Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja preferred to keep a low profile, but there was one place they were always recognised. On their morning walks around the lakes in St James’s Park, the brothers would be surrounded by gaggles of pigeons and squirrels, expectantly waiting for the breadcrumbs and peanuts which they would produce from a plastic bag.
Feeding wildlife is technically against the rules in the Royal Parks, but Srichand felt he owed a debt of gratitude. “I learnt about investment from squirrels,” he once said. “If you give them two nuts, they will bury one — they won’t eat both of them.”
The eldest two of four sons, Srichand and Gopichand were co-chairmen of the Hinduja Group, a company that was founded by their father, Parmanand, in Mumbai. The brothers have their father’s name as a middle name, and were better known by their nicknames SP and GP.
But now, the fauna of St James’s Park are looking less plump than usual. SP died in 2023 aged 87, while GP died last month aged 85, leaving behind a colossal empire and relatives rumoured to be at loggerheads over a contested family motto. The Hinduja Group always prided itself on being a family business — GP once said that he and his three brothers were “one soul” — but the past decade has been riven by disputes over who owns what that have played out in a London court.
Shalini Hinduja, Princess Anne, Princess Royal and Gopichand Hinduja at the inauguration of the Owo
Dave Benett/Getty Images
The drama is often portrayed as a Succession-style battle, yet this is Succession on a global, multi-industry scale. The brothers’ companies span not just media and entertainment, but finance, oil, real estate, healthcare, automotive, IT and several other sectors. They own one of London’s most extravagant hotels and their private home round the corner from Buckingham Palace is estimated to be worth over £300 million.
Hinduja Group operated from Iran until 1979, when the brothers moved its headquarters to London. It grew in the 1980s, with the acquisition of bus manufacturer Ashok Leyland and Gulf Oil, which are now overseen by GP’s two sons. It now has around 200,000 employees globally, with its head offices in London. Most of the conglomerate’s revenue comes from India, but it is the brothers’ cultural legacy that will be remembered here.
Wealth, power and controversy
GP once told The Times that he didn’t believe in luxury. “If you tell me to sleep on the ground, I can sleep on the ground,” he said. Yet he had no shortage of beds to choose from. In 2006, the brothers bought four interconnected Georgian mansions on Carlton House Terrace in St James’s. They paid the Crown Estate £58m for the property and spent a further £50m restoring it into an opulent private residence, which took five years.
In spite of the painstaking renovations, GP admitted in 2015 that his family preferred sleeping at their old house across the road, because it had “good luck”. The 25-bedroom mega-mansion was used to accommodate visiting relatives and became the venue for the brothers’ famous Diwali parties.
“They really started putting Diwali on the map when it wasn’t known here,” recalls an adviser for the family. Their early celebrations of the Hindu festival of lights were held in venues across London, from Alexandra Palace to the V&A and were attended by prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher onwards. At GP’s memorial service, photographs from the parties were displayed on screen of Tony Blair, Sadiq Khan and Boris Johnson, who was clutching a goodie bag.
Srichand Hinduja greets Tony and Cherie Blair at his family Diwali celebration at London’s Alexandra Palace in 1999
COLLECT-Daily Mail
Later, they were held at Carlton House Terrace. Celebrities, politicians and diplomats would fill the Gold Room in the mansion, where vegetarian Indian food was served on silver platters and tables were strewn with flowers. Tatler editor Richard Dennen recently described the event as “like a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly”.
The family has not been without controversy. In 2001, Peter Mandelson was forced to resign from Blair’s government after it emerged that he had tried to help SP obtain a British passport in 1999. The timing was suspect — SP and GP had recently donated £1m to the project to build the Millennium Dome. The brothers always denied wrongdoing and Mandelson was later cleared.
The brothers had a philosophy passed down by their father. “We are a family business,” SP once said. “All assets are held in common ownership, nobody owns anything individually, no ‘this is mine, that is yours’ business. All the houses, all the cars belong to everybody. There is one kitty. I do not own a single penny individually.”
But siblings sharing things can often go awry. In 2014, the four brothers signed a letter stating that “assets held in any single brother’s name belong to all four”. Yet only the following year, the philosophy fractured.
In 2015, SP went against the terms of the letter to take full control of the Switzerland-based Hinduja Bank, which his daughter Shanu was chair of. The dispute was contested in court. SP was at this point suffering from dementia, and his other daughter, Vinoo, was litigating on his behalf. Vinoo said that from 2014 onwards, SP’s brothers had attempted to exclude their side of the family from funding and decision-making. The brothers had traditional patriarchal values and felt the business should only ever be run by sons, not daughters.
SP did have a son, Dharam, but he died in shocking circumstances in 1992. Dharam had secretly married a Roman Catholic woman against his parents’ will, and fled to Mauritius with her to start a new life. But when Dharam heard that his father was trying to track him down, he entered a suicide pact with his wife and set fire to himself in a hotel room. His wife pulled out and tried to save him, surviving. Dharam died a few days later in hospital.
SP’s daughter Shanu Hinduja, who is chair of Hinduja Bank in Switzerland
Getty Images
By late 2021, funding for SP’s medical care had allegedly dried up to such an extent that lawyers considered moving him to a state-funded hospital. GP denied this, stating £5m had been made available. The High Court judge lambasted the family for failing to use their “extraordinary financial capacity” to afford SP “peace and dignity” during his final years, despite all their talk of family values.
