Mohamed Al Fayed has died aged 94 – almost 26 years to the day of the crash that killed his son and Princess Diana.
The ex-Harrods owner and father of Dodi Al Fayed passed away on Wednesday after a long illness.
A Muslim funeral was held yesterday at the London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, the tycoon’s son-in-law said. Ashfar Haider wrote on Facebook in Arabic: ‘Our Lord have mercy on him and forgive him, and open for him wide [the doors of] paradise.’
Mr Al Fayed went to his grave holding on to his obsession that his son and Princess Diana were murdered in a Paris road tunnel on August 31, 1997.
At Diana’s inquest in London, the bitter billionaire explosively accused Prince – now King – Charles of being ‘happy’ now that the Royal Family had ‘cleared the decks, they finished her, they murdered her’.
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Mohamed Al Fayed, who has died aged 94, with Princess Diana in 1996
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Mr Al Fayed pictured with the Queen at the Royal Windsor Horse Show. He seized on Dodi’s dalliance with Princess Diana as a means of ingratiating himself with the aristocracy
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Dodi Al Fayed with Diana in St Tropez in August 1997. Just over a week later the pair were dead, killed in a car crash in Paris
He spent more than a decade pedalling his bizarre and damaging conspiracy theories about the Royal Family’s alleged involvement in the car crash.
Mr Al Fayed was the world’s 1,493rd richest person, according to Forbes, worth an estimated $2 billion (£1.59 billion). He installed the Egyptian Room in his Knightsbridge store, which boasted several busts of himself, and he also created a memorial to Dodi and Diana, who were dating at the time of their deaths.
He is thought to have believed the couple were hours away from announcing their engagement.
Mohamed Al Fayed pictured with his son Dodi at a perfume launch in Harrods in 1988
Twenty years on from their deaths, friends said he continued to make the outlandish claim they were killed by security services.
His claims led to the Harrods store being stripped of its four royal warrants — the right to declare that a company supplies goods by appointment to the Royal Family.
In his latter years, even his extraordinary ramblings about the princess’s death were overshadowed by accusations against the tycoon himself.
A string of women came forward in 2017 to accuse him of sexual assault.
One alleged she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl when he grabbed her and ‘started rubbing himself on my chest’. Another was 17 when she said he coaxed her into a swimsuit and tried to kiss her.
Mr Al Fayed, who was interviewed by the Metropolitan Police, had not been seen in public since the scandal. He had homes in Surrey and his native Egypt, but became a total recluse.
Born in 1929, the son of an Egyptian schools inspector, Mr Al Fayed was raised in Alexandria. In his early years, he founded a shipping company before moving to the UK and working his way into high society – despite being twice refused British citizenship.
He owned Harrods from 1985 to 2010, and still owned the Paris Ritz which he bought in 1979.
He seized on his film producer son’s brief dalliance with Princess Diana as a way to the heart of the British aristocracy, and he was devastated to lose both his beloved Dodi and his path into the Royal Family.
In a manner characteristic of many self-made tycoons, Mr Al Fayed sought to win favour and fame through football.
His purchase of Fulham FC, then a somewhat desolate club, in 1997 was greeted with surprise.
But four years later, after investing over £60 million, he had propelled the club into the top flight. But ownership became a financial albatross. And in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, his income from Harrods slumped.
Mr Al Fayed made a string of allegations following the death of his son and Diana. He alleged the pair were murdered by the security services on the orders of Prince Philip to prevent her from marrying a Muslim.
He also claimed the princess was pregnant at the time of the accident, though he had no evidence of either claim. Mr Al Fayed had Dodi with first wife Samira Khashoggi, before divorcing and remarrying Heini Wathen, with whom he had Omar, Camilla, Karim, and Jasmine.
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Mohamed Al Fayed pictured with in Harrods in 2000. The pair were friends – and Jackson accepted an invite to watch a game at Fulham FC, which Al Fayed owned at the time
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Mr Al Fayed at the opening of the Egyptian Room in Harrods – which featured busts of himself and, later, a statue commemorating Diana and his son Dodi
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Mohamed Al Fayed with Fulham FC cheerleaders in 2002. He owned the club from 1997 until 2013, and his investment propelled the club into Premier League
Egyptian media reported that the tycoon’s body was laid to rest beside his son, who was buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey, before being moved to his father’s Oxted estate.
