Mohamed Al Fayed, who female former employees accused of sexual assault in a BBC investigation this week, was flamboyant, extrovert and a thorn in the side of the royal family.
That today, a year after his death at the age of 94, he is still making headlines reflects a life much mired in controversy.
A scrapper who never shied away from a fight, he took on the House of Windsor, the House of Commons with the “cash for questions” scandal, and business rivals.
He may have been the owner of Harrods, arguably Britain’s most prestigious store, and acquired a slice of British cultural life with ownership of Fulham FC and the satirical magazine Punch, but he died never having gained the one thing he desperately craved: citizenship, and with it full acceptance into British society.
His most high-profile war was against the royals and the “establishment” over the death of his beloved son Dodi alongside Diana, Princess of Wales, in a 1997 Paris car crash while being driven by Henri Paul, a Fayed employee who was over the alcohol limit.
Grief-stricken, Fayed embarked on an embittered and vengeful campaign. Dodi, he claimed, had told him the princess was pregnant and the couple were to be engaged. There was no evidence, and it undoubtedly caused unimaginable distress to her bereaved family and friends.
He would persist, too, for 10 years with allegations that Diana, Dodi and Paul were “murdered” in an act orchestrated by MI6 on the instructions of the late Duke of Edinburgh and involving the former prime minister Tony Blair.
“I am a father who lost his son,” he told the coroner conducting the inquests into the deaths. “I am fighting unbelievable forces. But with your power as a judge, you have to force MI6 to open their box and find the result.” The coroner dismissed claims of a “plot” as having “not a shred of evidence” to support them.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of a school inspector, Fayed rose from selling lemonade and sewing machines to working for the Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, advising the Sultan of Brunei and launching his own shipping business.
He was already wealthy when he moved to Britain in the 1970s, intent on building a business empire. In 1979, with his brother Ali, Fayed bought the Paris Ritz hotel.
He set his sights on Harrods, becoming locked in a bitter battle with “Tiny” Rowland, the business tycoon and head of the mining conglomerate Lonrho. Fayed won, though Rowland later accused him of breaking into his safety deposit box at the department store, claims that led to Fayed, along with others, being arrested in March 1998 but never charged.
Fayed bought Fulham FC, taking over the Division Two club 1997, with his spending on players and managers including Kevin Keegan and Roy Hodgson seeing them rise to the Premier League. Fans were bemused, however, when, in 2011, two years after Michael Jackson’s death, Fayed erected a statue of his pop singer friend at the Craven Cottage ground. When he sold the club in 2013 it was taken down.
In politics, he was at the centre of the 1994 “cash for questions” scandal, with claims he had paid the then Tory MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith thousands of pounds to illegally table questions in the Commons on his behalf. Hamilton sued for libel and lost. The cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was another scalp, forced to resign after the Harrods boss revealed he had been staying free at the Ritz in Paris at the same time as Saudi arms dealers. Aitken was later jailed for perjury after libel proceedings against the Guardian.
British citizenship continued to elude him, despite having four British children by his second wife, paying millions in tax, giving millions to charities such as Great Ormond Street hospital, and financing films, including Chariots of Fire. “Why won’t they give me a passport? I own Harrods and employ thousands of people in this country,” he asked.
Turning down his second application in 1999, the then Labour home secretary, Jack Straw, decided Fayed had a “general defect in his character”, citing the safety deposit box and “cash for questions” controversies.
Fayed was first accused of sexual abuse in the late 1980s, but the allegations did not lead to criminal charges. In 2009, the Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Keir Starmer, elected not to prosecute him after claims he had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl in Harrods. He denied all allegations against him and attended a voluntary police interview.
Claims of sexual misconduct against the billionaire businessman were the subject of pieces by Vanity Fair in 1995, ITV in 1997 and Channel 4 in 2017.
