Mohamed Al-Fayed
Mohamed Abdel Moneim Al-Fayed was an Egyptian businessman. His residence and primary business interests were in the United Kingdom from the mid-1960s, and his business interests included ownership of the Hôtel Ritz Paris, Harrods department store and Fulham Football Club. At the time of his death in 2023, Forbes estimated his wealth at US$2 billion. Since his death, Al-Fayed has been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and assault.
Fayed was married to Samira Khashoggi from 1954 to 1956. They had a son, Dodi, who was in a romantic relationship with Diana, Princess of Wales, when they both died in a car crash in Paris in 1997. Fayed claimed that the crash was orchestrated by MI6 on the instructions of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. In 2011, Fayed financially supported an unreleased documentary film Unlawful Killing, that presented his version of events.
From 1995 onwards, Fayed was the subject of media scrutiny and investigations into allegations of sexist and discriminatory practices he mandated at Harrods, of sexual harassment and assault. Early media scrutiny of sexual misconduct allegations against Al-Fayed was curtailed by his frequent threats of litigation. He developed a reputation for spending large sums on litigation against news organizations reporting on sexual assault allegations against him. In 2024, the year following his death, he became the subject of multiple posthumous accusations of rape, with over 200 women making complaints of illegal activity.
Early life
Fayed was born on 27 January 1929 in the Roshdy neighbourhood of Alexandria, in the Kingdom of Egypt, the eldest son of an Egyptian primary school teacher from Asyut. His year of birth has been disputed. The Department of Trade in 1988 found his date of birth was 27 January 1929. His brothers Ali and Salah were his business colleagues.At the age of nineteen Al-Fayed was selling bottles of Coca-Cola on the streets of Alexandria, and sold Singer sewing machines at the age of twenty-one. In 1952 Al-Fayed was hired by a friend, Tousson El Barrawi, and the seventeen-year-old Adnan Khashoggi for their furniture import business. Al-Fayed excelled at the business and impressed Adnan's father, Mohamed Kashoggi, the personal physician of the King of Saudi Arabia. In the early 1950s Al-Fayed travelled to Europe for the first time, visiting France, Italy and Switzerland. Returning to Egypt, Al-Fayed confessed to his wife, Samira Kashoggi, Adnan Kashoggi's sister, that he had had an affair, and she demanded a divorce. Al-Fayed terminated his partnership with Adnan Kashoggi, and secretly withdrew £100,000 from Kashoggi's Al Nasr trading company. Kashoggi issued a writ against Al-Fayed for the return of the money, and later agreed with Al-Fayed to forgive the money and other loans and debts in return for Samira's freedom to remarry and return to Egypt. Following Egyptian President Nasser's threats to expropriate foreign businesses, Al-Fayed was able to take control of a small shipping company, owned by Leon Carasso, who wished to emigrate. Carasso later claimed that Al-Fayed had defaulted on the agreed payment for his business. Fayed also acquired interests in other transport companies at favourable prices. After Nasser ordered the confiscation of Egyptian property in 1961, Al-Fayed transferred ownership of his Middle Eastern Navigation Company to Genoa in Italy.
On 12 June 1964, Al-Fayed arrived in Haiti, then under the control of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Al-Fayed entered the country on a Kuwaiti passport, and introduced himself as Sheikh Mohamed Fayed. Shortly after his arrival, Duvalier cancelled a ten-year contract with a U.S. company that gave them monopoly control over Haiti's oil industry and signed a similar contract with Al-Fayed for fifty years. Al-Fayed also worked with the geologist George de Mohrenschildt. He terminated his stay in Haiti six months later when a sample of "crude oil" provided by Haitian associates proved to be low-grade molasses. Al-Fayed promised to use his connections in Dubai to help bring investment to the Caribbean island, if they allowed him to build an oil refinery, and develop the wharf at Port-au-Prince. Al-Fayed had exclusive control over the collection of fees for docking, unloading, and loading at Haiti's main port, and this caused resentment in the Haitian shipping industry. Al-Fayed was 'tapped' for $30,000 by Duvalier, but rather than pay, and fearful of the growing anger of the shipping agents, he left Haiti in December 1964. Fayed later claimed that the Haitian government owed him $2 million. The 1988 Department of Trade and Industry report on Al-Fayed's background stated "we have no doubt at all that Mohamed Fayed perpetrated a substantial deceit on the government and people of Haiti in 1964... he deprived the harbor authority of over US $100,000 of money it could ill-afford to lose"
Fayed then moved to England, where he lived in central London.
