Mohamed al-Fayed, an Egyptian billionaire, bought many famous places over the course of his life, such as the Ritz Hotel in Paris and Harrods department store in London.
He was also known for his disagreements with the British establishment, which got worse after his son Dodi and Princess Diana of Wales died in a car accident in 1997.
The documentary says that Al-Fayed may “break down in tears” when he thinks about his son Dodi, who died in the same car accident that killed Princess Diana.
In an interview for the second part of Investigating Diana: Death in Paris, Al-former Fayed’s spokeswoman, Laurie Mayer, talked about how the billionaire thought his son and Diana had been “killed” and started his own private investigation into the car accident in Paris.
Mohamed Al-Fayed is still alive, but no one knows where he is
In general, the 93-year-old billionaire is still alive and living with his wife, Heini.
After Fayed moved to Britain in 1974, he bought more properties and added “al-” to the beginning of his name. He also bought the Ritz Hotel in Paris (1979).
It is well known that Fayed and the people in charge in Britain did not get along well.
In 1985, he beat the mining giant Lonrho in a bloody takeover to get the House of Fraser, which ran the Harrods department store.
Roland “Tiny” Rowland, who owned Lonrho, pushed the government to say that Fayed had lied about being able to pay for the takeover.
Heini Wathén, his wife, is 67 years old and used to be a model
Mohamed Al-Fayed and Heini Wathen-Fayed have been married for more than 35 years. She used to be a model, and she is said to be 67 years old.
In the same way, she is the mother of four of the children of the former owner of Fulham FC. People say that the two of them are wealthy and worth more than £1.2 billion. They also own a number of luxurious homes around the world.
Wathen-Fayed says she is fighting the case to keep the 12-acre “calm” area from being built on and to protect the ecology of the neighborhood.
She also went to the High Court to stop the building of a large crematorium that would be about a half mile from their luxurious Surrey property.
Heini Wathen-Fayed, who is 67 years old, filed a lawsuit over plans to build a large funeral home near their £4.6 million 17th-century Oxted manor house. The lawsuit is about plans to use land in a green belt.
The Egyptian billionaire will have a net worth of $1.9 billion in 2022
Forbes says that Mohamed Al Fayed is one of the richest Arabs in the world, with a net worth of about $1.9 Billion.
The 93-year-old man was born in Alexandria, Egypt. In the middle of the 1960s, he moved to the UK, where he made a lot of money.
Most notably, he used to own Harrod’s in London. In 2010, he sold it to Qatar for an estimated $2.4 billion.
He owns the famous Ritz Paris hotel, which reopened in 2016 after a four-year renovation. Some of the suites are named after famous guests, like Coco Chanel.
Al Fayed sold the Fulham Football Club to Shahid Khan in 2013 for an estimated $300 million. Khan is a millionaire American businessman who makes parts for cars.
Dodi Fayed’s father: Theories About What Caused Princess Daina’s Death
Dodi, the son of Al-Fayed, was in love with Diana, Princess of Wales, when they both died in a car accident on August 31, 1997, in Paris, France.
The former head of Harrods unveiled a statue of Diana and Dodi at his fancy department store in Knightsbridge on the same day that it was shown in the documentary Investigating Diana: Death in Paris.
In a statement to TV crews at the time, Al-Fayed said, “It’s a terrible day for me.”
“[Mohamed Al-Fayed] had wanted to be accepted for a long time,” Mr. Mayer said. “The relationship between Dodi and Diana brought him that acceptance.”
In order to find out what happened to Diana and Dodi, the show focused on the billionaire’s investigation into the 1997 car accident that killed four people.
Mr. Mayer says that his former boss tried to back up his own theory because he thought that his son had been “assassinated.”
He said there was no doubt in his mind that it was an attempt to kill someone. French investigators didn’t care about Al-argument, Fayed’s which they called a “conspiracy” anyway.
Early years
He was born in Roshdy, Alexandria, Egypt. His father was an Egyptian elementary school teacher, and he was his oldest son. His birth year has been argued about. The website alfayed.com used to say he was born in 1933, but the Department of Trade found that he was actually born in 1929. [3] alfayed.com rewrote “1933” to “1929” in 2011. Ali, Salah, Soaad, and Safia are Fayed’s children and siblings. [needs citation] Ali and Salah have worked with him in business.
He was married to Samira Khashoggi for two years, from 1954 to 1956. Fayed worked with Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer and businessman who is the brother of Fayed’s wife.
In the early 1970s, he started calling himself “Al-Fayed” instead of “Fayed.” In the 1980s, when they bought the House of Fraser, his brothers Ali and Salah began to do the same. However, by the late 1980s, both Ali and Salah went back to calling themselves “Fayed.” Some people have thought that Fayed added “Al-” to his name to show that he was from a noble family, like “de” or “von” in French or German. However, Al- does not have the same social meaning in Arabic as “de” or “von.” Private Eye magazine called him the “Phoney Pharaoh” because of this idea. [9]
The first business deals
Fayed and his brothers started a shipping business in Egypt. Later, they moved the company’s headquarters to Genoa, Italy, and opened offices in London. Around 1964, Fayed became close with Francois Duvalier, also known as “Papa Doc,” the leader of Haiti, and became interested in building a Fayed-Duvalier oil refinery in Haiti. He was also friends with George de Mohrenschildt, a geologist. Six months later, when a sample of “crude oil” given to him by Haitian friends turned out to be low-grade molasses, Fayed left the country.
