arty and unusual shot... because it was a mislabelled agency photo of the old Aylesbury Estate.
Not for lack of trying with old Peter; the residents were trying to get shot of him as far back as 2019 when it was only £50k.* I suspect he's learned to be more careful in the years since, though he deserves summary thrashing at the very least for his lack of good taste.
*London Borough of Lambeth v Peter Shorinwa (2019) Inner London CC