For Mohamed Al Fayed, who has died aged 94, the truth was always a relative commodity – bent and shaped to fit his need of the moment. The little-known Egyptian who emerged as the new owner of Harrods in 1985 had to explain the source of the £573m used to purchase control of its parent company, House of Fraser, valuing it at £615m. So, decades before Donald Trump’s “fake news”, Fayed created what the government inspectors who investigated the Harrods takeover later termed “new fact: that lies were the truth and that the truth was a lie”.
Mohamed Fayed, the son of a school inspector, who had hustled for Haiti’s feared dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier then made a living as a facilitator for British companies in the Gulf and Gulf rulers in London, became the fabulous pharaoh Mohamed Al Fayed, the public-school scion of an old-established Egyptian dynasty, whose wealth from oil, property and shipping was beyond measure.
The “hero from zero” – as his rival for Harrods, the Lonrho chief executive Roland “Tiny” Rowland, dubbed him – used his considerable energy, cunning, determination and persuasive skills to convince in the phoney pharaoh role he created for himself. Fayed lied about his family, his business background, even his date of birth, to hide a truth that was anything but pharaonic.
Fayed had to prove he was buying Harrods with his own money, or the prize could be denied him by the City regulators. Exactly whose money he used to buy Harrods was never proved. As one of his investment advisers, Fayed held power of attorney over some of the Sultan of Brunei’s Swiss bank accounts. This fed suspicions about the possible source of the funds.
Rowland, like the Tory MPs Fayed later paid and generously indulged, misjudged the man he dismissed as “Tootsie”. He believed Fayed would help sidestep a Monopolies Commission ban on Lonrho buying House of Fraser. Lonrho would “park” its near 30% stake with Fayed, who would sell it back later at a profit. Rowland did not believe Fayed, his former Lonrho co-director, could afford a full takeover. But Fayed saw the chance to obtain the social status he craved by owning the world-famous store with its royal warrants.
Within 24 hours of selling in 1984, Rowland realised Fayed had no intention of being his stooge. “Tiny” never forgave “Tootsie” for robbing him of the Harrods prize he had coveted for years. The two men fought the most bitter, expensive and personal feud ever seen between business rivals. It continued in the courts even after Rowland’s death in 1998.
Pressure from Rowland resulted in the official investigation. The damning report, published in 1990, exposed the myths about Fayed’s family and fortune. It accused Fayed of “an act of deception on the British government”. In response, even though no action was taken on the report’s findings, Fayed wreaked a savage revenge on his former friends in the Conservative government, who had welcomed his political donations.
Fayed put sleaze on the political agenda by exposing the “cash for questions” network created for him with the help of the Westminster lobbyist Ian Greer. In 1994, the Tory ministers Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith were forced to resign after their work for Fayed was disclosed by the Guardian. Fayed also helped bring down the defence minister Jonathan Aitken in 1995, over Saudi payment of his £1,000 bill at Fayed’s Ritz hotel in Paris.
But these were pyrrhic victories. The sleaze revelations helped sink John Major’s government, which had denied Fayed the British citizenship he desired. But Fayed was again refused a British passport by the Labour home secretary Jack Straw in 1999 because of his self-confessed role as a corrupter.
Desperate for social standing, Fayed donated generously to the annual Windsor horse show and was pictured with its patron, Queen Elizabeth. He befriended the Spencer family. Raine Spencer, stepmother of Diana, Princess of Wales, became a director of a Harrods subsidiary.
Like some grand vizier in an Arabian Nights tale, Fayed encouraged and manipulated an affair between Princess Diana and his eldest son, Dodi. Fayed basked in the international headlines. He talked seriously about becoming part of the British royal family.
After the tragedy of their deaths in the car crash in a Paris underpass in August 1997, Fayed embarked on a new campaign – to prove that the royal family were responsible for the fatal crash, rather than an over-the-limit Ritz employee driving too fast to escape the pursuing paparazzi.
There was much initial public sympathy. But Fayed’s ever more bizarre rantings about MI6 and CIA plots were received sympathetically only by conspiracy theorists and admirers of Diana who refused to accept their loss could be in part due to something as mundane as drink-driving. The claims were less warmly received at Buckingham Palace, which withdrew the Harrods royal warrants.
