The fire which has gutted the Grosvenor Hotel opposite Temple Meads in the centre of Bristol is the latest in a long saga of events to befall the hotel since it welcomed its last paying guest almost 40 years ago.
But the bizarre saga has been played out not at the building itself, which has suffered a gradual decline from landmark hotel at the gateway to Bristol, through hostel for homeless people and then a derelict playground for urban explorers and a roof for squatters.
It has been in the offices of estate agents, property developers and bank vaults of Dubai that the Grosvenor Hotel has played a starring - albeit entirely hypothetical - role over the past few years. For while the building has decayed as Bristol City Council labour to seize control of it with a compulsory purchase order, it’s been the subject of one of the more incredible court cases the British legal system has seen this century.
Updates: Massive fire destroys Grosvenor Hotel
The building had been empty for years when a plan emerged in 2016 and 2017 to convert it into 144 student flats. The developer was a man called Sanjiv Varma, who convinced lots of people his plan was a good one.
The Indian businessman convinced everyone: From the building’s owner, some of Bristol’s more upmarket property agents and then scores of people who wanted to either buy one for their student children to live in, or buy multiple flats as an investment.
They paid their money - perhaps as much as £9 million in total - but there was one small problem. Varma didn’t own the building, the flats in the Grosvenor Hotel didn’t exist and the plan was pretty much dead in the water when Bristol City Council told him they weren’t keen on the idea and he was unlikely to get planning permission for the big conversion.
Council chiefs have their own plans for the Grosvenor Hotel site, as part of the big Temple Quarter regeneration scheme, and Sanjiv Varma’s student flats weren’t part of it. But instead of giving everyone their money back and calling it a day, Varma disappeared.
And it took a huge effort by those people who paid their money upfront, a Bristol Live investigation over more than a year by former reporter Bronwen Weatherby and the forensic work of a company appointed as the liquidators of the firm Varma set up for the deal to uncover what had happened - and the truth was one of luxury and farce.
During 2017, with the money coming in to the company from people putting a down payment on the flats that would never get built, Varma and his glamorous wife spent £3.1 million on diamonds and jewels in Dubai. £49,830 on the company credit card in Harrods, £62,287 in Selfridges and £15,279 in London W1’s swankiest restaurants.
Then there were the overseas shopping trips - £10,255 on a five day spree to the Gucci store in Moscow, accompanied by £15,693 spent in Moscow’s upmarket fashion stores in the same week in June 2017, as well as a £70,000 payment to someone who one of the many judges in the case said the Joint Liquidators ‘believe is a Reiki healer’.
It took a long time for the law to catch up with Sanjiv Varma - although to this day, Avon and Somerset police are not believed to have launched a criminal investigation into the fraud he perpetuated.
It was left to the Official Receiver’s investigators to bring Varma to justice, and even though they proved the case against him, it was tough going. At one point Varma was ordered to hand over his passport as evidence - which would have given investigators the opportunity to match the passport stamps for trips abroad with the globetrotting spending spree from the company’s accounts. He did so but there were key pages of his passport missing, and the investigators then had to disprove his claim that his dog had just happened to eaten the important pages from the passport book.
In the end, with most of the money spent, there seemed little prospect of reclaiming the money investors had handed over. So the court system tried another approach to bring some form of justice for Sanjiv Varma - and prosecuted him for deliberately misleading and lying at previous court hearings.
In March 2021, with hearings taking place over Skype because of the pandemic, Varma was duly jailed for 21 months for contempt of court, and later banned for 13 years for being a company director for the scam itself. However, even that has proved a hollow victory.
In the time between him being found guilty of contempt of court, appealing those convictions, losing the appeal and being eventually sentenced, Varma had disappeared, and within a week of his jail sentence being issued, it was admitted he was an international fugitive - with Bristol Live’s own investigations tracking him down to a beach resort in Dubai - where it is believed some of the millions from the Grosvenor Hotel scam that he didn’t spend are stashed away in a bank vault he once told a court he’d have to ‘cut off his thumb and send from London’ to be able to access.
While the court saga was playing out over a couple of years, the Grosvenor Hotel was investigated by urban explorers, as Bristol City Council tried - so far unsuccessfully - to complete a compulsory purchase order on it.
Today, with the hotel a mere shell of a building, its future looks even more uncertain, with the longstanding assumption it would eventually be demolished to make way for some kind of regeneration scheme - something first envisaged when the old Temple Circus roundabout was paved over and the current road scheme was introduced - now looking even more likely to happen.
Read more on the saga of the Grosvenor Hotel:
- Man took millions for Grosvenor Hotel student flats and spent it on lavish lifestyle
- Gucci and diamonds - what the Bristol student property conman spent his money on
- Businessman Sanjiv Varma told judge 'dog ate my passport'
- Hotel conman says he would 'have to cut off his thumb' in bid to prove innocence
- Grosvenor Hotel conman jailed for 21 months
- Fugitive businessman banned for 13 years after hotel property scam
- 'It's like something out of a horror film' - inside the landmark Bristol hotel that's been empty for 20 years
- Jan 2020 - Grosvenor Hotel to become ‘public plaza’ as eyesore set for forced purchase
- Jan 2021 - Forced sale of a dilapidated Bristol landmark is still ongoing
- March 2022 - Bristol's eyesore Grosvenor Hotel and George and Railway will finally be bought
Follow the latest updates on this story and others like it here.
