Main Index

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

In the article published in September 1995 by the US Magazine Vanity Fair, author Maureen Orth describes Mohamed Al Fayed's theft of $150,000 from the Port au Prince harbour authority of Haiti. 
    Three years after Orth's piece the Daily Telegraph Magazine published this article, written by two North American-based journalists and drawn from files released by the US Central Intelligence Agency, throwing further light on Fayed's Haitian adventure.

FAYED'S FORGOTTEN YEARS:
THE CONMAN, THE DICTATOR AND THE CIA FILES
'Sheikh' Mohamed Fayed's stay in Haiti lasted less than six months.  But during that time he managed to attract the attention of the CIA who thought he might be a spy, and swindle Papa Doc's government out of more than $100,000 while at the same time courting his daughter.  Then, wisely, the 35-year-old future owner of Harrods left the country.

Report by Daniel Sanger and Julian Feldman
LIKE ANYWHERE, Haiti to those who live there is the centre of the universe - it's just a question of being in the right place and looking from the right angle.  The world, however, has a different idea.  As the first black republic slides precipitously down the United Nations Human Development Index, its slapstick parliament enters its ninth month without a prime minister and its once eminently civil society disintegrates, corroded by cocaine, corruption and poverty, it seems to have been forgotten by everybody else.
    But last year, when the world was grieving at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi, Haitians did have a claim on one of humanities momentous events.  For those who had survived long enough to remember back to 1964, the name Fayed filtering through the cables of Port-au-Prince's shoestring radio stations rang bells.  They thought, it can't be - there must be hundreds of Fayeds out there.  Then Dodi's dad was given a first name - Mohamed.  It had to be him.  And when they finally saw him on television at the funeral they knew.  He'd shed some hair and the Sheikh from Kuwait act, he'd added a few inches in the wrong places and an Al between his names.  But there he was, the sweet-talking wheeler-dealer who blew into Haiti in its darkest days, promising the moon and bamboozling everyone in his path, sweeping the Duvaliers off their feet and taking off again six months later, a whole lot richer and a legend in a country with no shortage of unbelievable stories.  There he was, more than three decades later, the sheikh sans provisions. 
    Those who recognised him began musing.  Had Fayed not hoodwinked Haiti and then hightailed it - had he, for instance, been thrown into Fort Dimanche prison and left to die like others who had crossed 'Papa Doc' Duvalier - it could have all been so different.
    The official version of Mohamed Fayed's life is full of Egyptian aristocrats and nannies, cotton plantations and private schools, shipping fleets and fortunes to float them.  The real tale, however, is much like Haiti's - captivating, mysterious and by no means short of intrigue or hints of danger.

    The story of Fayed in Haiti has been especially obscure, though certain of its threads have been made visible over the years.  In the mid-Eighties, following the Tiny Rowland/Mohamed Fayed fight to buy Harrods, the Department of Trade and Industry carried out an extensive investigation.  But neither the Rowland campaign nor the DTI investigation had access to information which has since come to light.  Recently declassified CIA files and US Embassy dispatches offer many tantalising new details of Fayed's time in Haiti.
    Mohamed Fayed was 35 when he arrived in Port-au-Prince on June 12, 1964.  The son of an Egyptian schoolteacher, he'd already been through several jobs, selling everything from Coca-Cola and furniture to sewing machines and medical equipment.  Fayed had ambition, and while working for Al Nasir, the trading company of the young Adnan Khashoggi - whose sister he married - and later, on his own as a shipping agent, he'd made connections.  The most fruitful had been Bozo Dabinovic, a prosperous Monaco-based shipping agent of Croatian origin then based in Geneva who had done business with Fayed in Alexandria.  Dabinovic, according to CIA documents, was a suspected arms dealer, who the French navy was convinced ran guns to Algerian independence forces.  Dabinovic maintains he was not providing any such service to Duvalier.

The "eminent Kuwaiti Sheikh Mohamed Fayed" arrives

    During one of Fayed's trips to Switzerland, Dabinovic's contacts with Duvalier came up.  The Egyptian was intrigued.  Dabinovic remembers.  'He said, "Can you introduce me?" And I said, "Sure".  So I introduced him to Duvalier'
    When Fayed arrived in Haiti on a two-week reconnaissance mission, he was met by a welcoming committee that included Clémard Joseph Charles, who had bankrolled Papa Doc's 1957 election campaign, and Lieutenant Woolley Gaillard, a member of the presidential guard, possibly the straightest man who ever served in the Haitian military and Fayed's companion and protector for all the time he was in Haiti.  Like all air arrivals, his landing was dutifully recorded by the journalist Aubelin Jolicoeur and reported at the top of his Au fil des jours social column that, along with verbatim transcriptions of presidential addresses and decrees, made up much of the local reporting in Le Nouvelliste in those days.  As Jolicoeur wrote with flourish, 'The eminent Kuwaiti Sheikh Mohamed Fayed' had arrived.
    His arrival came at the height of Macoutisme, the brutal and ingenious system devised by Papa Doc to hang on to power in a country where presidents had been used to moving in and out of the National Palace with the regularity of the rains.  A country doctor elected as a reformer in 1957, Duvalier had quickly become obsessed with establishing and maintaining his grip on Haiti. With the help of his state-sanctioned thugs, the Tontons Macoutes, he had become spectacularly successful in this narrow ambition.

Maurine Orth's famous Sept '95 Vanity Fair article

Continued overleaf