The Dark Night That Made £3B Hotel Giant Surinder Arora

Barchart·07/15/2026 20:18:15

Surinder Arora remembers clearly the night in 2008 when he thought he had lost everything.  “It was 2, 3 a.m. in the morning. You can't sleep. I must have cried so much that you could squeeze water out of the pillow,” recounted Arora, a hotel and property entrepreneur who founded Arora Group. Having borrowed heavily to expand in the run-up to the financial crisis, Arora’s business was under extreme pressure. One of his debt providers, struggling Irish lender Allied Irish Bank, had sold his loans to a hedge fund, which wanted its money back, and he was facing defaults.