Mohamed Al Fayed: Phoney pharaoh whose relationship with the truth - and the British royals - was strained

Born: January 27th, 1929

Died: August 30th, 2023

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 £573 million used to purchase control of its parent company, House of Fraser, valuing it at £615 million. 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 pharoah Mohamed Al Fayed, the public-school scion of an old-established Egyptian dynasty, whose wealth from oil, property and shipping was beyond measure.

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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 never forgave Fayed 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. 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.

[ Former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed dies aged 94 ]

Fayed put sleaze on the political agenda by exposing the “cash for questions” network created for him. 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.

But these were pyrrhic victories. The sleaze revelations helped sink John Major’s government, which had denied Fayed the British citizenship he desired.

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.

Like some grand vizier in an Arabian Nights tale, Fayed encouraged and manipulated an affair between Diana Princess of Wales and his eldest son, Dodi.

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.

An inquest jury in 2008 found that 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, the son of an influential doctor in Saudi Arabia.

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.

[ Al Fayed inisists Diana was murdered ]

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 $1 million today) was reportedly found to be missing from the port authority’s bank account.

Fayed moved to London and became involved in brokering construction deals in Dubai, doing well out of the Dubai building boom.

He 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 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 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.

It was easy to underestimate him; many did to their cost. He had a shrewd and finely tuned appreciation of human nature.

A dangerous opponent, he would make the wildest allegations in public as well as in 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.

There were repeated allegations of sexual harassment of female staff. Some who complained were accused of theft and on occasions arrested.

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.

[ Al-Fayed sells luxury store Harrods to Qatari royal family for €1.74bn ]

Despite huge investment, Fayed failed to make Harrods a retailing success story.

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 £200 million. He sold the club in 2013 for £121 million.

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 the end Fayed was not buried, as he once promised, in a pharaoh-style mausoleum atop the Knightsbridge store. He is survived by Heini and their children, Jasmine, Karim, Camilla and Omar.