Labour has pocketed cash from a hotelier who made millions housing asylum seekers.
A senior MP and a local branch have both accepted thousands from tycoon Gauhar Nawab’s hotel business in recent months despite others in the party previously claiming conditions in his rooms were ‘squalid’.
At the same time, Labour ministers are vowing to end the lucrative contracts his companies and other hoteliers have received to house record numbers of asylum seekers crossing the Channel.
Indian-born Mr Nawab has benefited from taxpayer-funded contracts for over two decades, which have helped him build an extensive property empire with assets now worth around half a billion pounds.
It includes at least two hotels currently housing asylum seekers as the Government scrambles to find spaces for the record 20,000 small-boat migrants that reached Britain in the first half of this year.
Taxpayers are paying £4 million a day to house asylum seekers, with the spending watchdog recently warning the total bill is expected to reach £15.3billion for the decade to 2029.
On Monday night Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘It is the height of hypocrisy for Labour to be taking thousands from a migrant-hotel tycoon who Cabinet ministers have criticised.
‘This Labour donor is getting rich from the illegal-immigrant asylum gravy train that Labour is running. It is sickening that Labour are taking money from one of the people they are enriching with the increase in illegal immigrants staying in hotels since the election.’
Labour has pocketed cash from a hotelier who made millions housing asylum seekers
A senior MP and a local branch have both accepted thousands from tycoon Gauhar Nawab’s hotel business in recent months
Labour ministers are vowing to end the lucrative contracts his companies and other hoteliers have received to house record numbers of asylum seekers crossing the Channel
One of London Hotel Group’s properties is the Best Western Peckham in south London.
Last year, protesters gathered outside it to block the planned relocation of asylum seeker residents to the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset. Labour MP Dr Rosena Allin-Khan had denounced plans to move migrants to the barge as ‘unethical’.
Her comments were made before she received the donation in March and there is no suggestion they were connected to the gift.
Another £3,500 was donated to the Dartford Labour Party in Kent. Mr Nawab, whose property empire is controlled via a complex web of firms with his son, Meher, and other family members, came to the UK in 1961 and began his hotel business in 1974.
The Mail first reported in 2002 that Mr Nawab was netting an estimated £5million a year from taxpayers by making money from what was already a national asylum crisis.
Mr Nawab, 84, lives in a mansion worth over £3.5millon in the south London constituency of Environment Secretary Steve Reed, Streatham and Croydon North.
He continues to drive his Jaguar I-Pace to his business’s elegant headquarters 15 minutes away in Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy’s Clapham and Brixton Hill constituency.
Both MPs, who neighbour Dr Allin-Khan’s constituency, have previously been fierce critics of parts of Mr Nawab’s hotel group.
Mr Reed has cited allegations raised in complaints about one of the firm’s hotels, which provides accommodation to the homeless, in a 2012 BBC investigation and local press that it was ‘squalid, inhuman and insect-infested’.
He demanded to know why the Home Office was making ‘financial arrangements’ with someone with such a ‘dreadful reputation’.
He later accused the hotel of providing ‘sub-standard’ accommodation after speaking to women and children in the hotel during Covid.
A small boat heads off in to the English Channel after picking up migrants at sunrise on July 02, 2025 in Gravelines, France
A group of migrants walk through the water to reach an inflatable dinghy in an attempt to cross the English Channel to reach Britain, from the beach of Petit-Fort-Philippe in Gravelines, near Calais, France, July 2, 2025
Taxpayers are paying £4 million a day to house asylum seekers, with the spending watchdog recently warning the total bill is expected to reach £15.3billion for the decade to 2029
A group of migrants get on an inflatable dinghy in an attempt to cross the English Channel to reach Britain, from the beach of Petit-Fort-Philippe in Gravelines, near Calais
A woman and her child walks with a group of migrants on the beach to reach an inflatable dinghy in an attempt to cross the English Channel to reach Britain, at the beach of Petit-Fort-Philippe in Gravelines, near Calais, France, July 2
In both cases the hotel group was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Ms Ribeiro-Addy claimed she was ‘intimidated’ by management when she visited another of the group’s hotels housing migrants in 2021. In a video filmed in front of the hotel’s sign she referenced Mr Nawab’s firm, then called Euro Hotels, and said she suspected she was being barred from entering Clapham South Dudley Hotel because residents were ‘complaining about the hotel’.
She added: ‘The Home Office really need to think seriously about the type of companies that they are paying lots of money to host refugees.’
The group denied having any involvement with the property at that time and said its management were not responsible for what happened to the MP.
Meher Nawab, CEO of London Hotel Group, said: ‘We have always invested in our properties and maintained high standards to meet the strict contract criteria of our accommodation partners including the Home Office… In the last two years alone, we have invested over £25million in our accommodation.’
A spokesman for Ms Allin-Khan said: ‘All donations are declared according to the rules set out by Parliament and the Electoral Commission. Rosena receives donations from a variety of people and companies who support her campaigns.’ A Labour source said the Government ‘has committed to ending hotel use by the end of this Parliament’.
