Leading hotelier and Rajya Sabha MP Lalit Suri passed away on Monday morning after a heart attack. Suri died at a London hotel. He was attending a business conference with industry association Ficci. He was 60.

Suri was recently in the news for taking over Asia’s oldest hotel, the Great Eastern, from the West Bengal government and announcing a Rs 125 crore revival package for it.

But in a career that spanned several decades as chairman and managing director of Bharat Hotels, he had become a businessman known for spotting opportunities. Suri’s personal and business interests included aviation, exports, automobile ancillaries, real estate, telecom and information technology as well as newspaper publishing. He was also known as an art collector and philanthropist.

Born on April 15, 1947 in Rawalpindi, Suri was trained as an automobile engineer and entered the hospitality industry after he took over Bharat Hotels in 1987, following diversification of the family-run business, Delhi Automobile Ltd.

The company’s first project, InterContinental The Grand, in Delhi, commissioned in 1988, is now among Delhi’s most successful hotels. The Grand hotels have a presence in Srinagar, Goa and Mumbai as well, apart from three ‘The Grand’ hotels in Bangalore, Udaipur and Khajuraho. Three more are planned — The Grand Great Eastern in Kolkata, The Grand Resort, Bekal, and The Grand Ahmedabad.

By 2009 the company planned to offer more than 3,000 rooms with hotels in Chennai, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Noida, Hyderabad, Amritsar and other key cities. Suri was actively involved in promoting tourism and was Global Executive Committee member of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC).

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