Fayed himself travelled the short distance from his Park Lane penthouse to Fulham football club – bought earlier in 1997 – with two cars packed with bodyguards and a medical team. An inquest jury in 2008 found that Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed had been unlawfully killed by the gross negligence of their driver, Henri Paul, and the paparazzi.
Fayed was born in the poor El-Gomrok district of Alexandria in 1929, four years earlier than he later maintained, and was the eldest of five children. He sold Singer sewing machines until, in 1952, he joined up with Adnan Khashoggi, son of an influential doctor in Saudi Arabia, who had attended Victoria college, a British-style public school in Alexandria. Fayed later falsely claimed to have also attended the school. Khashoggi later became the archetypal “fixer” for US companies in Saudi Arabia during the 1970s petro-dollar boom – and a bitter Fayed enemy.
Fayed the salesman flourished at Khashoggi’s import company in Jeddah. In 1954, he married Khashoggi’s sister Samira, the mother of Dodi. But within two years the marriage failed, as did the business relationship. Fayed returned to Egypt and with his brothers Ali and Salah became a shipping agent. President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation policy encouraged a move to Italy.
In 1964 Fayed arrived in Haiti, one of the world’s poorest nations, hailed as a rich sheikh from Kuwait. He romanced one of Papa Doc’s daughters and persuaded Duvalier to give him an oil concession and a contract to manage the Port-au-Prince harbour. The Duvaliers’ love affair with Fayed was short-lived. Early in 1965 the fake sheikh left Haiti, never to return. More than $100,000 (almost $1m today) was reportedly found to be missing from the port authority’s bank account.
Fayed moved to London. The construction group Costain made him its agent in the oil-rich Gulf emirate of Dubai, where he befriended Mahdi al-Tajir, an influential adviser to the ruling Maktoum family. The Dubai building boom was good to Fayed. He was paid tens of millions in “commissions” by Costain and another British contractor, Bernard Sunley, for their contracts. Most of these payments were kicked back to those who gave the contracts – the ruling family and their advisers. Fayed later lost his Dubai passport after a business dispute during the 1990s with the Maktoums.
Fayed made enough to buy Balnagown Castle in the Scottish Highlands, a Surrey mansion, a Park Lane apartment block, part of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, a St Tropez estate and the Paris Ritz. Fayed made himself welcome in Paris with political donations while leasing and restoring the former home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Fayed would entertain with disparaging tales about the Gulf rulers and how he arranged an endless supply of women and gifts for their visits. Doors in the Park Lane penthouse were always closed. There was a staff of attractive, well-dressed young women, mostly English. Whenever Fayed entered or left a room he closed the door behind him so that whoever was in the room could not be seen or heard. Rarely seen was Fayed’s second wife, the former Heini Wathén, a Finnish model whom he married in 1985.
Before Harrods, Fayed deliberately avoided the limelight. Only afterwards did he develop his appetite for publicity. Once he had acquired the Knightsbridge landmark – selling the remaining Fraser stores to refinance the bank loans possibly used to repay the Sultan of Brunei after that connection was severed – he pursued the prestige and influence he assumed owning a store with royal customers would bring.
Fayed had mastered the ace facilitator’s art of finding out what a person wanted and providing it. His generosity was boundless, if not declined. Then he would not repeat the mistake so as not to offend. But if a gift or favour was accepted, any subsequent failure to respond as required provoked rage and revenge.
Fayed honed these techniques as he moved ever more successfully through Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Dubai, Brunei and France. In Britain he applied them ruthlessly to reach sources of influence – politicians, peers, police and the press. The Harrods hamper list, free shopping and stays at the Ritz were his bait. But there were no free lunches with Fayed.
Because of his foul-mouthed jokiness, buffoonish behaviour and self-caricature, it was easy to underestimate Fayed. Many did to their cost. He had a shrewd and finely tuned appreciation of human nature. But he refused to recognise that his image and actions closed the door to his acceptance in Britain, no matter how hard and often he knocked.
