Beverly Hills council urges Brunei to divest itself of Beverly Hills Hotel

The Beverly Hills City Council on Tuesday night approved a resolution condemning new laws targeting gays and women in the Southeast Asian sultanate of Brunei and urged the government to divest itself of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The move heightens the growing political backlash against the Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air, also owned by Brunei. Celebrities including Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres have already called for boycotts.

“The City of Beverly Hills strongly condemns the government of Brunei as well as other governments which engage in similar policies for adopting laws that impose extreme and inhumane penalties including execution by stoning, flogging and severing of limbs,” the resolution says. “The City of Beverly Hills urges the government of Brunei to divest itself of the Beverly Hills Hotel and any other properties it may own in Beverly Hills.”

Brunei last week imposed new criminal codes based on Islamic law with harsh penalties for homosexuality and adultery, including death by stoning. The government of Brunei owns both hotels.

Christopher Cowdray, the hotel group’s chief executive, said in an interview that the boycotts and protests were misguided and potentially harmful to the city of Beverly Hills.

“They won’t stop the implementation of the new laws,” he said, but rather would “only hurt the [hotel’s] employees.” He added that Brunei had no plans to sell the hotels.

The Beverly Hills Hotel employs about 600 people and the Hotel Bel-Air roughly 400. Cowdray added that the Beverly Hills Hotel pays about $7 million in bed taxes and $4 million in city taxes annually.

Leno joined the chorus of condemnation at a demonstration Monday along Sunset Boulevard across from the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“This is 2014, not 1814,” Leno, the former “Tonight Show” host, told dozens of protesters.

Hotel representatives on Monday greeted the dozens of protesters cordially and offered them cookies and water.

Leno said Angelenos had lately been absorbed in the local controversy over Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, who was banned for life by the NBA after his racial remarks came to light.

Brunei’s adherence to sharia, or Islamic, law, he said, is far more serious. “I mean, we get so upset when a team owner says something inappropriate,” he said. “Here are people being killed, stoned to death.... It’s just a matter of priorities, that’s what it is.”

In protest, the Feminist Majority Foundation pulled from the Beverly Hills Hotel its annual Global Women’s Rights Awards, co-chaired by Leno and his wife, Mavis. The event, scheduled for Monday, was instead held at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.

Other organizations quickly jumped aboard the bandwagon. The Hollywood Reporter said it would not hold its annual Women in Entertainment breakfast at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The Motion Picture & Television Fund, which runs the star-studded Night Before the Oscars, said it would not hold its charity event at the hotel in 2015. In a statement, representatives said they met with hotel executives and “expressed very clearly that we cannot condone or tolerate these harsh and repressive laws.”

Teen Line — a confidential teen-to-teen helpline — also recently decided to move its annual fundraising luncheon from the hotel to the Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City.