If it weren’t for his well-known sibling, he could possibly be seen today as a corrupt and unpleasant man who wasted his life and the wealth he had on drugs and prostitutes.
However, Salah Fayed carries a name that evokes unease in society. He is the younger brother of Mohamed Al Fayed, the disgraced former owner of Harrods, who has been revealed as a prominent sex offender in Britain.
Now, like a corrupted version of Russian Matryoshka dolls, the secrets and lies of the Fayed family are being opened up layer after vile layer.
Similar to his brother, Salah is facing allegations of sexual misconduct and human trafficking. Three women have spoken up, claiming they were victims of his abuse. One of them accuses him of rape after suspecting her drink was spiked.
The women’s testimony reveals a terrifying pattern of being passed around by the brothers for their gratification. All three say they were also sexually assaulted or raped by Mohamed. And last week we also sensationally learned that the system that enabled Mohamed to evade justice played an equal part in the predatory life of feckless Salah, two years his junior.
It has emerged that a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner ‘intervened’ at the behest of one of Mohamed’s henchmen to prevent his brother from becoming embroiled in a drugs scandal.
Salah, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2010, had a prodigious cocaine habit and was described by an acquaintance as a ‘lost soul’.
Scant consolation for those women who said their frightening experience at his hands had changed the course of their lives.
Mohamed Al Fayed, left, with his younger brother Salah. Both brothers stand accused of sexual assault and trafficking
Helen was 23 and had been working at her dream job in Harrods’ Knightsbridge store when she was raped first by Mohamed and then Salah
One woman, Helen, who waived her right to anonymity, said she was 23 and had been working at her dream job in Harrods’ Knightsbridge store when Mohamed, who died at 94 last summer, raped her in a Dubai hotel room.
When months later he offered her some work with Salah, she saw it as an escape route.
Instead she was drugged and, while unconscious, raped by the younger Fayed brother.
‘He (Mohamed) shared me with his brother,’ she said. The Fayeds have ‘stolen a part of me’.
What drove two brothers into the same sordid and chilling pattern of behaviour will now never be known. Lawyers for the victims believe the full scale of Mohamed’s offending alone could be on a level with that of Jimmy Savile, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.
And like Savile, public affection at the time of Mohamed’s death – generated by his status as an outsider – has turned to revulsion.
Police believe he may have raped and abused at least 111 women and girls over four decades, with his youngest victim said to have been just 13.
No criminal action was ever brought against Mohamed, whose son Dodi was killed in a car crash alongside Princess Diana in Paris 27 years ago. Yet there seems no end to the shame and scandal his tainted name has brought.
How times change. Once, the three Fayed brothers – the surviving sibling Ali has also been the subject of a legal deposition in the US, where he lives, over what he knew of his brothers’ activities – were seen as indispensable to British retail.
Their relationship was summed up as: ‘Mohamed makes the money, Ali counts it, Salah spends it.’
They were joint purchasers of Harrods when they won a bitter takeover battle in the 1980s.
But an investigation by government inspectors subsequently revealed that the brothers had ‘dishonestly misrepresented their origins, their wealth, their business interests and their resources’.
Helen says she was drugged and, while unconscious, raped by the younger Fayed brother
Mohamed’s security chief John Macnamara, who was also an ex-Scotland Yard officer
Claims that they were the wealthy progeny of an established family of Egyptian ship owners, cotton traders and industrialists were exposed as lies.
And when a former school contemporary of Mohamed talked to a British TV crew about their true origins as sons of a dirt-poor schoolteacher, he was beaten up. Three eyewitnesses identified Salah as the attacker.
Yet that damning report from the Department of Trade and Industry barely dented the Fayeds’ popularity outside the business world.
Both brothers ruthlessly exploited the suggestion that they were gallantly fighting a cold and snobbish Establishment – even as they carried out their repugnant attacks on women who were intimidated, paid off and usually too terrified to complain.
As the two oldest brothers, Salah and Mohamed were particularly close. When Mohamed Al Fayed – he added the prefix himself – moved abroad to hustle and charm his way to riches, it was to Salah that he entrusted the welfare of his oldest son Dodi.
It was a reckless decision. The serially unfaithful Salah was a bad role model.
Brooding, short-tempered and complex, Salah was nicknamed ‘fruitbat’ by security staff at the Park Lane apartment where the three brothers were based because, like the flying mammal, ‘he only comes out at night’.
Thanks to the torrents of money that gushed in from Harrods, Salah divided his time between London and the picture postcard Chalet Ursa in Gstaad, Switzerland, where he installed his wife Adriana Funaro, an Italian shipping heiress, and son Moodi.
They also owned a house not far from the original family home in Alexandria.