Mr Al Fayed was a man of the most vivid contradictions. Capable of crude dishonesty but also gushing charm and generosity, he conjured a fable of being a pasha’s son born into fabulous wealth.
Thrusting his extraordinary hospitality upon sheikhs, tycoons, politicians and royalty, he seduced many powerbrokers into believing his masquerade while they enjoyed his helicopters, jets, three yachts and nine homes.
Habitually cursing his ‘fuggin’ enemies, he would turn against anyone he suspected of disloyalty, even when this harmed his own interests.
In the run-up to the 1997 election, he exposed Conservative politicians who had fallen prey to his own bribery and corruption. ‘I’m cleaning up British politics,’ he guffawed, but in doing so ensured that he would never be granted a UK passport.
Months later, on board a newly purchased yacht moored by his villa in St Tropez, Princess Diana was holidaying as his guest with her two sons.
The world was mesmerised by the photographs, including one of the shopkeeper’s arm around the world’s most glamorous woman. During that week, he introduced Dodi, his 42-year-old son, to Diana.
Dodi was encouraged by his father to offer Diana everything money could buy, and more. Diana, frustrated and lonely, was charmed by Dodi’s warmth and consideration.
Their romance during August, watched throughout the world, ended in tragedy when Fayed’s hugely expensive security service allowed Henri Paul, the drunken security chief of the Ritz hotel, to drive a Mercedes at high speed through the city in a reckless bid to avoid the paparazzi.
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Mohamed Al Fayed dons a Victoria emerald and diamond tiara as he launches Harrods’ New Year sale in 2001
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Mr Al-Fayed – seen here leaving the Royal Courts of Justice in 2007. The inquest into the death of his son Dodi and Diana, Princess of Wales, concluded the pair were killed unlawfully – but ruled out foul play
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Mr Al-Fayed later unveiled a statue of Diana and his son Dodi in Harrods commemorating their lives – the slogan ‘innocent victims’ is inscribed on its base
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Mr Al-Fayed’s repeated espousing of conspiracy theories relating to the death of his son Dodi alongside Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 meant he was often in the media eye
Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed was the eldest son of an unambitious school inspector whose wife died after the birth of her fifth child. At four years old he was already desperate to escape his family’s poverty.
As a child, he tramped through Alexandria’s dusty streets selling Coca Cola and Singer sewing machines. His salvation came aged 23, in 1952, when he met Adnan Khashoggi, the eldest son of Saudi Arabia’s minister of health. Mr Khashoggi, three years younger than Mr Al Fayed and still at school, was establishing his first business venture before entering university in California.
Mr Al Fayed agreed to become Khashoggi’s representative in Saudi Arabia importing furniture.
Two years later, after marrying Samira, Khashoggi’s younger sister, he was adopted by the wealthy family and began blurring his own past.
The birth of his first son, Dodi, in 1955 should have enhanced his ambitions. Instead, it hastened the collapse of his marriage. Rightly suspecting his infidelity, Samira demanded a divorce and instantly married a secret suitor. Mr Al Fayed was devastated.
Abandoned by the Khashoggis, the 28-year-old survived the humiliation by capitalising on the turmoil in Egypt in the wake of General Nasser’s overthrow of the monarchy and the Suez crisis.
Buying a prosperous shipping and forwarding agency from a persecuted Egyptian Jew and ultimately refusing to even pay the agreed low price, Mr Al Fayed hoped to join the Greek shipping magnates. But his ambitions were frustrated by his social and financial limitations.
He headed for Haiti, where he presented himself to Papa Doc Duvalier, the ruthless dictator, as Sheikh Fayed, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.
In the first weeks, the charming impostor wooed the dictator’s wife and daughter and won Duvalier’s trust to manage the nation’s port authority and search for oil.
His first prize was a Haitian diplomatic passport, facilitating his international travel when Egyptians required visas to enter every country. But after just six months, his venture soured.
Finding no oil and failing to modernise the port, the ‘sheikh’ fled to London in 1964.
