An Ealing strip club will be shut down after dancers were found to be touching clients, attempting to perform sex acts with them and offering to spend the whole night with them for extra cash.

At a licensing panel hearing at Ealing Borough Council on Thursday (June 21) to decide whether the LA Confidential club should have its sexual entertainments venue (SEV) licence renewed, evidence was heard from two council officers who visited the club posing as customers.

Their statements showed they were both let into the club at around 11.30pm on Friday, April 13, even though they told the security guards they did not have ID on them.

The two men were told that for £100 they could be taken to a VIP room where they could touch the girls and the girls could touch them and would be fully naked.

The officers eventually paid the cash and were taken to a VIP area where two girls stripped for them and began dancing.

LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 19: A dancer in Latex performs on stage during Erotica 2010 at Olympia Exhibition Centre on November 19, 2010 in London, England. (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images)

"She would often sit on me and rub her bottom, legs and breasts against me and my penis," one of the officers said.

One stripper touched herself and rubbed her vagina against the officer's penis.

She asked the officer if he and his colleague were gay as they were not touching her like other customers did.

When a security guard appeared nearby the girls both jumped off the two officers.

One of them told the officer for £300 she could spend the whole night with him. He said that she tried to repeatedly touch the officer's penis to "try to masturbate me".

Prior to this visit, the council had received an anonymous complaint alleging that dancers were taking drugs that were being supplied inside the club, that sexual acts were taking place in areas not covered by the CCTV system, and that security guards were complicit and taking money to turn a blind eye.

The complainant also alleged that the dancers were regularly fined between £20 and £300 for misdemeanours and the fines had to be paid in cash and they never got a receipt.

When the council's licensing officer Bob Dear tried to get CCTV footage from the club on February 12, it was not provided until March 1. When he did get it, he found it to be "completely unfit for purpose" as dancers were aware of the blind spots with hanging curtains and blinds obscuring the view.

When Mr Dear visited the club on March 9, he concluded the CCTV was not fit for purpose and in clear breach of the conditions on the SEV and premises licences, and that a dancer had been employed at the venue aged 20 and the photocopy of her ID did not have her date of birth on it. The permitted lower age limit was 21.

He also found paperwork was not complete in the dancer’s files and that the head doorman from the previous security company was still employed at
the premises, despite the decision from a previous review hearing in July 2017 stating that a new security team should be employed.

Acting for LA Confidential, Philip Colvin QC, opened his case to try to save the licence saying: "It's very clear there were significant breaches of the licence extending over a significant period of time.

"It's not good enough, it's not lawful, it's contrary to your rules and it should not happen."

He pointed out that the club had been open since 2006 and was subject to 33 conditions on its SEV licence and 99 on its premises licence but that this was the first time breaches of the SEV licence had been uncovered.

He said the reason was that the club's former manager, Kiran Gulati, had "stepped back" from involvement in the venue and since then things had deteriorated.

He said the club had now turned over a new leaf with Mr Gulati taking control once again with a new action plan of 14 new measures being introduced such as extensive improvements to CCTV and a self-monitoring system with undercover assessors working for an independent firm making frequent reports on conditions inside the club.

But the review panel consisting of Councillor Anthony Kelly, Councillor Shithal Manro and Councillor Nigel Sumner, found the arguments unconvincing.

They pointed out they were being asked to trust Mr Gulati who was found to have been in charge of the club when many of the previous licence breaches were made.

They were also baffled by the company's "tangled web" of a management structure and variety of different names including Club Karma Trading, Club Karma UK and Bespoke Leisure.

They failed to see how transferring ownership of the licence to Bespoke Leisure - which the club had applied to do - would make any difference.

The panel will officially publish its reasoning within five days.

A review of the club's premises licence which has been called for by the police was also due to heard on the same day as the SEV hearing, but was adjourned to a future date because the first hearing overran.