Fayed then went to live in central London in England. In the mid-1960s, Fayed met Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai. Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum asked Fayed to help change Dubai. In 1968, Fayed started IMS (International Marine Services). Fayed brought British construction companies like the Costain Group (where he became a director and 30% owner), Bernard Sunley & Sons, and Taylor Woodrow to the emirate to do the work that needed to be done. In 1966, he also became the Sultan of Brunei’s (Omar Ali Saifuddien III) financial adviser.
Fayed was on the board of the mining company Lonrho for a short time in 1975, but he left after a fight. In 1979, he spent $30 million to buy The Ritz hotel in Paris, France.
In 1984, Fayed and his brothers bought a 30% stake in House of Fraser from Roland “Tiny” Rowland, the head of Lonrho. House of Fraser was a group that included the London store Harrods. In 1985, he and his brothers paid £615 million to buy the last 70% of House of Fraser. Rowland said that the Fayed brothers lied about who they were and how much money they had, so he pushed the government to look into them. The Fayeds were looked into by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The DTI’s next report was harsh, but the Fayeds were not punished. Many people believed the report, but others thought it was made for political reasons.
In 1998, Rowland said that Fayed took papers and jewelry from his safe deposit box at Harrods. Fayed was put in jail, but the charges against him were dropped. Rowland died in 1998. Fayed paid his widow to end the fight, and he also sued the Metropolitan Police in 2002 for false arrest, but lost the case.
House of Fraser went public in 1994, but Fayed kept Harrods as a private business. He brought back the funny magazine Punch in 1996, but it went out of business again in 2002. Al-Fayed tried to become a British citizen twice, in 1994 and 1999, but both times he was turned down. People thought that Fayed’s fight with Rowland was one reason why he wasn’t given British citizenship the first time.
Cash-for-questions
In 1994, in what became known as the “cash-for-questions” scandal, Fayed revealed the names of MPs he had paid to ask questions in parliament on his behalf but who had not declared their fees. Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, both Conservative MPs, left the government in shame, and a Committee on Standards in Public Life was set up to stop this kind of corruption from happening again. Fayed also said that cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken had stayed for free at the Ritz Hotel in Paris at the same time as a group of Saudi arms dealers. This led to Aitken losing his libel case and going to jail for perjury. Michael Cole, a former BBC journalist, was Al-spokesman Fayed’s during this time in 1988. Cole’s PR work for Al-Fayed did not end in 1998, though.
Hamilton then sued Al-Fayed for libel and lost in December 1999. He also lost an appeal of the verdict in December 2000. The former member of parliament has always said that Al-Fayed did not pay him to ask questions in parliament. Hamilton sued Al-Fayed for libel over a Channel 4 Dispatches program that aired on January 16, 1997. In it, Al-Fayed said that the MP had received up to £110,000 in cash and other gifts for asking questions in parliament. Hamilton’s reason for appealing the original verdict was that Al-Fayed had paid £10,000 for documents that Benjamin Pell had stolen from the trash cans of Hamilton’s lawyers.
Fayed moved from Surrey, UK, to Switzerland in 2003. He said he had broken a deal with the British tax office. He moved back to Britain in 2005, saying that he “considers Britain to be home.” Before he sold it in 2014, he moored a yacht called the Sokar in Monaco.
Harrods is for sale
Harrods was sold on May 10, 2010, to Qatar Holdings, which is the sovereign wealth fund of the country of Qatar. Fayed had said that a couple of weeks before “People come to us from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar. All right. But I gave them the middle finger. You can’t buy it. This is not Sainsbury’s or Marks and Spencer. People enjoy going there because it is a unique place. Only one Mecca exists.” [28]
A price of £1.5 billion was paid for Harrods. Fayed later said in an interview that he sold Harrods because it was hard to get the trustee of the Harrods pension fund to agree to his dividend. Fayed said “I’m here every day, I can’t take my profit because I have to take a permission of those bloody idiots. Do you think this is right? Makes sense? Somebody like me? I run a business, and in order to take my profit, I need to get the trustee’s permission “. Fayed was given the position of honorary chairman of Harrods, which he was supposed to keep for at least six months.
Real estate in Scotland
Fayed bought the Balnagown estate in Easter Ross, which is in Northern Scotland, in 1972. Al-Fayed started with 4.8 hectares (12 acres), but now the estate is 26,300 hectares (65,000 acres). Al-Fayed has put more than £20 million into the estate, fixed up the pink Balnagown Castle from the 1400s, and started a business where tourists can stay. [30] In 2002, Al-Fayed was given the Freedom of the Highlands by the Highlands of Scotland tourist board for his “outstanding contribution and commitment to the Highlands.”
As an Egyptian with ties to Scotland, Al-Fayed was interested enough to pay for a reprint in 2008 of Scotichronicon, a history book written by Walter Bower in the 15th century. The Scotichronicon tells how Scota, a sister of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen, ran away from her family and ended up in Scotland, where she brought the Stone of Scone with her. The chronicle says that Scotland was later named after her. Modern historians don’t agree with the story. Later, Al-Fayed said, “The Scots are Egyptians at heart, and that’s the truth.”
In 2009, Al-Fayed came out as a supporter of Scotland breaking away from the United Kingdom. He told the Scots, “It’s time for you to wake up and get away from the English and their terrible politicians. I will give Scotland whatever help it needs to get its freedom back. When you Scots get your freedom back, I’m ready to be your president.”