The rebuffs fuelled Fayed’s darker side. A dangerous opponent, he would make the wildest allegations in public as well as private against enemies or those he blamed for setbacks. He fabricated documents and paid witnesses to perjure themselves. It was often difficult to detect whether Fayed himself believed the allegations he repeated with such conviction.
Fayed was a man without brakes. Nobody around him said “no”. His brothers Ali and Salah always deferred to him while sometimes shaking their heads at his antics.
A former Harrods finance director was removed by the police from an aircraft at Heathrow amid bribery allegations that were quickly dismissed. In Dubai, the executive Christoph Bettermann was less fortunate. He spent three years fighting civil and criminal proceedings after Fayed made allegations of theft before he was acquitted and the civil case dismissed. Employees’ telephones were routinely bugged.
Rowland’s safe deposit box at Harrods was burgled – Fayed was questioned by Scotland Yard in 1998, but not charged. This was another reason why he was refused a passport. Fayed unsuccessfully sued the Metropolitan police. He settled a legal action by Rowland’s widow, Josie, in 2000.
There were repeated allegations of sexual harassment of female staff. Some who complained were accused of theft and on occasions arrested by local police only too willing to accept allegations (later dropped) from a powerful patron.
In 2009 the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge Fayed over the claim he had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl at the store. Fayed had been interviewed by Scotland Yard under caution. He was interviewed again in 2013 after a woman alleged he had sexually attacked her at his Park Lane apartment after a job interview. The police reopened the case in 2015 but took no further action. Fayed always denied the allegations.
Further sexual harassment allegations were made by former Harrods employees in a Channel 4 documentary in 2017 and to Channel 4 News in 2018. One ex-employee claimed to have accepted £60,000 to drop a sexual harassment claim. Fayed again denied the allegations and the police took no action.
Despite massive investment, Fayed failed to make Harrods a retailing success story. More than 40 directors came and went, most sacked, some quit, as retail experts tired of Fayed’s tantrums and micromanaging. Only when his involvement waned did trading improve. Harrods was more a must-see for tourists than a must-spend. Burdened by huge bank borrowings, it struggled to match more professionally run rivals.
But there was enough coming through the tills to pay for the Fayed lifestyle of houses, helicopters, jets and yachts, as well as extensive “walking-round” money – usually wads of £50 notes. Channelled through offshore tax-haven bank accounts, companies and trusts, millions came back into Britain to fund Fayed’s failed media ambitions with Punch magazine and commercial radio plus, particularly, Fulham football club.
This bid for popular appeal – which included hiring the England hero Kevin Keegan as manager – won over Fulham fans but ultimately cost Fayed more than £200m. He sold the club in 2013 for £121m.
In 2019 Fayed, his wife and his son Omar stepped down as directors of the Paris Ritz. However, the hotel remained in family control.
The revelation, during the 1999 failed libel trial brought by Hamilton, that Fayed drew large amounts of cash from Harrods bank accounts and enjoyed other benefits sparked an Inland Revenue investigation. A cosy deal under which Fayed had paid a fixed amount in tax with no questions asked about his income was cancelled by the courts as illegal in 2002.
In 2003, the man who claimed to love Britain so much left for tax exile in Switzerland, declaring he was once more the victim of perfidious Albion. But he soon tired of Gstaad and returned two years later after cutting a different tax deal.
Fayed’s cavalier attitude towards the truth was demonstrated again when it came to selling Harrods in May 2010. Secretly negotiating for many months, Fayed consistently denied to the Harrods staff and the media that he had any intention of selling – ever. “I put two fingers up to them all. It is not for sale,” he told the Sunday Times, a month before Harrods was sold by Fayed family trusts to the Qatar sovereign wealth fund for just under £900m. The Qataris also assumed bank debts of nearly £600m. In the event Fayed was not buried, as he once promised, in a pharoah-style mausoleum atop the Knightsbridge store.
He is survived by Heini and their children, Jasmine, Karim, Camilla and Omar.
• Mohamed Al Fayed, businessman, born 27 January 1929; died 30 August 2023
