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Mohamed Al-Fayed spent years attempting to achieve admission to the higher echelons of UK society however finally did not win both acceptance or British citizenship.
In his quest for the popularity he craved, the Egyptian billionaire, who died final 12 months aged 94, repeatedly tried to ingratiate himself with the royal household.
His efforts included changing into a sponsor of the Royal Windsor Horse Present, one of many late Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite annual occasions.
In 1985 he additionally bought Harrods, the posh division retailer in London’s Knightsbridge, the place the a number of ladies and ladies he’s now accused of raping and sexually assaulting had been workers.
Different lavish purchases that did not safe his goals embrace Fulham soccer membership and the Ritz resort in Paris.
His son Dodi’s fateful relationship with Princess Diana which he engineered might need led to a level of acceptance.
As an alternative it marked his everlasting estrangement after he insisted — with out proof — the queen’s husband Prince Philip had ordered the Paris automobile crash wherein Diana and Dodi had been killed to forestall her marrying a Muslim.
Fayed’s claims towards the royal household got here at a worth.
Harrods misplaced a royal warrant bestowed by Prince Philip in 2000 after what Buckingham Palace known as “a big decline within the buying and selling relationship” between the prince and the shop.
The Institution “dislike my outspokenness and dedication to get the reality”, he stated, as he introduced his exile to Switzerland in 2003 due to his claims and what he stated was the “unfair” remedy by the hands of the tax authorities.
Fayed, recognized for his outspoken and infrequently foul-mouthed method, was as soon as dubbed the “phoney Pharaoh” by British media after a authorities report described his claims of a rich ancestry as “utterly bogus”.
Removed from being the scion of a dynasty of cotton and delivery barons as he had portrayed himself, Fayed was the son of a poor Alexandrian schoolteacher who, after an early enterprise flogging lemonade, set out in enterprise promoting stitching machines.
He later had the great luck to begin working for the arms seller Adnan Khashoggi, who recognised his enterprise talents and employed him in his furnishings export enterprise in Saudi Arabia.
He grew to become an advisor to the Sultan of Brunei within the mid-Nineteen Sixties and moved to Britain within the Seventies.
– ‘Money for questions’ –
Fayed purchased the Ritz in 1979 together with his brother and the pair snapped up Harrods six years later after a protracted and bitter takeover battle with British businessman Roland “Tiny” Rowland.
A subsequent authorities investigation into the takeover, formally revealed in 1990, discovered that Fayed and his brother had been dishonest about their wealth and origins to safe the takeover.
5 years later, his first software for British citizenship was rejected.
Revenge adopted swiftly. Quickly after, Fayed advised the press that he had paid Conservative MPs to ask questions in parliament on his behalf.
This introduced down two distinguished politicians, whereas Fayed additionally uncovered cupboard minister Jonathan Aitken’s involvement in a Saudi arms deal.
Aitken was later jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice.
After the dying of Dodi and Diana, Fayed additional alienated himself, with the commissioning of two ill-judged memorials to the couple at Harrods.
One, unveiled in 1998, was a kitsch pyramid-shaped show with photographs of Diana and Dodi, a wine glass presupposed to be from their last dinner and a hoop that he claimed his son purchased for the princess.
The opposite, a copper statue of the couple releasing an albatross, was entitled “Harmless Victims” — a mirrored image of his view that Dodi and Diana “had been murdered”.
Fayed bought Harrods in 2010 to the funding arm of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund for a reported £1.5 billion ($2.2 billion).
In keeping with Forbes checklist of the world’s billionaires, Fayed was price $1.9 billion in November 2022.
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