Mohamed Al Fayed: A Gilded Life Full of Controversy | Mohamed Al Fayed

Mohamed Al Fayed, who was accused of sexual abuse this week by former female BBC employees, was flamboyant, outgoing and a thorn in the side of the royal family.

That he is still in the news today, a year after his death at the age of 94, reflects a life marked by much controversy.

A fighter who never backed down from a fight, he took on the House of Windsor, the House of Commons with its ‘cash for questions’ scandal and business rivals.

He may have owned Harrods, perhaps Britain’s most prestigious department store, and acquired a slice of British cultural life when he owned Fulham FC and the satirical magazine Punch, but he died without having achieved the one thing he so desperately wanted: citizenship and thus full acceptance into British society.

His most notable war was against the royals and the ‘establishment’ over the death of his beloved son Dodi along with Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris in 1997 while being driven by Henri Paul, an employee of Fayed who had been drinking too much alcohol.

Grief-stricken, Fayed began a bitter and vengeful campaign. Dodi, he claimed, had told him that the princess was pregnant and that the couple were to be engaged. There was no proof and it undoubtedly caused unimaginable grief to her relatives and friends.

He would also persist for a further decade with allegations that Diana, Dodi and Paul had been ‘murdered’ in an act orchestrated by MI6 on the instructions of the late Duke of Edinburgh and involving former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“I am a father who lost his son,” he told the coroner leading the inquest into the deaths. “I am fighting against incredible forces. But with your power as a judge, you must force MI6 to open their box and find the result.” The coroner dismissed claims of a “conspiracy” as having “not a shred of evidence” to support them.

Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of a school inspector. He started out selling lemonade and sewing machines, and later worked for Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. He advised the Sultan of Brunei and started his own shipping company.

He was already wealthy when he moved to Britain in the 1970s, with the intention of building a business empire. In 1979, Fayed bought the Paris Ritz hotel with his brother Ali.

He targeted Harrods and became embroiled in a bitter battle with “Tiny” Rowland, the business magnate and head of mining conglomerate Lonrho. Fayed won, although Rowland later accused him of breaking into his safe at the department store, allegations that led to Fayed, along with others, being arrested in March 1998 but never charged.

Fayed bought Fulham FC, taking over the Division Two club in 1997. His spending on players and managers, including Kevin Keegan and Roy Hodgson, saw them rise to the Premier League. However, fans were stunned when Fayed erected a statue of his pop singer friend at the Craven Cottage grounds in 2011, two years after the death of Michael Jackson. It was removed when he sold the club in 2013.

In politics, he was at the centre of the 1994 “cash for questions” scandal, with allegations that he had paid then Tory MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith thousands of pounds to illegally ask questions in the House of Commons on his behalf. Hamilton sued for libel and lost. Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was another victim, forced to resign after the boss of Harrods revealed he was staying at the Ritz in Paris at the same time as Saudi arms dealers. Aitken was later jailed for perjury following a libel case against the Guardian.

British citizenship continued to elude him, despite having four British children with his second wife, paying millions in taxes, donating millions to charities including Great Ormond Street Hospital and financing films including Chariots of Fire. “Why won’t they give me a passport? I own Harrods and employ thousands of people in this country,” he asked.

When he rejected his second application in 1999, the then Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, ruled that Fayed had a “general character defect”, citing the controversies surrounding the safe and “cash for questions”.

Fayed was first accused of sexual abuse in the late 1980s, but the allegations did not result in criminal charges. In 2009, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then headed by Keir Starmer, decided not to prosecute him after he alleged he sexually abused a 15-year-old girl in Harrods. He denied all allegations against him and voluntarily went to police interview.

Allegations of sexual misconduct against the billionaire businessman were the subject of articles in Vanity Fair in 1995, ITV in 1997 and Channel 4 in 2017.