Almost 26 years to the day after Dodi’s death in a car crash with Princess Diana, Mohamed Al Fayed, the former Harrods magnate, passes away at the age of 94 and is buried next to his son at the family mausoleum. “Wise, colorful” Egyptian businessman is buried next to son on family estate.The former Fulham FC owner passed away on Wednesday and was laid to rest on Friday.Written by Jonathan Brady, Samuel Green, Cameron Charters, and Abul Taher Sunday, September 2, 3:58 AM EDT (Latest)
Mohamed Al Fayed, who was 94 years old, has passed away, almost 26 years to the day after his son Dodi and Princess Diana were killed in a car crash.Dodi Al Fayed’s father, the former owner of Harrods, died on Wednesday after a protracted illness.The tycoon’s son-in-law reported that a Muslim funeral was held yesterday at the London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park. ‘Our Lord have pity on him and pardon him, and open for him wide [the doors of] paradise,’ Ashfar Haider prayed on Facebook in Arabic.Mr. Al Fayed was obsessed with the idea that his son and Princess Diana were killed in a Paris tunnel on August 31, 1997, and he believed this until the day he died.
The furious millionaire made shocking accusations at the London inquest into Diana’s death, including that Prince Charles, now King Charles, was “happy” because the Royal Family had “cleared the decks, they finished her, they murdered her.” He spent over a decade spreading false and destructive rumors that members of the Royal Family were responsible for the vehicle catastrophe.According to Forbes, Mr. Al Fayed had an estimated net worth of $2 billion (£1.59 billion). In his Knightsbridge shop, which also featured numerous busts of himself, he set up the Egyptian Room as an homage to Dodi and Diana, who were in a relationship at the time of their tragic deaths.He probably thought the engagement announcement was coming within the next several hours.
Friends reported that even after 20 years had passed after their deaths, he persisted in the absurd notion that security forces had murdered them.As a result of his allegations, Harrods lost four royal warrants, which indicated that the store was an official supplier of the British royal family.
Accusations leveled against the tycoon himself overwhelmed even his astonishing ramblings regarding the princess’s demise in his later years.In 2017, more women came forward with allegations of sexual assault against him.One claimed that when she was 15, he grabbed her and “started rubbing himself on my chest.” Another claimed he tried to kiss her while she was only 17 and got her into a bikini.Since the incident broke, Mr. Al Fayed had not been seen in public and was interviewed by the Metropolitan Police. He was born in Egypt and raised in Surrey, but he eventually became an outcast.Mr. Al Fayed was raised in Alexandria, where he was born in 1929 as the son of an Egyptian schools inspector.
He started off as a shipping firm founder, then moved to the UK and made his way into the upper crust there despite being denied citizenship twice.From 1985 to 2010, he was the owner of Harrods, and he still owns the Paris Ritz, which he purchased in 1979.He saw his son, a film producer, and Princess Diana as a ticket into the British nobility, and he was horrified when Dodi and the royal connection were both taken away from him.Mr. Al Fayed, like many other self-made tycoons, used soccer to gain popularity and public recognition.His 1997 purchase of Fulham FC, a struggling team at the time, was met with shock.After spending over £60 million over the course of four years, he finally brought the team to the Premier League. However, the cost of ownership eventually proved too much to bear.
And after September 11th, 2001, when terrorist attacks hit New York, his income from Harrods fell.After his son and Diana’s deaths, Mr. Al Fayed launched a series of accusations. He said that Prince Philip had ordered the murders of the couple so that she couldn’t marry a Muslim.Although he had no proof of either assertion, he insisted the princess was pregnant at the time of the accident. Mr. Al Fayed’s first wife, Samira Khashoggi, gave birth to Dodi; he then divorced her and remarried to Heini Wathen, with whom he had Omar, Camilla, Karim, and Jasmine. The tycoon was reportedly buried in Oxted, at his estate, with his son, who was originally interred in Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey.Mr.
Al Fayed embodied the starkest of contrasts. He fabricated a story about being the son of a pasha and hence born into tremendous fortune, demonstrating his ability to switch between crass dishonesty and overflowing charm and charity.Many influential people fell for his act while they were enjoying his helicopters, planes, three boats, and nine residences, which he used to host sheikhs, tycoons, politicians, and kings.He would turn on anyone he suspected of being disloyal, ‘fuggin’ his adversaries in the process, even if it meant harming his own interests.He outed Conservative politicians who had been bribed or corrupted by him in the run-up to the 1997 election. To no one’s surprise, his boast that “I’m cleaning up British politics” led directly to his being denied a British passport.A few months later, Princess Diana and her two sons were vacationing as his guests aboard a yacht he had recently purchased and docked at his St. Tropez estate.
The images, including one showing the shopkeeper’s arm around the world’s most attractive woman, captivated the entire world. He had his 42-year-old son, Dodi, meet his girlfriend, Diana, that week.Dodi’s dad told him to give Diana the world and more if he wanted to win her heart. Dodi’s kindness and concern won over Diana, who had been feeling down and isolated.Their August romance, which was followed around the world, ended tragically when Henri Paul, the drunken security chief of the Ritz hotel, drove a Mercedes at high speed through the city in an attempt to evade the paparazzi. Fayed’s pricey security team had allowed this to happen.