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Mr Al-Fayed greets late Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti in 1995 as he arrives at Harrods
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Mr Al-Fayed (right) with Diana, Princess of Wales, a young Prince William and his son Dodi (left) at a polo match in July 1988
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After marrying Finnish socialite Heini Wathen Mr Al-Fayed had another four children, including Camilla (above)
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Mr Al-Fayed also had two sons – Karim (left) and Omar (right) – with Ms Wathen
Habitually spending beyond his means to bolster his charade, Mr Al Fayed posed as a middleman who could fix deals in the newly oil-rich Middle East.
His stock rose when he met Mahdi al Tajir, adviser to the ruler of Dubai, then a forlorn desert outpost on the brink of discovering oil. Promoting himself as a pasha’s son expelled from Egypt with an extraordinary network of City contacts, he offered to negotiate the bank loans to finance the construction of Dubai’s first harbour.
After Mr Al Fayed bought the Ritz in Paris in 1979, he started posing as Mohamed Al Fayed (the ‘Al’ implied high birth), and he set about financing films.
On his second attempt, he struck lucky with the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire.
On 14 March 1985, he bought Harrods and the House of Fraser group for £584 million. Thrilled, Mr Al Fayed married Heini Wathen, a Finnish model, already the mother of his two young children and expecting their third.
Initially, bemused Londoners did not care who owned Harrods and were unsurprised when Mr Al Fayed accompanied the Queen at the annual Windsor Horse Show.
But in March 1987, the government appointed two inspectors to investigate whether he had used his own money to buy the House of Fraser. His bid to bamboozle them backfired.
As Mr Al Fayed secretly handed out thousands of pounds in £50 notes to MPs and others to desperately win support, the inspectors concluded that he had bought the stores using ‘fraud and deceit’.
In March 1989, he was stunned by a special edition of the Observer reporting the inspectors’ denunciations. Increasingly paranoid, he surrounded himself with armed guards and transformed his homes into intimidating fortresses as he declared war against the country he claimed to admire.
After failing to strong-arm then prime minister John Major into revoking the Department of Trade report and granting his citizenship, Mr Al Fayed summoned Peter Preston, the then editor of the Guardian.
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Mr Al-Fayed fell out with the British establishment regularly over its refusal to grant him British citizenship, and later revealed he had bribed MPs to ask questions on his behalf in Parliament
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Mohammed Al Fayed at Fulham FC in early 2013 – he went on to sell the club for $300m later that year (then worth around £200m) having bought it for £6m
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Mohamed Al Fayed poses with actress Eva Longoria at the launch of the Harrods winter sale in 2006. He regularly mixed with the rich and famous through his ownership of the store
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Mr Al Fayed pictured in 2016. He became a recluse in his final years, plagued by allegations of sexual assault
Posing as the honest victim, the Egyptian revealed his secret cash payments to Conservative MPs and the overnight Saudi Arabian-funded stay of Jonathan Aitken, a government minister, at his Ritz Hotel in Paris.
‘I don’t owe these fuggin corrupt politicians anything,’ he told Preston. Roaring with glee as ministers resigned in the ensuing ‘cash for questions’ scandal, Mr Al Fayed played to the gallery as a powerbroker, while the beleaguered government tottered towards collapse.
Also in 1997, he attempted another publicity coup. After buying Fulham FC, the Fulham fans adored him. Parading on the pitch to their roars, he could easily imagine himself as a pharaoh.
On one bizarre occasion, he even used the football pitch as a stage to show off his friend Michael Jackson – and for a time, a statue of the star stood outside the Craven Cottage ground.
But after the shine wore off that enterprise and his Harrods income slumped, the company’s auditors resigned and a succession of senior directors, including those responsible for finance, departed.
Punch magazine, which he had bought to launch weekly tirades at the Establishment, was closed and he admitted being forced to invest his own money back into the business from his off-shore accounts.
An investigation by the Inland Revenue of his source of cash and tax-free earnings for bribes compounded his problems. Beleaguered by financial problems as the public boycotted his store, Mr Al Fayed withdrew from public appearances in Britain.
His final years were blighted by dementia.
Ultimately, the man who yearned to live on a par with royalty had become the eternal outsider.
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