The court battle only ended with a truce in 2022, when SP’s health was rapidly deteriorating. GP’s lawyers effectively agreed to tear up the 2014 letter regarding SP’s assets, but as Vinoo and Shanu made clear, broader disputes remained unresolved. In a 2023 interview, GP blamed the rift on “one or two kids who don’t understand business and the strength of family unity”.
Outside the UK, there was more legal drama. In 2024, the third brother, Prakash Hinduja, and his wife, son and daughter-in-law were found guilty by a Swiss court of exploiting staff at their villa in Geneva. Prosecutors argued that the workers, who were from India, had their passports confiscated, worked gruelling hours and were paid a pittance. The four family members were handed prison sentences of between four and four and a half years, though they vigorously deny the charges and are appealing the conviction.
Yet at GP’s funeral last month, his niece Shanu spoke of togetherness: “Uncle GP taught me that differences are not divisions. They are part of what makes a family strong.” She pledged: “I want to assure all of you that the era of SP and GP may have come to an end today but we have all learned from them and will continue to practise what they have taught us.”
The brothers were committed to furthering cultural ties between England and India. As well as the Diwali celebrations, they funded scholarships for Indian students at Cambridge University and King’s College London. But GP hoped that his greatest legacy to London would be the transformation of a former government building into the capital’s most expensively built hotel.
The Owo hotel in Whitehall opened after eight years of renovations, costing £1.4bn
PR
The Old War Office occupies a grand building on Whitehall. Thousands of military and political figures worked there for over a century and its corridors were stalked by Churchill when he was Secretary of State for Air and War from 1919. “We wanted to create something unique for Britain, the country that has welcomed us,” GP said in an interview. “This building is vital to Britain’s history. So we thought, why not convert it from an office of war into a place of peace?”
The Hinduja Group bought the Old War Office building from the government for £357m in 2016. They spent over £1.4bn creating the Owo (pronounced “oh-woe”) hotel along with 85 private residences. There were 1,500 workers on the site for an eight-year period, restoring what they could and undoing certain aesthetic indiscretions of the past.
Churchill’s old offices now house a grand bedroom, a marble bathroom and a reception room with tasteful soft furnishings. Guests can stay in it for around £20,000 a night. The great statesman looks on from a bust on the mantelpiece.
The Haldane Suite at the Owo Hotel, where Churchill used to hold war councils
Handout
The Owo has several restaurants, a James Bond themed underground bar and a four-storey spa. In the former military library where Ian Fleming did his research for the Bond books, there is now a “relaxed all day dining” restaurant. Fleming once said that scrambled eggs were one of the “only things in life that never let you down”. You’d hope that the maxim is true here, where a plate of them is £25.
There were more than 1,000 offices in the old building, connected by 2.5 miles of corridor. Now, there’s just 120 bedrooms, which cost upwards of £1,100 a night.
The hotel’s PR, Fiona Harris, insists that it’s not just the ultra-wealthy coming through the doors from overseas: some families save up for months, and their biggest market is British guests. Company accounts from 2024 show that after operating at a loss of over £16m in its first three months of opening in 2023, the hotel turned a profit of £1.7m in 2024.
The other half of the Grade II* listed building has been turned into the Owo Residences — 85 private apartments which cost anywhere from £2m to £50m, including a turreted penthouse with views across London. Nearly half of them were snapped up in 2023 by buyers including former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and comedian Rebel Wilson, who paid £3.5m for her apartment.
Yet Whitehall Residences, who operate the apartments, reported that in 2024, they sold just five properties, making a loss of over £14.5m. The Land Registry has not recorded any new owners for this year. The company said that the slowdown is reflective of “broader market trends”, but sceptics wonder if the area is part of the problem.
“Westminster is for tourists and shoppers,” says buying agent Henry Pryor. “If you’re looking for a swanky pad, then it is not usually where most people start.” His ultra-high net worth clients prefer locations like Mayfair or Knightsbridge.
Gopichand’s son Dheeraj Hinduja and his wife Shalini, who oversaw the art and interior design at the Owo
Dave Benett/Getty Images for Raf
It would take decades, if not centuries, to make the money back that was poured into revamping the Owo. But by all accounts, it was a family affair and a labour of very expensive love. The interior design and artwork curation was led by GP’s daughter-in-law, Shalini Hinduja, who said that the purpose was to give back to a city “that has given us so much”. Shalini and her husband Dheeraj are still very involved with the business.
In the short term, the younger two brothers — Ashok, who is based in India, and Prakash, in Monaco — are expected to assume control of the conglomerate, aided by GP’s sons, Sanjay and Dheeraj, who are based in London.
According to an adviser of GP’s descendants, the truce remains in place, and relations are relatively cordial. But other sources have said that some within the family do not feel they have got what they deserve from the family business, and will be moving to gain their share.
GP said that he cleaved to his parents’ advice to “do good and forget it”, which is why he turned down offers of honours. While he hopes to be remembered by a glitzy hotel, those who knew him recall a man who was unostentatious at heart: a vegetarian teetotaller who did not have the usual billionaire’s retinue of bodyguards and armoured vehicles, preferring the company of birds and squirrels instead.
