Gopichand Hinduja, listed at his death aged 85 as the richest man in Britain, was one of four brothers who took their father’s Indo-Iranian trading business and turned it into a vast international conglomerate. It spread across everything from motor manufacturing to their own banks and Bollywood film-making, and had a value put on it by this year’s Sunday Times Rich List of more than £35bn.
The brothers – devout, acquisitive, secretive – positioned themselves across the world like latter-day Rothschilds: one, Ashok, in India and one, Prakash, in Switzerland, with Gopichand and his elder brother, Srichand, in London. There they lived in opulence in four interconnected mansions purchased from the Crown on Carlton House Terrace on the Mall. Two years ago, at a party celebrated with canapes covered in gold leaf and in the presence of royalty, Gopichand opened his £1.25bn development of the Old War Office in Whitehall as the Raffles hotel, describing it as “my greatest legacy to London”.
