This article by Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, Cormac Kehoe, Olivia Facey for the London Centric has been shortlisted for the 2026 Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness. 

Thousands of people cheered this week as Sadiq Khan joined the family of billionaire landlord Asif Aziz to switch on the capital’s Ramadan lights in the heart of the West End. Aziz’s charitable foundation, which received widespread plaudits for funding the display, said it held the event to celebrate the “coexistence and community spirit that make this city so incredible”.

What those attending the ceremony didn’t know was that the Aziz family were, at the same time they were publicly praising London’s community values, secretly embarking on “one of the worst mass evictions in our capital’s recent history”.

London Centric has learned that in the coming weeks the Aziz family’s Criterion Capital business intends to remove hundreds of Londoners – including some marking the month of Ramadan – from their homes. These mass “no-fault” evictions of private tenants, which sources say are planned to be finished before the government’s Renters’ Rights Act comes into effect, are taking place on an unprecedented scale. They are going ahead regardless of whether the residents are up-to-date with their rent or have kept the property in good condition. Many residents have paid tens of thousands of pounds in rent to the Aziz family’s companies in recent years.

One of the Aziz-owned blocks where tenants are being cleared out is a former office building called Britannia Point in Colliers Wood, where one-bed flats rent for £1,700 a month. Earlier this week hundreds of its residents received letters pushed under their front doors informing them that they have two months to find somewhere else to live.

Lenny Kasi-Appiah, 40, said he came home to find the eviction notice this week. “Reading it, I thought, is this a mistake? I’ve always paid my bills on time, always paid my rent on time.”

When London Centric visited the building on Thursday, there was confusion as not everyone had received their post – but an email sent to one tenant confirmed “the landlord will be seeking vacant possession of the entire building.”

Another of the soon-to-be-evicted residents is Raluca, who moved in with her boyfriend in 2019. “It’s horrible looking for somewhere else at the same time as everyone else, all in the same area. You cannot find anything for the price we’re paying for this flat. We’ll either have to increase our rent by £300 or move outside of London. It’s so stressful.”

The billionaire who made his fortune in Britain then moved to Abu Dhabi

London Centric has pieced together the enormous scale of the evictions with the help of sources with knowledge of the Criterion Capital business, local politicians, and the tenants themselves. Many expressed disgust at the way the Aziz family business operates. There was particular scorn for the contrast between the company’s treatment of tenants and how the family present themselves in public — especially the declaration of patriarch Asif Aziz that one of his main charitable objectives is “tackling homelessness”.

Aziz, who recently moved to low-tax Abu Dhabi and is increasingly delegating day-to-day control of his London operations to his son Omar Aziz, previously described his mission in life: “I have worked hard to accumulate wealth not simply for myself, but for the communities that I am a part of.”

Politicians, tenants and councils did not realise the evictions were coordinated to take place across London, rather than being isolated to individual buildings, until we told them. Some tenants only found out they were losing their homes when we knocked on their doors; others received their eviction notices the day after we visited their properties to ask if they were at risk. With hundreds of households affected, the Aziz evictions dwarf the scale of the mass evictions carried out by Henry Smith, another wealthy London landlord, which caused widespread consternation across the capital in 2024.

This article was originally published in London Centric.