LONDON — Mohamed Al Fayed, the previous owner of Harrods, the Ritz in Paris and Fulham Football Club, died Friday at 94 years old.

“Everyone at Fulham was incredibly saddened to learn of the death of our former Owner and Chairman, Mohamed Al Fayed. We owe Mohamed a debt of gratitude for what he did for our Club, and our thoughts now are along with his family and friends at this sombre time,” said Fulham FC in an announcement on social media.

The Egyptian tycoon sold the football club in 2013, shortly after parting with Harrods in 2010, ending his 25-year reign at the posh department store by selling the landmark British retailer to Qatar Holding, an investment company linked to the royal family of the Gulf state, for 1.5 billion kilos, or $2.27 billion at current exchange, including about 600 million kilos, or $906 million, in property-backed debt.

He sold Fulham FC to the U.S. automotive billionaire Shahid Khan, owner of the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars. Al-Fayed had owned Fulham for 16 years.

None of Al Fayed’s 4 living children — his son Dodi died within the 1997 automobile crash that killed Princess Diana — were involved within the day-to-day operations of the family businesses. Mockingly, Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed also died on what’s Labor Day Weekend within the U.S.

When Al Fayed bought Harrods in 1985, the Egyptian retailer had spent an estimated 400 million kilos, or $592 million, to remodel what was a staid, drained store into an unapologetically opulent retail experience — but not without controversy and missteps.

Al Fayed’s management style could at best be described as mercurial, and he went through a string of managers who lasted about so long as his whims. He would walk the shop commonly and ask for things to be modified, only to then later ask why something was done. He brought a showman’s hand touch to Harrods — much to the shock of its more staid clientele — and the shop looked as if it would prosper. 

It actually has under its current owners. 

Harrods financial results for the 52-week period ending January 2023 showed the department store recording a 131.3 million pound increase in pretax profit, in accordance with records from Firms House.

The corporate also had a 52 percent increase in turnover to 994.1 million kilos, a 339.9 million pound boost from the previous 12 months.

Al Fayed was born in 1929 in Roshdy, a neighborhood in Alexandria within the Kingdom of Egypt because it was called before the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. His father was an Egyptian primary school teacher.

The Egyptian-born retail tycoon was often economical with the reality, his website used to assert he was born in 1933, however the Department of Trade had found it to be 1922. 

He added the flowery prefix “Al” to his surname within the Seventies, and fudged details concerning the source of his family’s wealth before he bought Harrods and its then-parent House of Fraser. A government report into the deal fell just wanting calling Al Fayed and his brothers liars concerning the size of their fortune, although the federal government took no legal motion and will never discover where precisely the Al Fayeds got the funds to purchase the shop — rumors ranged from the Sultan of Brunei to far-from-savory characters.

Private Eye, the satirical British news magazine nicknamed him the “Phoney Pharaoh.”

Before venturing into the world of retail, he had a shipping company along with his brothers that was based in Egypt before moving it to Genoa, Italy with offices in London.

Within the mid-Sixties, he cosied as much as Haitian leader François Duvalier, otherwise often called Papa Doc, to form an oil refinery called Fayed-Duvalier. Al Fayed left Haiti after six months for London when he was presented with oil that was disguised as molasses.

In London, he began a relationship with Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, an Emirati royal and a founding father of the United Arab Emirates helping him to remodel Dubai by introducing him to construction corporations equivalent to Bernard Sunley & Sons, Taylor Woodrow and the Costain Group, where he became a director and 30 percent shareholder.

Al Fayed’s big step got here into luxury in 1979, when he bought the near bankrupt The Ritz hotel in Paris for $30 million.

He spent roughly $250 million on a ten-year renovation without ever closing the hotel’s doors. He enlisted the assistance of a French architect from 1980 to 1987 to spruce up the establishment, from top to bottom, including the famous Ritz Bar, where Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald famously drank within the Twenties. The bar was added within the Cambon wing, across the road from Chanel.

Following The Ritz, in 1984, Al Fayed along along with his brothers, purchased a 30 percent stake within the House of Fraser group, which included Harrods, from British businessman, Roland Walter “Tiny” Rowland. The next 12 months, they bought the remaining 70 percent.

Al Fayed and Rowland had a tumultuous relationship, throwing daggers at one another within the press at any time possible.

Within the Eighties, Al Fayed accused Rowland of campaigning against him within the Observer newspaper, which Rowland then owned, and Rowland had the British government’s Department of Trade and Industry launch an investigation into Al Fayed and his activities. 

No motion was taken as a part of the investigation — though it did find Al Fayed and his brother Ali misrepresented the extent of their wealth once they bid for House of Fraser. It was never determined where the Al Fayeds actually got the funds to purchase the corporate. 

There was an extended history of such scandals: In 1994, Al Fayed was involved in what got here to be often called the cash-for-questions scandal, which ultimately resulted within the resignation of two British MPs. 

Within the late Eighties, Al Fayed believed his business rival, Rowland, had paid British MPs to call his business practices into query. 

So Al Fayed then paid MPs to query Rowland’s activities in parliament. After being refused a British passport, Al Fayed then went to London’s Guardian newspaper with the news that he paid the MPs to ask the questions for him in parliament.

Rowland and Al Fayed eventually reconciled before this had come to light in 1993

Other controversies weren’t as weighty. Within the mid-Nineties, Harrods began charging people 1 pound (about $1.50) to make use of the bathrooms in a bid to discourage nonshoppers from availing themselves of the facilities. Today, customers now not need to pay. Then there was the uproar that accompanied his decision to ban backpacks and huge handbags from the shop, leading to many tourists being turned away by security — although this practice was more comprehensible within the Nineties given Harrods was an everyday goal of bombs by the Irish Republican Army.