In Egypt he spent his days sunbathing, paragliding (until he broke his back) and visiting prostitutes. But while his behaviour abroad could be ignored, Mohamed feared his brother’s excessive misuse of drugs could harm his reputation.
There were complaints of Salah propositioning girls in the bar of the Harvey Nichols store, near Harrods, and bodyguards reported on a stream of escorts who arrived at Park Lane to entertain him, sometimes three simultaneously.
Eccentrically, Salah bought two miniature ponies which he kept tethered on the seventh floor balcony of his flat, exercising them each day in Hyde Park and taking them up and down in the lift.
But it was another folly in 1993 that tested the fraternal bonds when Salah came under suspicion from Scottish police for possession of drugs.
Salah and his secretary had been visiting Balnagown, the Fayed family’s castle in Easter Ross in the Highlands, when they accidentally left a bag in the back of a taxi that had driven them from Aberdeen airport.
Balnagown, the Fayed family’s castle in Easter Ross in the Scottish Highlands
Former Harrod’s owner Mohamed (pictured) died aged 94 last summer. His brother Salah died from pancreatic cancer in 2010
The driver discovered that the bag contained a large sum of cash in sterling, dollars and Swiss francs, a passport, pills, white powder that appeared to be crack cocaine and a ‘well-used homemade pipe’.
He took this evidence to police at Elgin and it triggered a flurry of phone calls involving Mohamed and later Sir David McNee, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
In a statement some time afterwards, Bob Loftus, a former member of the Harrods security team and an ex-officer in the Military Police, claimed that secretary Rachel Crowe was made to take the blame for the drugs paraphernalia to protect Salah.
Under questioning from police, she gave the clear impression that she did not know how to use the pipe. No further action was taken.
According to Mr Loftus, Sir David, Met Police chief from 1977 to 1982, had become involved at the behest of Mohamed’s security chief John Macnamara, who was also an ex-Scotland Yard officer.
In his statement, Mr Loftus wrote: ‘Mr Macnamara told me Sir David McNee had intervened. I can only say what he told me.’
He went on: ‘I have no doubt that Salah was in possession of these drugs and that they were for his use and that Mohamed Fayed knew this and orchestrated a cover-up which involved (a) persuading [the secretary] to take the rap, (b) paying her a substantial sum for doing so and (c) using the connection of Sir David McNee to persuade the procurator fiscal [the Scottish prosecutor] to drop the case.’
When Mr Loftus’s allegations were put to Sir David, who died in 2019, he denied pulling any strings, insisting he had merely been asked by Mr Macnamara ‘about Scottish law and who would take decisions in the matter’.
One figure close to Mohamed told me: ‘I always got the impression that Mohamed tolerated Salah only because he was family.’
Exasperated by the episode, and concerned at the threat of reputational damage, Mohamed bought out his brother’s Harrods share.
But it is in the devastating testimony of the women who say they were trafficked, tricked and abused by the men that the true tragedy lies.
Helen recalled how, after two days working for Salah, he offered her a glass of champagne. ‘Within a few sips, I was starting to feel a bit groggy but I can’t describe it as drunk. It was a really dizzy and weird feeling. I wasn’t feeling right,’ she told the BBC.
Salah began playing music and Helen felt ‘it was definitely time to go, he was getting too cosy’.
Helen says Salah pressured her to ‘just have one puff’ of a bong containing crack cocaine.
‘This will make you feel better,’ she remembers him telling her. ‘That’s the last thing I knew of that whole evening.’
She recalls waking up lying on a sofa in a different room, with double vision and her whole body shaking. Salah was sitting at her feet holding a glass of water and a tablet, looking ‘nervous and panicky’, she says. As she got up, she noticed her jeans were undone and her belt missing.
Helen recalls feeling a sensation between her legs. She adds: ‘I knew then what had happened. I knew.’
Salah then made a call to his brother Mohamed in front of her to let him know she would not be going to work at Harrods that day.
Their conversation was in Arabic and Helen says all she could hear ‘was them laughing to each other’.
Two other women employed by Harrods have come forward to say they were lured with deceptive offers of work to Monaco and the South of France where they were sexually abused by Salah.
One described waking up petrified to find Salah in her bed. He also encouraged her to smoke a hookah pipe, which she discovered contained crack cocaine.
She said she felt it was his goal to get her addicted to make it easier to abuse her.
A third woman, who says she was 19 when Mohamed sexually assaulted her, has told how she was pressured into sharing a hot tub with Salah in an apartment in Monaco where he assaulted her and encouraged her to smoke from a home-made bong.
As more and more shocking details of their unsavoury and criminal activity emerge, the tragedy is that the only possible recognition of the Fayeds’ evil deeds will come after their deaths.
Additional reporting: Simon Trump
