Mohamed Al-Fayed

Mohamed Al-Fayed was an Egyptian-British businessman whose six-decade business empire — including ownership of Harrods (1985–2010) and Fulham Football Club (1997–2013) — made him one of the most-iconic Egyptian-British business figures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was born Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed on January 27, 1929, in Alexandria, Egypt. He started his business career in his native Egypt in the 1940s and 1950s, primarily in shipping and import-export, before pivoting to international real estate and luxury retail in the 1960s and 1970s.

His business empire's trajectory through the 1970s and 1980s included substantial real-estate investments across the Persian Gulf, the 1979 acquisition of the Hotel Ritz Paris (one of the most-iconic luxury hotels in the world), and the 1985 House of Fraser acquisition — which made him owner of Harrods, the Knightsbridge London department store that has been continuously cited as one of the most-iconic British retail landmarks. The Harrods acquisition produced the two-decade legal-and-political dispute with the British media and the British Conservative government over Al-Fayed's application for British citizenship — which was repeatedly denied.

The August 31, 1997 deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Al-Fayed's son Dodi Al-Fayed — both killed in the Paris Pont de l'Alma tunnel car crash following their summer-1997 romantic relationship — shaped Al-Fayed's subsequent decade. He spent extensive financial and personal resources investigating the crash, repeatedly alleging that the deaths were the result of an British intelligence-services conspiracy involving the British royal family. The 2008 British inquest into the 1997 deaths concluded that the deaths had resulted from gross negligence by driver Henri Paul, with no evidence supporting the conspiracy allegations.

Al-Fayed sold Harrods to the Qatar Investment Authority in 2010 for £1.5 billion. He died on August 30, 2023, at age 94, at his Surrey country home — one day before the 26th anniversary of the 1997 Paris crash. Following his death, multiple former Harrods female employees came forward with substantial sexual-assault allegations against him, which the 2024 BBC documentary investigation corroborated.

His name Mohamed is one of the alternate Arabic-Western spellings of Muhammad (from the Arabic Muḥammad meaning "praiseworthy"). Mohamed has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 2000s.