The protection that Mohamed Al Fayed gained with money, lawyers and influence has been completely torn down. Up to 65 women have come to the BBC to report that they too were victims of sexual harassment or abuse by the Egyptian billionaire, who owned the legendary department store Harrods from 1985 to 2010. London’s Metropolitan Police (New Scotland Yard, as the institution is known) has opened forty new investigations, which are added to the twenty-one that were already open before a documentary revived the scandal.
Al Fayed died last year, aged 94.
In September, the public channel revealed the ploys and traps set by the magnate for many of the warehouse employees to sexually abuse them. At least twenty decided to come forward and publicly expose the humiliations, attacks and, in some cases, rapes they suffered at the hands of Al Fayed.
Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods (Al Fayed: A Predator in Harrods) put several of them before the cameras, who decided to show their faces and voices. Others preferred to continue speaking anonymously, still unable to overcome years of pressure and threats from the millionaire’s entourage. Five of them claimed that they were raped.
In search of accomplices
The investigations opened by the police extend until 1979, so in some cases they involve women who did not go through Harrods, but were part of Al-Fayed’s domestic service. It is now impossible, once deceased, for the Egyptian businessman to be criminally convicted, but Scotland Yard does not rule out that legal proceedings may be opened against some of the people who were complicit or concealed the abuses.
“Since the broadcast of the documentary and the petition [de la Policía Metropolitana] For the alleged victims to report, we have received numerous pieces of information. In most cases they refer to the activities of Al Fayed himself, but several of them point to other people,” explained Commissioner Stephen Clayman, heading the investigation.
The BBC documentary reveals a web of silence, complicity and concealment by Harrods staff regarding the sexual assaults of its owner. Especially by the management of the time and the security services.
In 2010, Al Fayed sold the Harrods department store to the Qatari sovereign wealth fund for around 1.8 billion euros. The current owner company, aware for a few months of the sexual violence carried out by Al Fayed, has assured the BBC in a statement that they are “totally horrified by the accusations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed Al Fayed. They were acts carried out by a specific individual who wanted to abuse his power when he was in charge. [de la organización] and we condemn them with all firmness.” The company admits it: “During all this time we have failed our employees, who were their victims, and we express our most sincere apologies.”
The Metropolitan Police has admitted, after the documentary was broadcast, that 19 women reported Al Fayed for sexual abuse over the last two decades. A formal investigation was never opened against the businessman. In some cases, due to pressure from their lawyers, or due to the achievement of extrajudicial agreements with the victims, which imposed a confidentiality clause and buried the scandal. The police, in other cases, alleged the advanced age of the Egyptian billionaire to not advance the investigations.
The Police Conduct Office, as Scotland Yard’s internal affairs department is called, has already warned the unit investigating Al Fayed’s alleged abuses that it must report any findings that need to be analyzed. The police authorities have also opened an internal investigation into the way their agents behaved in this matter in recent years.
The suspicion that a sexual predator was hiding behind Al Fayed had been running through British newsrooms for years. The magazine Vanity Fair In 1995, the chain MOT in 1997 or Channel 4 In 2017 they already tried to unmask the businessman’s attacks. His pressure and legal maneuvers managed to prevent the violence he perpetrated from being exposed.
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