Arun Nayar has spent nearly two decades being defined by other people’s words rather than his own, and this year has not been any different. In the first half of 2026, his former wife, actress Elizabeth Hurley, testified for several days at London’s High Court, in a case against the publisher of the Daily Mail. Coverage of the trial kept introducing her the same way British newspapers have for years, as the actress once married to an Indian businessman who almost never speaks to the press himself.
He has built a real business in Mumbai, married three times, and stayed close to a stepson with no legal reason to still call him family. Almost none of that has come from him directly.
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Who is Arun Nayar?
Arun Nayar is a British-Indian businessman born in Leeds in December 1964, raised mainly in Mumbai after his family moved there and his parents later separated. He studied physics at Oxford and Imperial College London before joining his family’s textile business, and later started a software company of his own. He is best known in Britain as the second husband of actress Elizabeth Hurley, and has been married three times in total.
| Full name | Arun Nayar |
| Born | December 1964, Leeds, England |
| Education | Oxford University; Imperial College London (physics) |
| Occupation | CEO, Direction Software LLP, Mumbai |
| Marriages | Valentina Pedroni (1997 to 2002); Elizabeth Hurley (2007 to 2011); Kim Johnson (2016 to 2017) |
| Current status | Not publicly known to be remarried |
The business the press never quite believed
Nayar’s marriage to Hurley made headlines around the world in March 2007. Within days, so did the software company he had built in Mumbai.
A reporter for the Dubai newspaper Khaleej Times traveled to Mumbai that month and found a business that looked considerably smaller in person than it did in its own marketing. Its office turned out to be a converted flat in a building owned by Nayar’s father. A client listed on the company’s website, an equestrian centre in England, said it had never heard of the firm. Bombay Times editor Mark Manuel summed up the reaction in Mumbai at the time:
“No one has heard of his business in India.”
A readers’ poll that same week asked whether Nayar should simply start calling himself Arun Hurley. Most said yes.
Nayar has never appeared on any published list of Indian millionaires, and no financial publication has ever put a verified figure on his net worth, despite the numbers that still circulate online. His own mother pushed back on the coverage at the time, telling a family friend that her son was not as wealthy as the press was making him out to be.
Nayar never publicly disputed any of it, and he has never given an interview to correct the record either. The company, meanwhile, kept growing. By 2019 it had been restructured as Direction Software LLP, now including his brother Nikhil among its partners alongside his original co-founder, Sanjay Gupta, according to filings with India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs. It employs around 150 people and reports close to $5.4 million in annual revenue, based on its most recently filed accounts, and operates from a commercial building in Lower Parel, one of Mumbai’s main business districts, not the converted flat a reporter found there in 2007.
Marrying Elizabeth Hurley
Nayar’s first marriage, to Italian model Valentina Pedroni, had already ended in separation by 2002, when he met Hurley, though the divorce itself was not finalized until November 2005. The two were first photographed together in January 2003, at a Christian Dior show in Paris.
They married on 2 March 2007, in a civil ceremony at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Elton John gave the bride away. A week later, the couple held a traditional Hindu ceremony at Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur. Hello! magazine reportedly paid close to ยฃ1.5 million for exclusive rights to the wedding photographs.
The goodwill did not extend to the parish that hosted their church blessing. Seven months after the wedding, the Independent reported that St Mary’s, Sudeley, had never received its usual donation for the ceremony. The couple had offered a set of embroidered kneelers instead of the standard fee. Parish treasurer Sue Williams put it plainly:
“We haven’t received a penny from them.”
The marriage, and how it ended
The couple lived mainly on a farm Hurley owned near Barnsley, Gloucestershire, and Nayar became a regular presence at Elton John’s charity events over the next few years. He also grew close to Damian, Hurley’s son from an earlier relationship with the film producer Steve Bing, once describing taking the boy out on the family’s tractor while Hurley cooked, and comparing the arrangement to the television family the Waltons.
By the autumn of 2010, the marriage had quietly come apart. The public only learned of it that December, after a tabloid photograph showed Hurley with the cricketer Shane Warne. Hurley confirmed the split on Twitter, calling it a painful time but adding that Nayar had been a great father to their son. She filed for divorce the following April, citing his “unreasonable behaviour.” The case was settled at London’s High Court on 15 June 2011, in a hearing that lasted 92 seconds. Neither of them was in the room.
A second marriage, then nothing public at all
Nayar met British model and personal trainer Kim Johnson in September 2011, a few months after his divorce from Hurley was finalized. They married on the French Riviera in July 2016, with Damian Hurley among the guests, and separated quietly less than a year later. Johnson’s agent confirmed the split to the Daily Mail in August 2017. Nayar has not been reported in a relationship since, and there is no public record of him remarrying.
The relationship that outlasted both marriages
What survived everything else is Nayar’s bond with Damian Hurley, the son who was never his by blood or by law.
In 2009, an Independent profile of Damian’s biological father, the film producer Steve Bing, mentioned in passing that Damian, then seven, called Nayar “Daddy.” Fifteen years later, in May 2024, Damian invited his former stepfather to the London premiere of his own directorial debut, “Strictly Confidential,” where Nayar posed for photographs beside Elizabeth Hurley and Hugh Grant. A few months before that, Damian had shared a New Year’s photo of his mother and Nayar together, captioned simply “Mama & Daddy.” Hurley later confirmed the relationship herself:
“Arun still calls him son and Damian calls him Dad.”
That line is, by some distance, the clearest thing on record about who Arun Nayar actually is to the people closest to him, and it did not come from him. Across nearly two decades of marriages, a High Court divorce and a foreign newspaper’s investigation into his own company, Arun Nayar has said remarkably little about any of it in his own words. His former wife testified in a London courtroom again this year, and he was not there. On the page, at least, he rarely is.
