For Mohamed Al Fayed, who has died aged 94, the reality was at all times a relative commodity – bent and formed to suit his want of the second. The little-known Egyptian who emerged as the brand new proprietor of Harrods in 1985 needed to clarify the supply of the £573m used to buy management of its mum or dad firm, Home of Fraser, valuing it at £615m. So, a long time earlier than Donald Trump’s “pretend information”, Fayed created what the federal government inspectors who investigated the Harrods takeover later termed “new reality: that lies had been the reality and that the reality was a lie”.
Mohamed Fayed, the son of a faculty inspector, who had hustled for Haiti’s feared dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier then made a residing as a facilitator for British firms within the Gulf and Gulf rulers in London, turned the fabulous pharoah Mohamed Al Fayed, the public-school scion of an old-established Egyptian dynasty, whose wealth from oil, property and transport was past measure.
The “hero from zero” – as his rival for Harrods, the Lonrho chief govt Roland “Tiny” Rowland, dubbed him – used his appreciable power, crafty, willpower and persuasive expertise to persuade within the phoney pharaoh position he created for himself. Fayed lied about his household, his enterprise background, even his date of delivery, to cover a fact that was something however pharaonic.
Fayed needed to show he was shopping for Harrods together with his personal cash, or the prize may very well be denied him by the Metropolis regulators. Precisely whose cash he used to purchase Harrods was by no means proved. As one among his funding advisers, Fayed held energy of lawyer over among the Sultan of Brunei’s Swiss financial institution accounts. This fed suspicions in regards to the attainable supply of the funds.
Rowland, just like the Tory MPs Fayed later paid and generously indulged, misjudged the person he dismissed as “Tootsie”. He believed Fayed would assist sidestep a Monopolies Fee ban on Lonrho shopping for Home of Fraser. Lonrho would “park” its close to 30% stake with Fayed, who would promote it again later at a revenue. Rowland didn’t consider Fayed, his former Lonrho co-director, may afford a full takeover. However Fayed noticed the prospect to acquire the social standing he craved by proudly owning the world-famous retailer with its royal warrants.
Inside 24 hours of promoting in 1984, Rowland realised Fayed had no intention of being his stooge. “Tiny” by no means forgave “Tootsie” for robbing him of the Harrods prize he had coveted for years. The 2 males fought essentially the most bitter, costly and private feud ever seen between enterprise rivals. It continued within the courts even after Rowland’s dying in 1998.
Strain from Rowland resulted within the official investigation. The damning report, printed in 1990, uncovered the myths about Fayed’s household and fortune. It accused Fayed of “an act of deception on the British authorities”. In response, although no motion was taken on the report’s findings, Fayed wreaked a savage revenge on his former associates within the Conservative authorities, who had welcomed his political donations.
Fayed put sleaze on the political agenda by exposing the “money for questions” community created for him with the assistance of the Westminster lobbyist Ian Greer. In 1994, the Tory ministers Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith had been pressured to resign after their work for Fayed was disclosed by the Guardian. Fayed additionally helped deliver down the defence minister Jonathan Aitken in 1995, over Saudi fee of his £1,000 invoice at Fayed’s Ritz resort in Paris.
However these had been pyrrhic victories. The sleaze revelations helped sink John Main’s authorities, which had denied Fayed the British citizenship he desired. However Fayed was once more refused a British passport by the Labour residence secretary Jack Straw in 1999 due to his self-confessed position as a corrupter.
Determined for social standing, Fayed donated generously to the annual Windsor horse present and was pictured with its patron, Queen Elizabeth. He befriended the Spencer household. Raine Spencer, stepmother of Diana, Princess of Wales, turned a director of a Harrods subsidiary.
Like some grand vizier in an Arabian Nights story, Fayed inspired and manipulated an affair between Princess Diana and his eldest son, Dodi. Fayed basked within the worldwide headlines. He talked severely about turning into a part of the British royal household.
After the tragedy of their deaths within the automobile crash in a Paris underpass in August 1997, Fayed launched into a brand new marketing campaign – to show that the royal household had been answerable for the deadly crash, reasonably than an over-the-limit Ritz worker driving too quick to flee the pursuing paparazzi.
There was a lot preliminary public sympathy. However Fayed’s ever more unusual rantings about MI6 and CIA plots had been acquired sympathetically solely by conspiracy theorists and admirers of Diana who refused to simply accept their loss may very well be partially on account of one thing as mundane as drink-driving. The claims had been much less warmly acquired at Buckingham Palace, which withdrew the Harrods royal warrants.
