“Mohamed Fayed’s lies and his success in silencing the press created a new reality: lies were truths and truth was lies,” the report concluded on the Harrods takeover. After allegations this week about the systematic way he planned, carried out and covered up his sexual abuse, the indictment is as much about his private life as his public life.
But while that damning report scuppered Fayed’s first of many bids for British citizenship, the newly minted holder of Harrods’ royal credentials and sponsor of the Royal Windsor Horse Show was still riding in the late 1980s. He may have been every bit as “unacceptable” as Rowland in the eyes of many, but his bulging bank balance and Rolodex of useful connections, from police officers to publicists to doctors, seem to have made him feel invincible. The earliest allegations of abuse published this week involved a 17-year-old girl in 1987, two years after Fayed expelled Rowland.
“From what I can gather from talking to other people, it really opened up when he bought Harrods,” says Penny Simpson. “If you went there you would regularly see him walking with his posse. He wasn’t interested in Harrods; the women worked there.”
The shop did well – but not spectacularly – during its 25-year tenure, with Fayed investing £400m in its restoration, including £75m on an Egyptian-themed escalator. But it wasn’t just young female workers who were harassed if they crossed the chairman. More than 40 executives left, among them the vice-chairman, to whom Fayed paid six-figure damages after spoofing his personal phone and making false allegations of embezzlement and fraud that saw his former colleague appear in 24 courts at a Dubai cage yard.
Meanwhile, Fayed’s feud with Rowland continued after his death in 1998. A year later, he was ordered to pay £2 million in damages to Rowland’s widow after admitting that her staff had broken into her husband’s Harrods safe with her knowledge.
In the long run, Fayed proved every bit as vindictive as his vanquished rival, turning his wrecking ball on politics with the same ruthlessness reserved for workers who dared say no to him.
Clever politicians
Having supposedly persuaded the Sultan of Brunei over tea in Downing Street with Margaret Thatcher to support the pound during the currency crisis in 1985 – and having donated £250,000 of his own money to the Conservatives in 1987 – Fayed felt particularly aggrieved that the DTI report was published in their company in 1989.
In the 1990s, he bribed a number of Conservative MPs to ask questions in Parliament, hoping to prove that Rowland had bribed Michael Howard, then a junior DTI minister and later Home Secretary and leader of the Conservative Party. report.
Fayed never got the scalp or scoop he sought – Howard always denied the allegations – but he did manage to end the careers of four other Conservative MPs. He decided they offered insufficient value to his envelopes stuffed with £50 notes and Harrods gift cards, so he took them public in 1994.
He was also a source The Guardiana story told in 1995 that then Defense Secretary Jonathan Aitken had lied about the Saudis paying for his stay at Fayed’s Ritz Hotel in Paris. The bogus politician was eventually jailed and the ‘cash issues’ scandal played a major role in the ‘Tory sleaze’ story that led to their election oblivion in 1997.