Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, who is accompanying the Prime Minister on the UK tour, recalled being asked out by the hotelier-turned-MP but declined since he was feeling unwell. At 2.30 in the night, Kamal Nath says Lalit Suri’s wife Jyotsna called him to say her husband was dead despite efforts to revive him after a massive heart attack. Among the others who received a similar distress call from Jyotsna Suri was High Commissioner Kamlesh Sharma.
Suri was a member of the FICCI delegation which was in London to attend the Indo-UK business summit, the concluding session of which will be attended by PM Manmohan Singh and Tony Blair. Suri, who boasted he was the largest Indian hotel owner because of his majority holdings in his properties, had over the years acquired the image of being a multi-faceted personality.
He entered politics since he had a good equation with the Gandhi family through Sanjay Gandhi. He was nominated to the Rajya Sabha first in 1992 and later in 2002.
After Sanjay and later Rajiv Gandhi’s death, Lalit Suri was one of the first friends of the Gandhis to move on.
Within the decade, and later, he had built a formidable hotel empire — his publicists never failed to remind one and all he was the single largest hotel owner in the country, with 1600 rooms and majority shareholdings in the company. Bharat Hotels went on to bid and acquire some of the choicest ITDC properties during the disinvestment years of 1999-2004, from Bangalore to Khajuraho, apart from embarking on a Rs 600 crore expansion plan in towns like Amritsar, Hyderabad, Chennai, among others sunshine cities.
Lailt Suri’s political ambitions were equally soaring —...
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