Fayed himself travelled the quick distance from his Park Lane penthouse to Fulham soccer membership – purchased earlier in 1997 – with two vehicles full of bodyguards and a medical group. An inquest jury in 2008 discovered 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 within the poor El-Gomrok district of Alexandria in 1929, 4 years sooner than he later maintained, and was the eldest of 5 kids. He offered Singer stitching machines till, in 1952, he joined up with Adnan Khashoggi, son of an influential physician in Saudi Arabia, who had attended Victoria school, a British-style public college in Alexandria. Fayed later falsely claimed to have additionally attended the varsity. Khashoggi later turned the archetypal “fixer” for US firms in Saudi Arabia in the course of the Nineteen Seventies petro-dollar increase – and a bitter Fayed enemy.
Fayed the salesperson flourished at Khashoggi’s import firm in Jeddah. In 1954, he married Khashoggi’s sister Samira, the mom of Dodi. However inside two years the wedding failed, as did the enterprise relationship. Fayed returned to Egypt and together with his brothers Ali and Salah turned a transport agent. President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation coverage inspired a transfer to Italy.
In 1964 Fayed arrived in Haiti, one of many world’s poorest nations, hailed as a wealthy sheikh from Kuwait. He romanced one among Papa Doc’s daughters and persuaded Duvalier to provide him an oil concession and a contract to handle the Port-au-Prince harbour. The Duvaliers’ love affair with Fayed was short-lived. Early in 1965 the pretend sheikh left Haiti, by no means to return. Greater than $100,000 (virtually $1m immediately) was reportedly discovered to be lacking from the port authority’s checking account.
Fayed moved to London. The development group Costain made him its agent within the oil-rich Gulf emirate of Dubai, the place he befriended Mahdi al-Tajir, an influential adviser to the ruling Maktoum household. The Dubai constructing increase was good to Fayed. He was paid tens of tens of millions in “commissions” by Costain and one other British contractor, Bernard Sunley, for his or her contracts. Most of those funds had been kicked again to those that gave the contracts – the ruling household and their advisers. Fayed later misplaced his Dubai passport after a enterprise dispute in the course of the Nineteen Nineties with the Maktoums.
Fayed made sufficient to purchase Balnagown Fort within the Scottish Highlands, a Surrey mansion, a Park Lane residence block, a part of the Rockefeller Heart in Manhattan, a St Tropez property and the Paris Ritz. Fayed made himself welcome in Paris with political donations whereas leasing and restoring the previous residence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Fayed would entertain with disparaging tales in regards to the Gulf rulers and the way he organized an countless provide of ladies and items for his or her visits. Doorways within the Park Lane penthouse had been at all times closed. There was a employees of engaging, well-dressed younger girls, largely English. Every time Fayed entered or left a room he closed the door behind him in order that whoever was within the room couldn’t be seen or heard. Hardly ever seen was Fayed’s second spouse, the previous Heini Wathén, a Finnish mannequin whom he married in 1985.
Earlier than Harrods, Fayed intentionally averted the limelight. Solely afterwards did he develop his urge for food for publicity. As soon as he had acquired the Knightsbridge landmark – promoting the remaining Fraser shops to refinance the financial institution loans probably used to repay the Sultan of Brunei after that connection was severed – he pursued the status and affect he assumed proudly owning a retailer with royal prospects would deliver.
Fayed had mastered the ace facilitator’s artwork of discovering out what an individual needed and offering it. His generosity was boundless, if not declined. Then he wouldn’t repeat the error in order to not offend. But when a present or favour was accepted, any subsequent failure to reply as required provoked rage and revenge.
Fayed honed these methods as he moved ever extra efficiently by means of Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Dubai, Brunei and France. In Britain he utilized them ruthlessly to achieve sources of affect – politicians, friends, police and the press. The Harrods hamper checklist, free procuring and stays on the Ritz had been his bait. However there have been no free lunches with Fayed.
Due to his foul-mouthed jokiness, buffoonish behaviour and self-caricature, it was simple to underestimate Fayed. Many did to their value. He had a shrewd and finely tuned appreciation of human nature. However he refused to recognise that his picture and actions closed the door to his acceptance in Britain, irrespective of how exhausting and sometimes he knocked.