Harrods was his most prized possession, often comparing it to pyramids in Egypt.

In 2010, Fayed told The Sunday Times of London that he planned to own the business for the remainder of his life, and when he died he hoped to be entombed in a mausoleum on the roof of the shop — a wish he’s expressed repeatedly. 

“It’s a pyramid for me, a monument,” he told the British paper. “It’s the most effective department store on the planet.”

It’s no secret that Harrods has had a robust tradition of revolving door management attributable to Al Fayed’s autocratic style.

Former Gucci Group executive James McArthur left his post as chief executive officer of Harrods lower than a 12 months after starting his role. Martha Wikstrom was also managing director of the shop for a period, staying there for lower than two years. 

When Al Fayed let the highest brass shine, it paid off. Marigay McKee, the shop’s fashion and wonder director, transformed each of those divisions.

“Fayed realized how much value she’s adding to the shop, so she’s allowed to have a profile,” a former worker told WWD on the time. “And the sadness up to now was that a number of good people went for the fallacious reasons.”

In fashion, McKee had spearheaded a string of initiatives including the creation of the International Designer Room on the shop’s first floor, which launched in September 2009, showcasing 40 labels including RM by Roland Mouret, Prada, Balmain, Lanvin, Balenciaga and Chloé.

Although Al Fayed could have a novel management style, there isn’t a doubt he made Harrods a greater store during his tenure. 

On his regular tours of the shop, employees would literally run for canopy once they saw him coming for fear he’d notice them and fire them on the spot for some imagined infraction or berate them at the highest of his voice for something he didn’t like — after which a number of weeks later, after they’d modified it, ask them to alter it back again.

He was known to call with a whim in any respect hours of the day or night. In return, he could possibly be extraordinarily generous, showering executives with cars, apartments on Park Lane and all-expenses-paid trips. But as quickly as they won his favor, they only as rapidly — and inexplicably — lost it; one senior executive was once dismissed due to the brand of suits he bought.

“Once I first joined Harrods, they were still selling Tampax, toilet paper and notions. It had this type of faded elegance. But Mohamed did an incredible job really adding some luster to what was form of a drained old department store,” Terron Schaefer, Saks Fifth Avenue’s group senior vp of creative marketing and marketing director of Harrods from 1986 to 1990, said on the time.

“Their motto was ‘every part for everyone, all over the place,’” Schaefer added.

“Once I was in the shop last February eager about skiing, I used to be just overwhelmed by the collection of sporting goods — skis, skiwear, boots, climbing, camping, whatever sport you were remotely all for. It’s an infinite selection at a wide range of price points. I used to be at all times overwhelmed by the collection of cheeses, meats, vegetables and fruit, and on a regular basis they’d change the fish display. However the thing I most loved about working there have been the windows. There are 72 windows across the perimeter of the shop and you possibly can get the handle on anything occurring inside.”

Certainly one of Al Fayed’s many inventions was to put in the glittering, cartoonish Egyptian hall and escalator at a value of 20 million kilos, or $29.6 million, which is decorated with busts of Tutankhamun-like figures at each floor. Al Fayed opened the hall by donning an Egyptian headdress and robes.

Famously, the shop had also acted as a shrine to Al Fayed’s late son Dodi and Princess Diana. Two memorials to the late couple are on show in the shop — a bronze statue of them dancing, which stands near to considered one of the shop’s entrances, and a shrine on the lower ground floor made up of photos of the couple and a few of their possessions surrounded by candles.

The statue was returned to Al Fayed in 2018.

“We’re very proud to have played our role in celebrating the lives of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Al Fayed at Harrods and to have welcomed people from all over the world to go to the memorial for the past 20 years,” said Michael Ward, Harrods managing director.

“With the announcement of the brand new official memorial statue to Diana, Princess of Wales at Kensington Palace, we feel that the time is true to return this memorial to Mr. Al Fayed and for the general public to be invited to pay their respects on the palace,” he added.

Yet despite constant speculation he would open more flagships — in all over the place from Dubai to Chicago — Al Fayed never made the move of exporting the Harrods concept abroad. 

His tenure as owner of Harrods had also not been without controversy. 

Many upper-crust Brits refused to enter its doors after Al Fayed bought the shop, and the negative feelings toward him only grew along with his outspoken campaign to prove the deaths of his son Dodi and Princess Diana were murder ordered, he claimed, by the British royal family since the couple was about to be married. Quite a few investigations into their deaths have never uncovered any evidence of that, and located they died in a tragic high-speed automobile accident.

Al Fayed forged an in depth relationship with the late Princess of Wales as they were involved with the identical charities and attended similar events.

Harrods also lost its long-held royal warrants that had been displayed on the shop’s facade. When Al Fayed needed to remove them, he replaced them with the Arab crest.

He was often called generous with big donations, via the family’s charitable foundation, going to Great Ormond Street and Royal Marsden hospitals, and quiet payments for personal medical take care of certain employees who were unwell.

For King Charles III’s coronation last 12 months, Harrods laid low, given its history with the present monarch with no major celebratory events planned. It had, nevertheless, issued a coronation mix of English breakfast tea, and Scottish shortbread fingers, each in decorative tins.

In the most recent season of Netflix’s royal drama “The Crown,” Al Fayed and his son Dodi’s relationship was documented, from mingling with royals and Hollywood’s inner circles.

In 1979, Al Fayed arrange film production company Allied Stars Ltd, appointing his son because the chief executive.

The corporate backed the film “Chariots of Fire,” earning them 4 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Costume Design and Best Original Rating.

Al Fayed funded Keith Allen’s 2011 documentary “Illegal Killing,” based on the death of Princess Diana, which Allied Stars produced.

The production company is now defunct.