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.
