Some tabloids suggested that an immigrant had been an unfit suitor for a princess. All three were killed.Ĭontroversy exploded over the cause of the crash and the implications of the affair. 31, 1997, a Mercedes-Benz carrying Diana and Dodi and driven by Henri Paul, a Fayed security agent who was drunk and traveling at a high speed trying to elude carloads of pursuing paparazzi, slammed head-on into a concrete pillar in a tunnel in Paris. Paparazzi hounded the couple everywhere they went. As their romance bloomed, the British press pounced. He and Diana had been acquainted, but by many accounts they fell in love on the Mediterranean sojourn. The Egyptian-born nephew of the Saudi billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Dodi was a notorious playboy who gave lavish parties, financed films, dated beautiful women and was once briefly married. Fayed signed a 50-year lease on the 19th-century villa in Paris that had been the home of the former King Edward VIII of Britain and Wallis Warfield Simpson, the divorced American woman for whom he abdicated his throne in 1936. A year later, as if securing a jewel in the crown of British heritage, Mr. His takeover of the venerable Harrods in 1985 struck many Britons as shameless brass, something akin to buying Big Ben. He bought a castle in Scotland and sometimes wore a kilt snapped up a popular British football club cultivated Conservative prime ministers and members of Parliament sponsored the Royal Horse Show at Windsor and tried unsuccessfully to salvage Punch, the moribund satirical magazine that had lampooned the British establishment for 150 years. He reveled in the trappings of a British aristocrat. And they think, ‘How can he? He’s only an Egyptian.’” You do things that are the talk of the town. So you prove you’re better than they are. “Anyone who comes from a colony, as Egypt was before, they think he’s nothing. “It’s the colonial, imperial fantasy,” Mr. He campaigned noisily for British citizenship, but his applications were repeatedly denied. He clashed repeatedly with the government and business rivals over his property acquisitions and attempts to influence members of Parliament. Fayed lived and worked mostly in Britain, where for a half-century he was a quintessential outsider, scorned by the establishment in a society still embedded with old-boy networks. He held Egyptian citizenship but rarely if ever returned to his native land. Tropez and other locales a fleet of 40 ships based in Genoa, Italy, and in Cairo and businesses that reached from the Persian Gulf to North Africa, Europe and the Americas. He had homes in London, Paris, New York, Geneva, St. Forbes estimated his net worth at $2 billion this year, ranking his wealth as 1,516th in the world. Fayed controlled far-flung enterprises in oil, shipping, banking and real estate, including the palatial Ritz Hotel in Paris and, for 25 years, the storied London retail emporium Harrods. The patriarch of a family that rose from humble origins to fabled riches, Mr. His death was confirmed on Friday in a statement by the Fulham Football Club in Britain, of which Mr. Mohamed al-Fayed, the Egyptian business tycoon whose empire of trophy properties and influence in Europe and the Middle East was overshadowed by the 1997 Paris car crash that killed his eldest son, Dodi, and Diana, the Princess of Wales, died on Wednesday.
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