Mohamed Al Fayed ‘bugged super posh Ritz hotel to blackmail me – after offering to send women up to my room’
MOHAMED Al Fayed allegedly bugged rooms at the Paris Ritz hotel he owned in the hopes of blackmailing anyone who spoke out against him.
The “vulgar” Harrods tycoon would try and catch “something incriminating” on visitors before offering to send women up to male guests, author Hugo Vickers told The Sun.
Hugo recalled being put up for the night with his wife in the swanky 5-star hotel during the 90s when he was writing a book about an estate Fayed was leasing.
He revealed any conversation he and his wife had, would instantly be followed up by a call on the room phone offering assistance.
Hugo said: “My wife and I stayed in the Ritz, in Paris, which he owned. We were put up there for a night.
“At one point, she said ‘Oh, I think they’ve got a swimming pool. I’d really like to go swimming’.
“At which point the telephone rang, and a voice said ‘If your wife wants to go swimming, all she has to do is dot dot dot’.
“And the next day, when we were leaving, they said something about a car to take us to the station.
“But we said ‘Come on, let’s just take a taxi’. Then ring ring, ‘There’s a car waiting for you downstairs’.
“So quite clearly the rooms were being bugged. It’s not a very nice atmosphere.
“When they bug the room or something, what they’re really trying to do is to get something incriminating on the person in the room.”
Some time later, Fayed asked Hugo to write a book on the Ritz itself and offered up a girl in exchange for his words.
Hugo added: “He also asked me at one point to write a book about the Paris Ritz.
“And he said to me ‘You come, you stay at the hotel. You want, girl? You ask hall porter and he’ll arrange’.
“That’s the sort of thing he did, that’s the way he thought. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do the book.”
Fayed was leasing Windsor House in Paris when Hugo first met him.
He said the “slippery eel” manned his properties with armed security and caged dogs in a bid to frighten girls that were brought to him.
Mohamed Fayed stable hand reveals how sex predator got teen girls to trot past him
By Stephen Moyes
A STABLE hand who worked for Mohamed Fayed has told how the sexual predator got teenage workers to trot past with his horses so he could ogle them.
The woman — just 15 at the time in 1987 — was one of a team employed to look after the Harrods boss’s nags and said he “got off” on humiliating staff and leaving them fearing for their jobs.
She revealed he tried to get her to visit him in London — and she had to make up having a boyfriend to ward off his advances.
Recalling her time working for him, she said: “He was so creepy. He’d sit in a marquee in front of his lawn and bark at us to jog by him with his horses so he could see our young bodies moving up and down.
“He’d like to watch us in our Harrods tops and jodhpurs.”
The woman said the Egyptian billionaire, who died last year aged 94, went around his Barrow Green Estate in Surrey offering up cash to girls he liked.
She said: “People were scared of losing their jobs and of upsetting him — and he got off on that.
“Workers were on tenterhooks but he feared no repercussions and was god of his domain.”
The woman said some girls who were lured to work for him in London with the promises of success and money would then go on to become victims.
Of her own close call, she said: “He knew how young I was but would still ask me to go to London and visit him when he wouldn’t have his family around him.
“I pretended that I had a boyfriend to get out of it.”
The woman went on: “His security, all ex-military police, knew exactly what he was like but we were just told to go along with it and do whatever he said. He was sick and didn’t fear any comebacks.”
Hugo added: “At the Windsor House, the one in the Bois de Boulogne, they had very fierce dogs in cages, and they had security people, all of whom were very smiley characters.
“But you knew that if instruction was given the cages would open and you would just be ripped to shreds.
“It’s not a nice atmosphere, so I’m not at all surprised that these girls were absolutely petrified of him.
“As an author going there, nobody was particularly concerned about me, but if they’d suddenly decided that they didn’t want me to leave, I wouldn’t be able to get out.
“There were men with guns, and there were gates that were locked, and there were dogs in cages.
“It’s all that sort of atmosphere which can be very frightening.
“I mean, he was very vulgar in his approach to many things. I’m very surprised, because I’d always heard all these stories, I’m surprised that he wasn’t brought to book during his lifetime.
“I can only think that the reason for that is that he was so litigious and such a slippery eel, that people didn’t want to take him on.
“Because that’s the sort of person he was.”
The Egyptian billionaire also packed out the basement of his department store with TVs so “everything that went on” was monitored, Hugo said.
It comes as more than 150 women bravely came forward to tell of how Fayed sexually abused them since the BBC2 documentary Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods exposed him as a serial sex attacker.
Bruce Drummond, a barrister for some of the compensation claims against Harrods, said: “This is the worst case of corporate sexual exploitation of young women I have ever seen, and I think probably the world has ever seen.”
The Crown Prosecution Service has confirmed it twice failed to charge Fayed.
The first was in 2009 when PM Sir Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions and again in 2015 under Dame Alison Saunders.
A spokeswoman said: “To bring a prosecution, the CPS must be confident there is a realistic prospect of conviction. In each instance, our prosecutors looked carefully at the evidence and concluded this was not the case.”
Harrods admitted that it had settled a number of claims over the past 18 months.
Paris Ritz has been contacted for comment.
Fayed had a 'fixer' who would seek out young victims for him
BY Summer Raemason
FAYED had a ‘fixer’ who would would seek out young victims for the predator, it is claimed.
She has been described as a blonde woman who donned designer clothes and drove a Porshe.
It is understood the woman was working as a senior executive at Harrods at the time.
She would hang around in wealthy areas of London and entice young women out for drinks at expensive venues before making twisted promises to help them with work.
Allegedly the woman took them to vile Fayed’s penthouse as if she was delivering them to him on a silver plater.
A student, who was 19 at the time, claimed she met her in 2013.
She said: “She told me all about her life and her fiancé. I wasn’t sure why we were gossiping like we were best friends when we were so different in age.
“Then she just stood up and said she wanted to go and see him so we drove through Knightsbridge. I remember arriving at 60 Park Lane and pulling into this garage.
“It was like alarm bells going off in my head because suddenly I was trapped.”
The former student claimed Fayed tried to have sex with her, but she declined and managed to leave unharmed.
However, he gave her £300 in cash with his number and allegedly told her “call me when you get randy”.
When the teenager told the ‘fixer’ about her nightmare ordeal, the woman is claimed to have said “it’s not that bad, it won’t take that long and after he will give you whatever you want”.
Another source claimed the woman had made a name for herself taking Harrods staff to Fayed’s properties in exchange for gifts and money.