Mohamed Al Fayed ‘listened to super posh Ritz hotel to blackmail me – after he offered to send women to my room’

MOHAMED Al Fayed is said to have bugged rooms at the Ritz hotel in Paris, which he owned, in the hope of blackmailing anyone who spoke out against him.

The “vulgar” Harrods magnate first tried to find “something incriminating” in visitors before offering to send women to meet male guests, author Hugo Vickers told The Sun.

Mohamed Al-Fayed, pictured here outside the Paris Ritz in 2016, is said to have bugged the roomsSource: Getty

Author Hugo Vickers said conversations with his wife were overheard in their Ritz roomSource: AFP

Author Hugo Vickers spoke exclusively to The Sun about his experience with FayedCredit: Alamy

Fayed, pictured here with Princess Diana in 1996, a year before she died next to his son DodiSource: Getty

Hugo remembers staying in a posh five-star hotel with his wife in the 1990s while writing a book about the estate Fayed rented.

He admitted that every conversation he had with his wife was immediately followed by a call on the room phone offering help.

Hugo said: “My wife and I stayed at the Ritz in Paris, which he owned. We were put up there for one night.

“At one point she said, ‘Oh, I think they have a pool. I’d really like to go swimming.’

“At that moment the phone 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 left, they said something about a car that was supposed to take us to the station.

“But we said, ‘Come on, let’s just get a taxi.’ Then ring ring, ‘There’s a car waiting for you downstairs.’

“So it was clear that the rooms were bugged. It’s not a pleasant atmosphere.

“When they bug a room or something, they’re actually trying to find out something incriminating about the person in the room.”

Some time later, Fayed asked Hugo to write a book about the Ritz itself, offering a girl in exchange for his words.

Mohamed Al Fayed accused of raping five women, including a teenager, with one of them saying he ordered her to wash with Dettol after the attack

Hugo added: “He also once asked me to write a book about the Paris Ritz.

“And he said to me ‘You’re coming, you’re staying at the hotel. Do you want to, girl? Ask the doorman and he’ll arrange it’.

“That’s the kind of thing he did, that’s the way he thought. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do the book.”

Fayed was renting Windsor House in Paris when Hugo first met him.

He said the ‘slippery eel’ guarded his property with armed security and caged dogs, in an attempt to frighten the girls brought to him.

Groomsman Mohamed Fayed Reveals How Sex Predator Made Teenage Girls Run Past Him

By Stephen Moyes

A farmhand who worked for Mohamed Fayed told how the sex offender would have teenage workers trot past on his horses so he could watch them.

The woman – then just 15 in 1987 – was one of a team hired to deal with nagging comments from the Harrods boss. She said he got a kick out of humiliating staff and making them fear for their jobs.

She revealed that he had tried to persuade her to visit him in London, and that she had to invent a boyfriend to fend off his advances.

She recounted the time she worked for him: “He was so creepy. He would sit in a tent on his lawn and bark at us to jog past him with his horses so he could see our young bodies bobbing up and down.
“He’d like to see us in our Harrods tops and jodhpurs.”

The woman said the Egyptian billionaire, who died last year at the age of 94, went around his Barrow Green estate in Surrey offering money to girls he liked.

She said: “People were afraid of losing their jobs and upsetting him – and he got satisfaction from that.

“The workers were on tenterhooks, but he feared no repercussions and was the god of his domain.”

The woman said some girls who were lured to London with the promise of success and money to work for him later became victims themselves.

Of her own predicament, she said: ‘He knew how young I was, but he still asked me to come to London and visit him when he didn’t have his family around.

“I pretended to have a boyfriend to get out of it.”

The woman continued: “His security, all ex-military police, knew exactly what he was like, but we were just told to go along with his behaviour and do what he said. He was sick and wasn’t afraid of comebacks.”

Hugo added: “At Windsor House, the house in the Bois de Boulogne, they had very aggressive dogs in cages and there were security guards, all very cheerful types.

“But you knew that if you gave instructions, the cages would open and you would be torn to pieces.

“There was no pleasant atmosphere, so I’m not at all surprised that those girls were terrified of him.

“As a writer, there was no one who cared about me, but if they suddenly decided they didn’t want me to leave, I wouldn’t have been able to get out.

“There were men with guns, there were gates that were locked, and there were dogs in cages.

“It’s that atmosphere that can be very scary.

“I mean, he was very vulgar in his approach to a lot of things. I’m very surprised, because I’ve always heard all these stories, I’m surprised that he wasn’t held accountable during his lifetime.

“I can only think that the reason for that is that he was such a litigious and slippery type that people didn’t want to take him on.

“Because that’s just the kind of person he was.”

The Egyptian billionaire also had the basement of his department store packed with TVs so that “everything that happened” was monitored, Hugo said.

It comes after more than 150 women courageously came forward to tell how Fayed sexually abused them since the BBC2 documentary Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods exposed him as a serial rapist.

Bruce Drummond, lawyer for some of the compensation claims against Harrods, said: “This is the worst case of corporate sexual exploitation of young women that I have ever seen, and I think the world has probably ever seen.”

The Public Prosecution Service has confirmed that it failed to charge Fayed on two occasions.

The first time was in 2009, when Prime Minister 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 satisfied that there is a realistic prospect of a conviction. In each case, our prosecutors carefully considered the evidence and concluded that this was not the case.”

Harrods admitted it had settled a number of claims over the past 18 months.

Paris Ritz has been contacted for comment.

Fayed had a ‘fixer’ who went looking for young victims for him

BY Summer Raemason

FAYED had a ‘fixer’ who would find young victims for the predator, it is alleged.

She is described as a blonde woman wearing designer clothes and driving a Porsche.

It is believed the woman worked as a senior manager at Harrods at the time.

She hung around wealthy areas of London, luring young women for drinks in expensive establishments, then making dark promises to help them find work.

The woman reportedly took them to Fayed’s penthouse, as if handing them to him on a silver platter.

A student, then 19 years old, 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 had such an age gap.

“Then she got up and said she wanted to see him, so we drove through Knightsbridge. I remember arriving at 60 Park Lane and pulling into this garage.

“Alarm bells started ringing in my head because I was suddenly stuck.”

The former student claimed that Fayed wanted to have sex with her, but she refused and escaped unharmed.

However, he gave her £300 cash along with his phone number and is said to have told her: “Call me if you get horny”.

When the teenager told the ‘fixer’ about her nightmare, the woman allegedly said: “It’s not that bad, it won’t last that long and after that he will give you everything you want.”

Another source claimed the woman had made a name for herself by taking Harrods staff to Fayed’s properties in exchange for gifts and money.