inthe world: the Sultan of Brunei. The Sultan had come to the attention of the British government and public a year and a half earlier: in August 1983, he had withdrawn the Brunei Reserve Fund, worth $5.7 billion, from the Crown Agents in Britain, to the noticeable detriment of sterling. In 1985, the following events occurred, some or all of which may be connected. In January, the Sultan of Brunei bought London’s Dorchester Hotel—a deal fronted by Mohamed Al-Fayed, using a power of attorney to draw funds on the Sultan’s behalf On March 4, Mohamed Al-Fayed and his brothers were suddenly revealed to be much richer than anyone thought they had a right to be. On March 14, the Minister for Trade and Industry, Norman Tebbit, announced that he would not be referring the Al-Fayed bid for Harrods to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission; he also released Lonrho from the ban on its making a bid—by which time, of course, it was mockingly too late, as the Al-Fayeds had already acquired the 51 percent of the company’s shares they needed. Later in the year, as the sterling crisis deepened, with the pound falling to $1.04 and a continuing miners’ strike threatening to make things even worse, the Sultan of Brunei transferred £5 billion pounds into sterling to help prop up the British currency. Whereupon the pound sat up in bed and took a little soup, staggering back to $1.08.
The brothers Al-Fayed now owned Harrods, but Lonrho kicked up such a fuss that a Department of Trade and Industry inquiry was ordered into the circumstances of the takeover. In 1988, its report was presented to the new Trade Minister, Lord Young, but a delay of publication was immediately imposed on the ground that criminal investigations into the takeover were being conducted by the Fraud Squad. The chief executive of Lonrho continued to fume, and the following year, when the report had still not been published, Tiny Rowland (or one of his adjutants) slipped Tiny Trelford (or one of his adjutants) a bootleg copy of the report, which Trelford published as a special, unprecedented midweek edition of the Sunday
Observer
. It was injuncted shortly after it hit the streets, but Rowland, who by then seemed to be the only person in the country still interested in the ownership of Harrods, had managed to keep the story running.
Finally, this March, five years after the government gave the Al-Fayed brothers the nod, a 752-page report—by a High Court judge and an accountant—was published, and everyone got excited all over again.
The Times
ran the front-page headline “ LYING FAYEDS” KEEP HARRODS over a large photograph of Mohamed Al-Fayed, straw-boatered and white-coated, slicing up a salami in the Harrods food department. The DTI inspectors declared that the brothers, both before and after their bid for the House of Fraser, had “dishonestly represented” their origins, wealth, business interests, and resources to the Secretary of State, the Office of Fair Trading, the press, the House of Fraser board, the company’s shareholders, and even to their own financial advisers. The “catalog of lies” makes interesting reading, not least for its great variety of category: some of the lies seem to be calculated deceptions; others seem to the outsider like normal business practice; still others do no more than comically reflect the quaint British snobbery of those who compiled the report. The Al-Fayeds, the inspectors concluded, had inflated their income, had exaggerated the start-up wealth they possessed when they left Egypt, and had failed to come clean about the origins of their mysterious cash injection. They claimed to have had a fleet of ships that survived Nasser’s nationalization, whereas in fact they had owned only two 1,600-ton cargo ferries at the time. In 1964, Mohamed had spent seven months in Haiti, where he posed as a Kuwaiti sheikh, obtained two valuable government concessions, and decamped after cheating Papa Doc out of $100,000 (which some
The brothers Al-Fayed now owned Harrods, but Lonrho kicked up such a fuss that a Department of Trade and Industry inquiry was ordered into the circumstances of the takeover. In 1988, its report was presented to the new Trade Minister, Lord Young, but a delay of publication was immediately imposed on the ground that criminal investigations into the takeover were being conducted by the Fraud Squad. The chief executive of Lonrho continued to fume, and the following year, when the report had still not been published, Tiny Rowland (or one of his adjutants) slipped Tiny Trelford (or one of his adjutants) a bootleg copy of the report, which Trelford published as a special, unprecedented midweek edition of the Sunday
Observer
. It was injuncted shortly after it hit the streets, but Rowland, who by then seemed to be the only person in the country still interested in the ownership of Harrods, had managed to keep the story running.
Finally, this March, five years after the government gave the Al-Fayed brothers the nod, a 752-page report—by a High Court judge and an accountant—was published, and everyone got excited all over again.
The Times
ran the front-page headline “ LYING FAYEDS” KEEP HARRODS over a large photograph of Mohamed Al-Fayed, straw-boatered and white-coated, slicing up a salami in the Harrods food department. The DTI inspectors declared that the brothers, both before and after their bid for the House of Fraser, had “dishonestly represented” their origins, wealth, business interests, and resources to the Secretary of State, the Office of Fair Trading, the press, the House of Fraser board, the company’s shareholders, and even to their own financial advisers. The “catalog of lies” makes interesting reading, not least for its great variety of category: some of the lies seem to be calculated deceptions; others seem to the outsider like normal business practice; still others do no more than comically reflect the quaint British snobbery of those who compiled the report. The Al-Fayeds, the inspectors concluded, had inflated their income, had exaggerated the start-up wealth they possessed when they left Egypt, and had failed to come clean about the origins of their mysterious cash injection. They claimed to have had a fleet of ships that survived Nasser’s nationalization, whereas in fact they had owned only two 1,600-ton cargo ferries at the time. In 1964, Mohamed had spent seven months in Haiti, where he posed as a Kuwaiti sheikh, obtained two valuable government concessions, and decamped after cheating Papa Doc out of $100,000 (which some
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