Predatory instincts: the Phoney Pharaoh of Harrods

The sticky slime streaming forth from the memory of the late Mohamed Al-Fayed, who died in August last year at the age of 94, has been unrelenting. That the billionaire was an ogre of some proportion and influence during his time as the owner of Harrods in London was no secret. His ego was so outsized it barely fitted in the store, and he ran it much like a fiefdom. While the department store was the jewel in the Fayed crown, one acquired in the 1980s in acrimonious circumstances from Roland "Tiny" Rowland, other diamond encrustations included the Fulham football club and the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

In time, the symptoms of Fayed's imperial reign showed. A BBC investigation released on September 19, comprising a documentary and podcast, heard testimony from more than 20 female ex-employees claiming that that Fayed had sexually assaulted or raped them from the late 1980s to the 2000s. Much as a despot keen on flesh, he also subjected many of his female employees to needlessly intrusive medical tests, including full cervical smears.

With impunity, the man Private Eye called the "phoney pharaoh" seemed authentically hungry in the ways of the flesh, seeking victims on what could only be described as hunts on the store floors. Selected individuals were promoted to work in Fayed's offices upstairs and were plied with champagne before the sexual advance. Occasionally, he would seek the seclusion of the Villa Windsor, the former Parisian home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor he bought and renovated, to inflict his sexual misdeeds upon his victims.

Fayed always shared a testy relationship with the British establishment, one that was hardly free of racial and cultural distaste towards the Egyptian interloper. But he did little to endear himself, despite the thin ethical covering offering by his philanthropic pursuits. For one, he was fantastically economical with the truth, lying, along with his brother, of their wealth and origins to secure the Harrods takeover.

It was an instinct that also came into play when he exposed the role of Conservative cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken in a Saudi arms deal. (Fayed had previously worked in the Saudi Arabian export furniture business of the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.) Aitken had also been mendacious about his role – it obviously takes one to know one – and was sentenced for perjury and perverting the course of justice in June 1999.

The Fayed world view often verged on the ludicrous. He nursed a fantasy that the royal family, notably Prince Philip, had instructed the British security services to kill his feckless son Dodi and the limelight seeking Princess Diana in August 1997, when a car driven by one of Fayed's intoxicated employees, chauffeur Henri Paul, crashed in a Paris road tunnel.

The findings of Operation Paget, launched in 2004 by the British Metropolitan Police, found that the deaths of Diana, Dodi and Henri Paul had arisen from intoxication, excess speed and the failure on the part of the occupants to wear a seatbelt. "Garbage," came the dismissive response from Fayed. "I'm certain 100 percent that a leading member of the royal family has planned that and that the whole plot was executed on his order with the help of members of MI6."

In Tom Bower's Fayed: The Unauthorised Biography, the businessman is shown to have had episodes of sheer, small minded malice, including hatred for a particular cat that incurred his displeasure. So unhappy was he with the ginger tom, he ordered its killing, entrusting the task to former SAS soldier John Evans.

With dark comedy, Evans shot the wrong ginger tom, a feline that so happened to be a favourite of one of Fayed's children. Always struggling with the consonants "c" and "k", the tycoon lamented that, "Fuggin' nothing is fuggin' done properly." Evans, camouflaged in SAS-styled fatigues, eventually identified the right cat on the estate, but needed the assistance of every security guard and dog handler to capture it after initially wounding the agile animal.

To the extensive Fayed resume can now be added alleged sexual assault. Indeed, the Bowers biography dating back to 1998 also notes instances of alleged sexual harassment of staffers at Harrods. Behaviour of this sort never takes place in a vacuum, requiring complicity, assistance, and wilful blindness. A former Harrods employee, pseudonymised as Katie, told the BBC that "many other people throughout the organisation" knew of Fayed's alleged predations.

The BBC investigation notes, for instance, the knowledge of Tony Leeming, a Harrods department manager from 1994 to 2004, who admitted to being "aware of it when I was on the shop floor". Store detective Eamon Coyle, who became a deputy director of security from 1989-95, also conceded that Fayed had "this very strong interest in young girls."

The extent Harrods went to stomp on any news of Fayed's fleshy wanderings was evident in a settlement reached with Gemma, who worked as one of Fayed's personal assistants between 2007 and 2009. After her rape, she informed a lawyer that she was leaving her position at the store citing sexual harassment, without revealing the full extent of the assault. Harrods, in agreeing to pay her a sum of money, also sought a non-disclosure agreement and the destruction of all relevant evidence of Fayed's role, witnessed by a member of Harrods' HR team.

While Harrods' current owners claim to have been "utterly appalled" by the allegations, lawyers representing the various women have advanced arguments of institutional accountability. "The spider's web of corruption and abuse in this company was unbelievable and very dark," claims barrister Bruce Drummond, who is acting for a number of the women.

Claims running into the millions of pounds are likely to follow. Many are already in train, and some have been settled. "Underneath Harrods' glitz and glamour," observes US lawyer and prominent women's right advocate Gloria Allred, "was a toxic, unsafe and abusive environment." That, it seemed, was far from phoney.