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Mohamed Al Fayed told the Financial Times that when he died he wanted his body on display in the London department store Harrods, which he owned — “so people can come and visit me”.
The remark, with its mixture of bravado and provocation, was typical of the Egyptian-born businessman who has died at the age of 94. It was tinged with hubris too, for by 2010 he had sold the department store.
In truth, Al Fayed’s energetic bid to place himself and his family at the heart of the British establishment had begun to unravel long before, with the crash in August 1997 that ended the life of his beloved son Dodi and Diana, Princess of Wales. Al Fayed subsequently accused the Royal Family of conspiring to murder the princess.
While Al Fayed enjoyed the trappings of upper-class British life — owning houses in Mayfair and in the country, and travelling by helicopter to glittering sporting and social events — he harboured a deep resentment at what he saw as his enduring outsider status, despite cutting a swath through the British retail and hotel trades. Britain’s upper classes, he once said bitterly, were “racist at the core”.
Al Fayed’s upbringing in Egypt was a humble one. As a young man he hustled for cash by selling drinks and sewing machines on the streets of Alexandria. He would go on to develop his family’s business interests in several industries.
These ambitions were helped by his professional relationship with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, to whose sister Samira he was briefly married in the mid-1950s. Fayed later married again in the 1980s to the former Finnish model Heini Wathen, with whom he had four children.
He launched his own shipping company in Egypt. The opening of an office in London in the 1960s was the launch pad for his business interests in the UK. He added the “Al” to his name in the 1970s.
Al Fayed helped the Sultan of Brunei to buy London’s Dorchester Hotel. He also acquired trophy assets on his account, including the Ritz hotel in Paris, which he bought in 1979. He spent hundreds of millions renovating the Ritz, dedication that was later recognised when he was awarded the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest civilian award.
The acquisition of Harrods in 1985 for £615mn would be his most lucrative investment and one of the most controversial. The deal for the upmarket department store was questioned by rival bidder and long-term adversary, Roland “Tiny” Rowland, who claimed he had been cheated by Al Fayed.
A subsequent parliamentary inquiry found that Al Fayed and his brothers had misrepresented their wealth to the government department investigating the circumstances of the takeover. The family described the accusations as unfair.
Al Fayed sought to create a unique retail spectacle at Harrods. In later years, this included an Egyptian room that contained statues of himself and memorials to Dodi and Diana. The stuffed shark in the Harrods food hall was named “Tiny” after his rival. A Qatari sovereign wealth fund acquired the store for £1.5bn in 2010.
With Dodi, Al Fayed helped finance a number of films, most notably Chariots of Fire, which won Best Picture at the 1982 Oscars. He also owned Fulham football club in south-west London from 1997 to 2013, reflecting a life-long passion for the sport.
He commissioned a statue of Michael Jackson outside Fulham’s Craven Cottage ground after inviting the pop star to watch a game. Fans who did not like the statue could, he said, “go to hell”.
Shahid Khan, owner and chair of the club, said on Friday: “The story of Fulham cannot be told without a chapter on the positive impact of Fayed as chair. I always enjoyed my time with Fayed, who was wise, colourful and committed to Fulham.”
Al Fayed was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and in the 1980s developed close relationships with Conservative MPs, two of whom, Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, were drawn into the so-called cash for questions scandal.
Hamilton and Smith were said by Al Fayed to have accepted money from him in exchange for helping him in his long-term bid to secure British citizenship. Hamilton later lost a libel case against Al Fayed, whose repeated applications for a UK passport were rejected.
Speaking after his death, Michael Cole, Al Fayed’s long-term spokesman and friend, said he “was a remarkable man in many ways and did more good in this world than all his mealy-mouthed critics put together”.