After the birth of her fifth child, Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed’s mother passed away, leaving him as the eldest son of an unambitious school inspector. He wanted desperately to get away from his poor home as early as age four.Selling Coke and Singer sewing machines as a young boy, he walked the dusty streets of Alexandria. Adnan Khashoggi, the eldest son of the Saudi Arabian minister of health, saved him when he was 23 years old in 1952. Mr. Khashoggi, who was still a high school student and three years younger than Mr. Al Fayed, had just launched his first business venture before enrolling at a California university.In order to import furniture into Saudi Arabia, Mr. Al Fayed agreed to become Khashoggi’s representative.Two years later, he married Khashoggi’s younger sister Samira and became a full member of the affluent family, erasing any trace of his previous life.
Dodi’s birth in 1955 should have given him new motivation. However, it just accelerated the breakdown of his marriage. Samira wanted a divorce after accusing him of cheating and quickly married an unknown suitor. Mr. Al Fayed’s grief was palpable.After the Khashoggis’ humiliating abandonment, the young man, then 28 years old, took advantage of Egypt’s political upheaval following General Nasser’s removal of the monarchy and the Suez crisis to build a successful business empire.Mr. Al Fayed wanted to join the Greek shipping magnates, so he bought a successful shipping and forwarding service from a persecuted Egyptian Jew and then refused to pay the agreed-upon low price. However, he was unable to achieve his goals because of his limited social and financial resources.He traveled to Haiti and introduced himself to the brutal tyrant Papa Doc Duvalier as Sheikh Fayed, a member of the royal family of Kuwait.In the first several weeks, the impostor managed to romance the dictator’s wife and daughter while also gaining Duvalier’s trust to run the port authority and conduct oil exploration.His first reward was a diplomatic passport from Haiti, which allowed him to travel freely between countries at a time when Egyptians were forced to obtain visas for entry.
His business effort failed after only six months.Since the’sheikh’ had been unable to find oil or modernize the port by 1964, he had escaped to London. Mr. Al Fayed posed as an intermediary who could strike agreements in the newly oil-rich Middle East, despite his habit of habitually spending beyond his means to buttress his deception.When he met Mahdi al Tajir, adviser to the ruler of Dubai (back then a desolate desert outpost on the cusp of oil discovery), his reputation skyrocketed. Offering his services to negotiate the bank loans to finance the development of Dubai’s first harbour, he marketed himself as a pasha’s son exiled from Egypt with an amazing network of contacts in the City.Mr. Al Fayed began funding movies under the guise of Mohamed Al Fayed (the ‘Al’ denoted high birth) after he purchased the Ritz in Paris in 1979.The Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire was his second effort.He spent £584 million to acquire Harrods and the House of Fraser company on March 14th, 1985. Mr.
Al Fayed was so overjoyed that he quickly wed Heini Wathen, a Finnish model and the mother of his two young children.It didn’t seem to phase puzzled Londoners when Mr. Al Fayed accompanied the Queen to the Windsor Horse Show or that he owned Harrods.In spite of this, in March of 1987, the government assigned two inspectors to look into whether or not he had used his own money to purchase the House of Fraser. His attempt to fool them was unsuccessful.Inspectors found that Mr. Al Fayed had purchased the businesses using ‘fraud and deceit’ because he had discreetly distributed thousands of pounds in £50 notes to MPs and others in a last-ditch effort to win approval.A March 1989 Observer special edition detailing the inspectors’ accusations shocked him.
As his paranoia grew, he declared war on the country he had before praised and surrounded himself with armed guards and formidable fortifications.Mr. Al Fayed called the then-editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston, after he was unsuccessful in pressuring the then-prime minister, John Major, to reverse the Department of Trade findings and grant him citizenship. An Egyptian who pretended to be a victim said that he had secretly paid Conservative members of parliament in cash and that a government minister, Jonathan Aitken, had stayed at his Ritz Hotel in Paris with funding from Saudi Arabia.Telling Preston, “I don’t owe these fuggin corrupt politicians anything,” he emphasized that he had no debt to the lawmakers. Mr. Al Fayed, playing to the gallery in his role as a powerbroker, roared with joy as ministers resigned in the ensuing ‘pay for questions’ controversy, which threatened to bring down the already-weak administration.In 1997, he made yet another attempt at gaining media attention.
Now that he owned the club, he was beloved by Fulham supporters. Walking out into the field to the sound of their roars made him feel like a pharaoh.A statue of Michael Jackson once stood outside the Craven Cottage stadium because of his odd use of the football field as a stage to showcase the star’s talents.
But as the novelty of that business venture worn off and his income from Harrods dropped, the company’s auditors resigned and several senior directors, including the ones in charge of finances, left in quick succession.He revealed that he had to reinvest his own money from his offshore accounts after the closure of Punch magazine, which he had purchased in order to launch weekly tirades at the Establishment.The Inland Revenue began looking into his bribery finances, which only made things worse. Mr. Al Fayed, who was having financial difficulties as a result of the public boycott of his store, stopped making public appearances in Britain.Dementia plagued him in his last years.The man who had once dreamed of being treated like a prince was now doomed to be an outcast.
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