Mr. Fayed, whose holdings included London landmarks resembling Harrods division retailer, turned greatest identified to the world by way of the prism of collective sorrow after the 1997 demise of Diana in a high-speed automotive crash in Paris. In his adopted homeland of Britain, nonetheless, Mr. Fayed’s life and legacy was far more advanced.
Admirers noticed him as an inspirational empire-builder with achievements resembling serving to bankroll the Oscar-winning 1981 historic drama “Chariots of Fireplace” and relaunching the venerable humor journal Punch in 1996 for a last-gasp, six-year run. Critics, in the meantime, pressed claims — by no means proved — that Mr. Fayed was one thing of a flimflam man in a bespoke go well with and ascot, embellishing his fortune and background.
In his later years, Mr. Fayed turned more and more remoted over his self-fueled obsession {that a} huge conspiracy led to the automotive crash that killed Dodi, Diana and their driver shortly after they left the Fayed-owned Resort Ritz within the Place Vendome.
The regular hum of scandals and quarrels was broadly seen as undercutting Mr. Fayed’s quest to realize British citizenship. But Mr. Fayed additionally represented an inescapable truth of British life: the flood of Arab cash into London because the 1960s, and the way the deep-pocket newcomers influenced the capital’s life and economic system.
Mr. Fayed, whose web price in 2022 Forbes estimated at $2 billion, took particular pleasure in tweaking haughty sensibilities.
After buying Harrods within the mid-1980s, Mr. Fayed rapidly shook up an ossified retail tradition. Mr. Fayed sought extra edgy manufacturers and opened an “Egyptian room” touting mini-pyramids and sphinxes. Some commentators decried the “bazaar” environment invading the greater than 150-year-old grand dame of London shops.
Mr. Fayed doubled down, saying (with wryness worthy of Punch’s greatest satire) that he needed to be mummified and entombed inside Harrods like a pharaoh.
When Mr. Fayed owned London’s Fulham soccer membership, he surprised the sports activities institution in 2011 by erecting a 71/2-foot statue of his late good friend Michael Jackson — depicted belting out a track — exterior the stadium. Mr. Fayed claimed that the singer was a fan of the crew, though he was solely reported to have made a single look at a recreation as a visitor of the proprietor. The statue was eliminated when Mr. Fayed bought the membership in 2013.
He as soon as quipped to a British tabloid that he deliberate to clone himself 2,000 instances, later explaining with a smile: “I simply needed to upset the British institution.”
The businessman’s circle of acquaintances and contacts was eclectic and expansive: glitterati of all stripes, pro-business politicos together with then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, potentates such because the sultan of Brunei, and the arms service provider Adnan Khashoggi. Mr. Fayed’s two-year marriage with Khashoggi’s sister, Samira, produced a toddler, Emad, identified to all as Dodi, in 1955.
“Britain is all the time mentioned to be a nation of shopkeepers, and an Egyptian proved the king of shopkeepers. . . . He was an amazing showman,” mentioned Robert Lacey, a distinguished biographer of British royalty, instructed The Washington Submit.
However Mr. Fayed additionally stewed over what he perceived as makes an attempt by Britain’s highly effective cliques to derail his ambitions.
Mr. Fayed “felt endlessly snubbed,” mentioned Lacey.
He battled for years — and ultimately prevailed — in opposition to claims by a rival for Harrods that Mr. Fayed wildly inflated his private funds and fabricated tales about his ancestors as influential Egyptian cotton sellers and shipbuilders. An investigative panel in 1989 sided with the fabulist allegations — saying Mr. Fayed got here from “respectable however humble origins” — however let stand the $1.05 billion sale. In 2010, Harrods was bought for about $2.25 billion to Qatar’s state-run funding arm after what Mr. Fayed described as annoyance at British paperwork and a need to decelerate his tempo of labor.
At Diana’s funeral, Mr. Fayed was inside Westminster Abbey, however rows away from the royal household. His son was buried earlier exterior London.
His full break with the royals got here quickly after, as he publicly accused members resembling Prince Philip, the queen’s husband, of being a part of an anti-Diana cabal. Buckingham Palace described Mr. Fayed as unhinged — and turned from lovable rogue to a punchline within the eyes of many Britons.