The rebuffs fuelled Fayed’s darker facet. A harmful opponent, he would make the wildest allegations in public in addition to non-public in opposition to enemies or these he blamed for setbacks. He fabricated paperwork and paid witnesses to perjure themselves. It was typically tough to detect whether or not Fayed himself believed the allegations he repeated with such conviction.
Fayed was a person with out brakes. No one round him mentioned “no”. His brothers Ali and Salah at all times deferred to him whereas generally shaking their heads at his antics.
A former Harrods finance director was eliminated by the police from an plane at Heathrow amid bribery allegations that had been rapidly dismissed. In Dubai, the chief Christoph Bettermann was much less lucky. He spent three years preventing civil and prison proceedings after Fayed made allegations of theft earlier than he was acquitted and the civil case dismissed. Workers’ telephones had been routinely bugged.
Rowland’s secure deposit field at Harrods was burgled – Fayed was questioned by Scotland Yard in 1998, however not charged. This was another excuse why he was refused a passport. Fayed unsuccessfully sued the Metropolitan police. He settled a authorized motion by Rowland’s widow, Josie, in 2000.
There have been repeated allegations of sexual harassment of feminine employees. Some who complained had been accused of theft and on events arrested by native police solely too prepared to simply accept allegations (later dropped) from a robust patron.
In 2009 the Crown Prosecution Service determined to not cost Fayed over the declare he had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old lady on the retailer. Fayed had been interviewed by Scotland Yard underneath warning. He was interviewed once more in 2013 after a girl alleged he had sexually attacked her at his Park Lane residence after a job interview. The police reopened the case in 2015 however took no additional motion. Fayed at all times denied the allegations.
Additional sexual harassment allegations had been made by former Harrods workers in a Channel 4 documentary in 2017 and to Channel 4 Information in 2018. One ex-employee claimed to have accepted £60,000 to drop a sexual harassment declare. Fayed once more denied the allegations and the police took no motion.
Regardless of large funding, Fayed didn’t make Harrods a retailing success story. Greater than 40 administrators got here and went, most sacked, some stop, as retail consultants uninterested in Fayed’s tantrums and micromanaging. Solely when his involvement waned did buying and selling enhance. Harrods was extra a must-see for vacationers than a must-spend. Burdened by big financial institution borrowings, it struggled to match extra professionally run rivals.
However there was sufficient coming by means of the tills to pay for the Fayed life-style of homes, helicopters, jets and yachts, in addition to intensive “walking-round” cash – often wads of £50 notes. Channelled by means of offshore tax-haven financial institution accounts, firms and trusts, tens of millions got here again into Britain to fund Fayed’s failed media ambitions with Punch journal and industrial radio plus, significantly, Fulham soccer membership.
This bid for fashionable enchantment – which included hiring the England hero Kevin Keegan as supervisor – gained over Fulham followers however in the end value Fayed greater than £200m. He offered the membership in 2013 for £121m.
In 2019 Fayed, his spouse and his son Omar stepped down as administrators of the Paris Ritz. Nonetheless, the resort remained in household management.
The revelation, in the course of the 1999 failed libel trial introduced by Hamilton, that Fayed drew massive quantities of money from Harrods financial institution accounts and loved different advantages sparked an Inland Income investigation. A comfy deal underneath which Fayed had paid a set quantity in tax with no questions requested about his revenue was cancelled by the courts as unlawful in 2002.
In 2003, the person who claimed to like Britain a lot left for tax exile in Switzerland, declaring he was as soon as extra the sufferer of perfidious Albion. However he quickly uninterested in Gstaad and returned two years later after reducing a special tax deal.
Fayed’s cavalier perspective in direction of the reality was demonstrated once more when it got here to promoting Harrods in Might 2010. Secretly negotiating for a lot of months, Fayed constantly denied to the Harrods employees and the media that he had any intention of promoting – ever. “I put two fingers as much as all of them. It’s not on the market,” he informed the Sunday Instances, a month earlier than Harrods was offered by Fayed household trusts to the Qatar sovereign wealth fund for slightly below £900m. The Qataris additionally assumed financial institution money owed of practically £600m. Within the occasion Fayed was not buried, as he as soon as promised, in a pharoah-style mausoleum atop the Knightsbridge retailer.
He’s survived by Heini and their kids, Jasmine, Karim, Camilla and Omar.
