Main Index

Section Six Index:
Mohamed 'Al' Fayed - the facts

Although Mohamed 'Al' Fayed's capacity for fantasy, vengefulness, and thievery had all been aired in the DTI report of March 1990, Fayed's heavily-publicized gifts to children's charities helped him prosper in British society. 
    Five years later the American current affairs magazine, Vanity Fair, sent its top investigative journalist, Maureen Orth, to England to research a story on the larger-than-life Egyptian owner of Harrods.  The intention had been to produce a positive profile of Fayed - how the stuffy British Establishment had refused to accept this Anglophile Egyptian philanthropist.  However, when Orth began her research she soon changed her ideas. 
    Free from spin and packed with devastating facts about Fayed in a structured format, Orth's piece remains the definitive concise work on Mohamed 'Al' Fayed and a master class example to investigative journalists the world over.  It was the first time that any publication had catalogued Fayed's lying, thieving, bugging of his staff, sexual shenanigans, true background, and propensity for prosecuting vendettas against innocent people.  When it was published in September 1995 Fayed sued the magazine for libel.  Vanity Fair refused to back down.  In the first days of December 1997 Fayed withdrew his action against the magazine.  

I love Britain . . . Ethics and morals count in Britain like nowhere else in the world.
      -Mohamed Al Fayed, 1985.

One day this past May, Harrods chairman Mohamed Al Fayed, flashing a megawatt smile, was gleefully throwing his dough around.  The flamboyant Egyptian owner of the London retail landmark, as well as of the fabled Ritz hotel in Paris, had put on a chef's toque to toss pizzas for the cameras in a public-relations doubleheader.  He was inviting journalists to sample the wares in the new pizzeria in Harrods' famous Food Halls.  At the same time, he was celebrating a victory in his ongoing battle with John Major's government to obtain British citizenship for himself and his brother Ali, since he had just gained the right to appeal the government's refusal to allow them to become citizens.  A few days later Fayed (the "Al" was added in the 70s) was in media heaven again-photographed with the Queen herself at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, which Harrods sponsors.  One can only imagine what certain officials in Major's scandal-rocked administration were thinking as they watched these antics of the man who has baldly announced that he is trying to overthrow them.  Having been accused of accepting lavish payoffs from Fayed in return for favors rendered, the Conservatives remain mired in an embarrassing scandal stemming from their refusal to keep playing the game. 
    Fayed became non grata with the Tories last October, when, in a fury over the stalled citizenship applications, he disclosed the names of three ministers in Major's administration who he alleged had taken cash from him to ask questions on his behalf in Parliament, or stayed free at the Ritz, or both.  According to Andrew Neil, former London Sunday Times editor and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, who is pro-Fayed,  "He feels very bitter.  The younger Tories were happy to take his largesse, to take his suites at the Ritz, but this government has stayed in power so long that they became ministers, and they stopped taking his phone calls.  It got too dicey.  They decided, 'We don't need Mohamed Al Fayed anymore.' "  Neil adds that he thinks England needs "another hundred Al Fayeds. So he comes from the wrong side of the tracks; so does Mrs. Thatcher. Who cares who owns Harrods? It's a department store, not the Department of Defense. He's a great entrepreneur."  Neil subscribes to the lovable-rogue theory.  "With Mohamed, you sup with a long spoon."  Film producer David Puttnam, who got half of the $6 million to produce the 1981 Academy Award winner Chariots of Fire from Fayed, agrees.  "Mohamed is somebody who works on an old-fashioned system: favors done, favors received...  For 10 or 12 years the government said, 'Anything goes. We live by our own ethics.' ...  What I find unfair is that what Mohamed's accused of is an everyday occurrence in London". 
    When I met Fayed last fall, in his heavily scented office at Harrods, which he shares with a giant teddy bear of the sort that is for sale on the fourth floor, he told me, "The more good you give, the more angels guide you, protect you.  The more terrible you are, the more dishonor for you."  Since then, the angels have more or less sat on the fence.  The government's rejection in February of the Fayed brothers' petitions for citizenship-without explanation-was a stunning rebuff to someone who constantly invokes the importance of loyalty and respect.  But if the affidavit of a onetime government chauffeur who allegedly read a privileged Conservative Party memo and overheard party whips discussing Fayed and his case in derogatory language is to be believed, the decision to grant him citizenship would have been "political suicide".  It appears that the Establishment has made up its mind.  Fayed can make numerous highly publicized donations to charities and play the jolly merchant prince for the press as much as he likes, but those he wants most to impress-the British upper class-have decided to give him the cold shoulder.  "Nobody quite accepts him," admits a friend of his, former Daily Express executive editor Alan Frame.  "We're still a class-ridden society.  He sponsors lots of things involving the royal family, and he's still not accepted."

Guardian articles on the publication of the DTI report

Continued overleaf