Mr. Fayed asserted the automotive wreck in Paris stemmed from a far-reaching plot, going as excessive as British intelligence and Buckingham Palace. An inquest in 2008 concluded that reckless driving by chauffeur Henri Paul and the pursuit of paparazzi mixed to trigger the crash.
Mr. Fayed didn’t waver. He sunk $four million right into a 2011 documentary, “Illegal Killing,” constructed across the Diana-was-murdered allegations. The movie was saved from widespread launch after its producers had been unable to acquire insurance coverage in opposition to attainable libel costs.
By all of it, Mr. Fayed made repeated functions for British citizenship, which had been denied. The precise causes had been by no means made public, however commentators say they in all probability included his public feuds and finger pointing.
Mohamed Abdel Moneim al-Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on Jan. 27, 1929, in keeping with British commerce data. However different sources, together with “Who’s Who,” reported that the 12 months was 1933. He by no means publicly clarified the date.
An identical murkiness shrouded his youth. Regardless of his claims of hailing from highly effective service provider inventory, the extra prosaic — however extra accepted — model was that he grew up dwelling throughout the technique of his father’s instructor wage. By his early 20s, Mr. Fayed was putting out on his personal, reportedly peddling Singer stitching machines and Coca-Cola.
Round that point, he met the Saudi-born Adnan Khashoggi. Mr. Fayed struck up a romance with Khashoggi’s sister, resulting in marriage in 1954. It didn’t final, however Mr. Fayed was now blood-linked to the Khashoggi clan by their son Dodi. It was a key calling card into the enterprise world past Egypt.
Mr. Fayed used Khashoggi-arranged introductions for profitable investments within the United Arab Emirates within the early 1960s, and to safe building contracts in Haiti beneath the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
By the mid-1960s, Mr. Fayed and his two youthful brothers had relocated to England to supervise their rising conglomerate of oil, building and delivery. Mr. Fayed was notably determined for acceptance in his new European life.
In 1979, Mr. Fayed introduced a fading Parisian gem, the Ritz, and led a serious renovation. Not lengthy after, he kicked in $three million for “Chariots of Fireplace” (Dodi was listed as government producer), the true story of a gaggle of British runners getting ready for the 1924 Olympics. One of many fundamental characters, sprinter Harold Abrahams — a Jewish pupil at Cambridge — mirrored a few of Mr. Fayed’s personal emotions of alienation and prejudice in Britain.
Mr. Fayed’s fame reached the sultan of Brunei — among the many world’s richest males — who admired how Mr. Fayed straddled Western and Muslim worlds. In an act of big religion, the sultan in 1984 gave Mr. Fayed energy of lawyer for a variety of affairs. The following 12 months, Mr. Fayed used London property purchased for the sultan as leverage to amass the retail chain Home of Fraser, the group holding Harrods, in keeping with British media stories.
This layered monetary deal spurred a vitriolic problem from the notoriously contentious British businessman Roland “Tiny” Rowland, who claimed that Mr. Fayed was merely using on the sultan’s cash and had bamboozled commerce overseers. Investigators in 1988 discovered no grounds to repeal the Harrods sale — whilst its income climbed and Mr. Fayed burnished his nickname, “Chairman Mo.”
Mr. Fayed chalked up the battle to anti-foreigner phobias.
“It’s the colonial, imperial fantasy,” he instructed the New York Instances in 1995. “Anybody who comes from a colony . . . they assume he’s nothing. So that you show they’re higher than they’re. You do issues which are the speak of the city. They usually assume, ‘How can he? He’s solely an Egyptian.’ ”
He wouldn’t abandon Britain, although. He saved afloat the money-losing Punch journal till 2002, and loved cheers from Fulham followers when the crew clawed again into England’s Premier League. The sale of Harrods, nonetheless, appeared to mark a turning level.
He largely shifted his life to Geneva together with his household. Survivors embody his second spouse, former Finnish mannequin Heini Wathén, and their 4 kids: Camilla, Jasmine, Omar and Karim.
But whilst his place in British life light, he by no means let go of his resentment over being snubbed as a countryman.
“I’ve two Filipino nannies who’ve British passport and never me,” he instructed the London Guardian in 2006. “I don’t want [a] British passport. Once you had been operating round in an animal pores and skin, my ancestors had been constructing the pyramids.”
Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.