Restaurateur found guilty of spiking woman’s drink at private members’ club in London
A London restaurateur has been found guilty of lacing a woman’s drink with a date-rape drug at a private club.
Vikas Nath, 63, spiked the unsuspecting woman’s spicy margarita with gamma-butyrolactone (GBL) after she left him with the drink at Annabel’s rooftop garden.
But his plot, which prosecutors said was so that he could drug the woman and take her back to his place for sex when she was incapacitated, unravelled after eagle-eyed staff at the high-end Mayfair club spotted Nath tampering with the cocktail.
His move was also caught on the bar’s CCTV. Detectives later found two bottles of the liquid at his west London home along with motion sensor cameras pointed at his bed.
Nath, the owner of several top restaurants, including two with Michelin stars, admitted spiking the drink, but he insisted it was to ‘relax’ the woman rather than a ruse to have sex with her.
He denied that his plan was to ‘stupefy and overpower’ the woman, whom he had met a few times before the incident on January 15, 2024.
Nath claimed the woman had been ‘erratic’ at the bar, and that he wanted her to be ‘less anxious and for her to calm down a little bit.’
He told jurors that he had consumed the substance a few times before that night recreationally as it heightened the effects of alcohol.
The court heard that he took a ‘swig’ from a bottle containing the substance before entering Annabel’s.
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He had told in a police interview the had bought the substance to clean his BMW in 2016 before a friend said it could be drunk with alcohol as a ‘relaxant,’ but Nath had also said he didn’t know what the drug was.
Thanks to the quick-thinking staff at Annabel’s, the woman’s drugged drink was switched for a fresh one before she sipped from it.
They had seen him ‘suck up liquid’ using a straw before dropping the contents into the drink.
Nath threw the bottle of GBL into a toilet cistern at the bar before the police arrived after he realised he had been caught, where it was later retrieved, the court heard.
Staff managed to keep the spiked drink so it could be tested by forensic experts.
The woman, who was stopped by staff before she returned to Nath and thedrink, said at the trial she had first defended the businessman when staff warned him.
She said: ‘I remember vividly defending Mr Nath, saying ‘There is no way he could do that”.’
‘I remember sending him a message saying ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s happening’. Because I felt it was my fault.
‘I didn’t want him in trouble, I didn’t believe it.’
She said she felt ‘betrayed’ by him.
During his evidence on Wednesday, tearful Nath, from Knightsbridge, west London, said tearfully ‘What I did was wrong and I regret it very deeply.’
Nath was found guilty by a jury of attempting to administer a substance with intent and possession of a Class B drug at Southwark Crown Court today.
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