Career in Dubai
Ingratiating himself in London's Arab expatriate community, Al-Fayed met an Iraqi businessman, Salim Abu Alwan, and through Alwan was introduced to Mahdi Al Tajir. Tajir was then an adviser to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum of the United Arab Emirates. Rashid was the Emir of Dubai, and oil was soon to be discovered in Dubai, which would transform the wealth of the emirate.Tajir informed Al-Fayed that Dubai was penniless and needed to borrow £1 million to build modern harbour facilities. Al-Fayed secured a loan of £9 million from Imre Rochlitz, an American lawyer. Rochlitz's Jewish ancestry caused embarrassment to Tajir, and later caused Rochlitz to reject Al-Fayed's offer of a formal partnership. Al-Fayed earned £1.5 million commission from the contract for British engineering company Costain to carry out the work to the port. Al-Fayed also assisted in securing finance for the Dubai World Trade Centre. The banker David Douglas-Home of Morgan Grenfell was responsible for managing the contract. By the mid-1970s Costain had gained over £280 million of contracts thanks to Al-Fayed and Tajir, and Al-Fayed bought 20.84% of Costain's shares. He was later appointed a company director.
With his earnings from commissions on various projects in Dubai, Al-Fayed bought a Rolls-Royce, a large chalet in Gstaad, and the remaining apartments of 60 Park Lane in Mayfair, where he had been living for the past few years.
In 1974 Al-Fayed met Roland 'Tiny' Rowland, a British businessman with extensive interests in Southern Africa, and the chairman of international conglomerate Lonrho. Fayed's complex professional relationship with Rowland dominated his life for the next twenty years, with legal repercussions continuing into the late 1990s.
Rowland persuaded Al-Fayed to exchange his shares in Costain for 5.5 million shares in Lonrho in March 1975, and Al-Fayed used the profit from the deal to buy another 3 million shares in Lonrho and become a director of the company. Al-Fayed soon became alarmed at Rowland's use of Lonrho's money to fund his lifestyle and to pay large bribes in Africa, as well as his syphoning off company profits into a secret bank account in Switzerland.
The British Department of Trade and Industry began to investigate Lonrho in early 1976, and an alarmed Al-Fayed quit the company in May 1976. He sold his Lonrho shares to Kuwaiti investors and bought back his Costain shares for £11 million. Tajir's influence in Dubai was waning by 1977, and Al-Fayed was excluded from the commission process for a new aluminium smelter, and the development of Jebel Ali, putting Costain's future profits at risk.
In 1993 Al-Fayed was visited at Harrods by Mohammed Alabbar, the director of Dubai's Department of Economic Development. Alabbar had been appointed by Sheikh Maktoum to eradicate the system of large commission payments from previous decades. Tajir was challenged in the British courts to repay his alleged excessive profits earned from the construction of Dubai's aluminium smelter, and Al-Fayed was targeted over his management contract of the Dubai World Trade Centre. Al-Fayed's contract to manage the centre was later terminated by the Maktoums, and Al-Fayed sued them for compensation estimated between £30 to 90 million. The case came to court in October 1994, and after trying to unsuccessfully settle the case with the Maktoums, Al-Fayed was due to testify on 17 October. Al-Fayed's lawyer informed the court that morning that he had been taken seriously ill with neck and back complications, and could not fly to Dubai as a result.
Alabbar had secretly taped Al-Fayed on his way to Harrods that morning, and the tapes were shown to the court the next day. Al-Fayed's lack of ill health was evident, and Al-Fayed was informed by his lawyer of the disastrous effect that his deception had on the case that day.
In the mid-1960s, he met the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, who entrusted him with helping transform Dubai, where he set up IMS in 1968. Fayed introduced British companies including the Costain Group, Bernard Sunley & Sons, and Taylor Woodrow to the emirate to carry out construction work.
Relationship with the Sultan of Brunei
Al-Fayed became a financial adviser to the then Sultan of Brunei Omar Ali Saifuddien III in 1966. Al-Fayed told Maureen Orth that he had known Hassanal Bolkiah, who succeeded Saifuddien on his abdication, since the sultan's childhood and that they had met during the building of a trade centre in Brunei. Tiny Rowland told DTI inspectors that Al-Fayed had told him that he negotiated an introduction to the sultan for $500,000 plus a percentage of any resulting business with an Indian holy man and alleged fraudster, Shri Chandra Swamiji Maharaj. Rowland later admitted this account was untrue.In mid-1984 Al-Fayed received several powers of attorney and written authorisations from the sultan to carry out tasks for him. These gave Al-Fayed access to large sums of the sultan's money. The sultan was then the richest man in the world. During this period, the bank of the three Fayed brothers, the Royal Bank of Scotland, received a transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from Switzerland into their accounts. RBS assumed that the money belonged to the sultan, but Al-Fayed told the bank that his portfolio was separate from the sultan's. The DTI report noted that "It may be no more than coincidence that this vast increase in disposable wealth followed quickly on the admission of Mohamed to the sultan's confidence... It is, however, a very powerful coincidence."
Using a power of attorney, Al-Fayed bought the Dorchester Hotel for the sultan in 1985. Al-Fayed accompanied the sultan to 10 Downing Street to visit Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in January 1985, with sterling in decline and threatening the economy. The sultan, who had moved £5 billion of assets out of pounds, moved the assets back into sterling. Al-Fayed took credit for this and for persuading the sultan to give half a billion pounds of contracts to British defence industries.