Top PIO restaurateur found guilty of spiking woman’s drink at Annabel’s in Mayfair

TOI Correspondent from London: An Indian-origin businessman who owns a string of high-end restaurants, including Michelin-starred Benares in Mayfair, has been convicted of spiking a woman’s cocktail with a date-rape drug at the private members’ club Annabel’s.

Vikas Nath (63), a British citizen, was convicted by a jury at Southwark crown court on Friday of lacing the woman’s “Spicy Margarita” with gamma-butyrolactone (GBL) with the intent of overpowering her for sex. Judge Usha Karu remanded Nath in custody. He will be sentenced at a later date. Nath denied the charges of attempting to administering a substance with intent and possession of a controlled class B drug and muttered “That’s bullshit” as the guilty verdicts were read out.

Staff at the London club noticed him using a straw to transfer liquid from a small bottle into the woman’s drink when she was away from the rooftop garden bar table on Jan 15, 2024. They intervened to prevent the woman from drinking it and swapped her drink so that it could be tested by forensic experts. It was later found to contain GBL, a substance with the ability to incapacitate those who ingest it. Prosecutors said Nath’s plan was to drug the woman and take her back to his home for sex when she had been “overpowered or stupefied”.

Police were called to the club at 7.41 pm and officers found a discarded bottle of Madagascan vanilla extract floating in a toilet cistern. It contained traces of GBL. Nath was arrested at the scene and charged the following day.

CCTV footage showed Nath remove a small bottle from his trouser pocket and use a straw to transfer liquid from the bottle into the woman’s drink on two occasions before going to the toilet.

Officers searched his Knightsbridge home and located two bottles of GBL under his kitchen sink as well as a motion-activated camera pointed at his bed. Nath told detectives he had obtained GBL to clean the wheel rims of his BMW.

The court heard Nath had grown frustrated with the woman’s reluctance to have sex with him. The jury was also shown messages in which Nath had even warned the woman about drinks being spiked.

Nath admitted spiking the woman’s drink without her consent, but insisted he had been trying to “relax" her.