A restaurant owner has been found guilty of spiking a woman’s drink with a date-rape drug at a Mayfair private members’ club in a bid to overpower her for sex.
Vikas Nath, 63, who owns Michelin-starred Benares in Mayfair, laced the woman’s spicy margarita with gamma-butyrolactone (GBL) after she left him with the drink in the rooftop garden bar at Annabel’s, 46 Berkeley Square.
Southwark Crown Court heard Nath had grown frustrated with the woman’s reluctance to have sex with him prior to the spiking incident, and took GBL in a vanilla extract bottle with him to the club on January 15 2024.
Nath had two bottles of the liquid drug at his Knightsbridge home, as well as a motion sensor-activated covert camera pointed at his bed.
Prosecutors said his plan was to drug the woman and take her back to his home for sex when she had been “overpowered or stupefied”.
However, eagle-eyed staff at the private member’s club spotted Nath using a straw to put the substance into the margarita, and intervened to prevent the woman from drinking it.
On Friday, Nath was found guilty by a jury of attempting to administer a substance with intent and possession of a Class B drug.
The businessman reportedly looked to the floor as the jury returned its verdicts, and could be seen “shaking his head in the dock”.
He had been forced to admit spiking the woman’s drink after he was caught red-handed by Annabel’s staff and recorded on the exclusive members’ club’s CCTV.
The court heard Nath threw the bottle of Madagascar vanilla extract into a toilet cistern after realising he’d been rumbled, but it was later recovered by police.
Bar staff also managed to retrieve the spiked drink from the table, so it could later be tested by police forensics experts.
Prosecutor Tim Clark KC hailed the swift actions of Annabel’s staff after they noticed the “rather strange actions”.
The target of the spiking felt “betrayed” by Nath, she told the trial, but had initially defended him when staff warned that they believed her drink had been spiked.
The court heard they had been in contact prior to the Annabel’s incident, including for lunch meetings at Benares and the Beaverbrook Town House five-star hotel.
She also recalled Nath taking her to a burlesque show at Cirque Le Soir, and the court was shown messages in which Nath had actually warned the woman about drinks being spiked.
After he was arrested at the club, Nath admitted spiking the woman’s drink without her consent, but insisted he had been trying to “relax” her rather than overpower her for sex.
He claimed to have obtained GBL to clean the wheel rims of a high-powered car, on the advice of a friend, and suggested he himself had drunk some of the liquid in the past to relax.
In a police interview, Nath also admitted past incidents when he had covertly filmed sex at his home, using the motion sensor-activated camera set up in his bedroom.
Nath was “impatient with lack of progress”, said Mr Clark, telling jurors the restaurateur “wanted to have sex at his house where there was a camera and it could record it”.
In the witness box, Nath broke down in tears as he admitted spiking the drink had been “wrong”.
“I regret it very deeply”, he said, but argued he had not been thinking about sex at the time.
He also argued that he did not realise the substance was an illegal drug.