Mohamed Al Fayed: the ebullient entrepreneur who acquired Harrods

“If the novelists P.G. Wodehouse, Jackie Collins and Naguib Mahfouz had been asked to pool their creative talents, they would have struggled to invent a character as bold and controversial as Mohamed Al Fayed,” said Andrew Anthony in The Observer.

A flamboyant Egyptian entrepreneur who acquired the Paris Ritz in the 1970s, and then double-crossed the ferocious Lonrho tycoon Tiny Rowland to seize control of Harrods in the mid-1980s, he was razor-sharp in his business dealings, and cultivated a larger-than-life image that helped ensure that for many years he was rarely out of the headlines; yet he repeatedly blurred fact with fiction, and almost everything about him was subject to dispute, even his age.

‘Phoney Pharaoh’

To his critics, Fayed, who has died aged 94, was a corrupting influence on public life, a foul-mouthed bully, a manipulative sexual predator (he was accused but not convicted of sexual assault), and perhaps a fraudster. Rowland (who had himself been branded “the unacceptable face of British capitalism” by Ted Heath) spent millions trying to destroy his reputation; Private Eye dubbed him the “Phoney Pharaoh”.

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Yet Fayed regarded himself as a victimised outsider, said The New York Times. A long-standing UK resident, he had acquired all “the trappings of a British aristocrat”, including a 65,000-acre estate in the Highlands; he’d sponsored the Royal Horse Show at Windsor, invested in British businesses, and in a football club (Fulham), and supported British charities – yet he’d been shunned by the establishment, and denied British citizenship.

In the 1990s, he wrought vengeance on the Major government by claiming to have paid two Tory MPs (Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith) to advance his interests, and by revealing that Jonathan Aitken, a defence minister, had had his Ritz hotel bill paid for by the Saudi royal family (something Aitken then lied about, leading to him being jailed for perjury).

The “cash for questions” scandal brought down the government, said The Guardian – but Fayed’s victory proved pyrrhic: Labour’s Jack Straw refused him citizenship too, on the grounds that he was a self-confessed corrupter. And later in the decade, his social manoeuvrings would lead to a tragedy from which he seemed never fully to recover.

As part of his efforts to get access to royalty, Fayed had long courted Princess Diana on her shopping trips to Harrods, said The Times; and in 1997, she accepted his invitation for a family holiday on his yacht in the south of France.

He then arranged for her to meet his son Dodi, who invited her back for a private trip on the boat. When they were both killed in Paris, on 31 August 1997, Fayed embarked on a campaign to prove that the royal family had conspired to cause the fatal crash.

It was delusional, said The Daily Telegraph. The decision to leave the paparazzi-besieged Ritz that night had been made at the last minute, with the details approved by Fayed himself; the chauffeur had been drinking, and had been speeding in an effort to evade the paparazzi following the couple. Yet the grief-stricken Fayed refused to accept that his driver had been over the limit. He claimed to know Diana’s last words (though doctors testified that she’d been too injured to speak), and accused Prince Philip (“a murdering Hun”) of having ordered her killing. Harrods’ royal warrants were removed; Fayed said he’d burned them.

‘Hero from zero’

Although he claimed to be from a family of wealthy merchants, Mohamed Fayed was born in a poor neighbourhood of Alexandria, and was the son of a primary school inspector. After leaving school, he started out hawking sewing machines. His break came when a friend introduced him to Adnan Khashoggi – the future arms dealer.

Khashoggi’s father had become a doctor to the Saudi royals, and he gave Fayed a job in an import business he had set up. In 1954, Fayed married Adnan’s sister, Samira, the mother of Dodi. But within two years, the marriage and the business relationship had ended acrimoniously.

Now prosperous, Fayed became a shipping agent. He lived briefly in Geneva; then in 1964, he moved to Haiti. Claiming to be a Kuwaiti sheikh, he ingratiated himself with its dictator, Papa Doc Duvalier, who gave him a contract to develop the Port-au-Prince harbour. Within a year, however, Fayed had fled the country, and $1m in today’s money was found to be missing from the harbour’s bank account.

Settling in London, where he claimed to be the son of an expelled pasha, Fayed (or Al Fayed as he took to calling himself) used his contacts in the Gulf to set himself up as a middleman for construction projects in Dubai – which made him an estimated £60m. He installed his family in a mansion in Surrey (which bristled with surveillance cameras and was heavily guarded by his private army of ex-servicemen), and acquired Balnagown Castle in Easter Ross, chalets in Gstaad, and the former home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the Bois de Boulogne. He bought the Ritz for £9m in 1979.

‘Lies became the truth’

Fayed had got to know Tiny Rowland in the 1970s. Rowland had long wanted to acquire Harrods, but his bid for its holding company, House of Fraser, had been rejected by the Monopolies Commission. In 1985, he sold his 29% stake in it to Fayed. He was confident Fayed hadn’t enough money to buy House of Fraser himself, and would therefore be willing to sell the shares back to him at a profit, when he was ready to make a second bid.

But the next year, Fayed swooped in and acquired the firm. Beyond livid, Rowland then used his considerable resources to investigate Fayed’s background and financial affairs. The evidence thus gleaned he passed to The Observer, a paper he owned. Fayed, it was alleged, was a crook who had lied about his origins (Rowland called him the “hero from zero”) and the source and extent of his wealth.

The Harrods purchase, it was claimed, had been funded not with his own money, but with a secret £600m loan that he’d received from the Sultan of Brunei for a different project. A government inquiry into the deal later found that Fayed had even obscured his date of birth. The last line of its damning report read: “Lies became the truth and the truth became a lie.”

The DTI declined to publish it, so The Observer released it as a special midweek edition. But Fayed was not found to have broken any laws during the acquisition, and he was able to keep Harrods.

In 2005, Fayed commissioned life-size bronze statues of Diana and Dodi dancing together beneath a dove. He called the memorial Innocent Victims and installed it in Harrods. But five years later, he sold the store to the Qataris, for around £1.5bn, and the memorial was later removed and returned to the family.

He is survived by his second wife, Heini, and their four children.