The billionaire Harrods owner faced allegations from multiple women in the years before his death, but no charges were ever brought…reports Asian Lite News
Mohamed Al Fayed faked having dementia to avoid being prosecuted for sexual assault, his youngest son has claimed.
Omar Fayed, 37, said his father “got off the hook on the grounds he was mentally incapacitated” but “afterwards it was back to business — he was as sharp as a tack”, he told The Mail on Sunday.
The billionaire Harrods owner faced allegations from multiple women in the years before his death, but no charges were ever brought. A total of 111 victims have now made claims against him, with the youngest said to have been aged 13.
The Metropolitan Police is investigating allegations that Al Fayed, who died last year at the age of 94, sexually abused and raped women at properties and businesses across the world over more than three decades. Police have not commented on the dementia claim.
Much of the abuse is alleged to have taken place when Al Fayed owned Harrods between 1985 and 2010 and has only come to light following a BBC documentary broadcast in September.
Several complaints against Al Fayed were made to police long before he died. Fayed suggests the best opportunity to prosecute his father was missed when allegations emerged in 2017 and 2018, saying he wished the “investigation had been able to take its course when he was still alive”.
In 2017 one victim waived her right to anonymity to describe in a Channel 4, “Dispatches” programme how Al Fayed sexually harassed Harrods workers. No action was taken.
On Saturday night Tom Porter, the documentary’s executive producer, said he had “suspicions” about the extent of Al Fayed’s illness after an attempt was unsuccessfully made to block the exposé on the grounds that the businessman was mentally incapacitated.
Another woman went to the police in 2018 with allegations of sexual assault but was told that Al Fayed had dementia and was too frail to be prosecuted, according to The Mail on Sunday.
Al Fayed was in his late eighties at the time, but Fayed said this did not matter. “If a Nazi general is found to have been hiding in the Algarve for the last 50 years then of course he should be tried,” he said.
The business tycoon’s son said he got “dirty old man vibes” from his father, and “knew about the call girls”, and that he now felt “a degree of relief” that the allegations were coming to light. Al Fayed was also arrested in 2013 over a rape allegation but never charged. Five years before that, he was interviewed by Scotland Yard regarding an allegation of sexual assault against a 15-year-old girl.
The Crown Prosecution Service concluded there was no realistic chance of conviction.
Fayed, an entrepreneur who focuses on climate change, is the youngest of four children between Al Fayed and his second wife, the Finnish model Heini Wathen. He served on the Harrods board between 2006 and 2010, when his father sold the business.
In September, he said: “The extent and explicit nature of the allegations are shocking and has thrown into question the loving memory I had of him.”
Dame Jasvinder Sanghera, who was appointed by Harrods as an independent advocate to address the needs of the late billionaire’s victims, said last month that the scale of abuse could be “the [same] scale of Jimmy Savile”.
Fayed attempted to explain his father’s crimes, suggesting his mistreatment of women was rooted in his childhood. “He lost his mother at the age of seven and didn’t have any stable female figure in his life growing up,” he said. “We all know how impactful that can be to a child’s psychological development. That was really one of the most fundamental things.”
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