This is the second of a two-part article on the individuals and institutions in the UK that failed survivors of trafficking and abuse linked to Al Fayed time and again.
The targeting of underage girls
In 1998 Al Fayed purchased West Heath School, gaining proximity to vulnerable girls. Recent reporting and ongoing investigations now include allegations connected to that environment. The youngest alleged victim in the Metropolitan Police investigation was 13-years-old.
So how keen were the police to investigate reports of abuse going back years, of both underage girls and trafficked women? Not very, it appears.
Police obstruction
Harrods security staff, including Bob Loftus, former head of security at Harrods, have described police officers intervening after complaints were made – not to protect the women making complaints, but to silence them.
A former Fayed security officer reported that police tipped off Harrods when women attempted to report abuse: “A woman went to the police, and Mac [Fayed security chief John MacNamara] got a call to say she was there, and he was outside the nick before she’d even been released. He had a chat to her and she went back in and dropped the charges against Fayed.”
In 2008, a 15-year-old girl reported that she was sexually assaulted by Mohamed Fayed at Harrods. No further action was taken on the basis of a single inconsistency in her account. Police returned her phone, which had contained critical evidence, in a broken and unusable state. She told the BBC: “Once I received my phone back, it wouldn’t turn on… It was dead… Nothing would work on it.”
In relation to the same allegations, two other female employees – who were also subjected to sexual assaults – were coerced into providing false character witness statements in favour of Fayed. Police took their statements in the presence of Harrods lawyers.
In 2017 and again in 2018, Channel 4 broadcast further allegations of groping, assault and harassment. Multiple women contacted producers and the Metropolitan Police. The force declined to act, citing Al Fayed’s poor health. His son, Omar Fayed, has since claimed his father faked dementia to avoid questioning – at the least, potentially spurious medical evidence was not tested. Some women have alleged that officers failed to inform them of the existence of other allegations, or misled them to believe that women had withdrawn their reports. While investigations were ongoing, the Supreme Court confirmed, in a decision related to the Worboys case, that police have a duty to identify patterns of serious sexual offending.
Between 2005 and 2023, 21 women reported allegations of abuse, rape and trafficking to the Metropolitan Police. Two cases were referred to the CPS for charging decisions; police sought advice on three other cases. No charges were made. Keir Starmer, who led the CPS between 2008 and 2013, has said the allegations “never crossed his desk”. His replacement Alison Saunders, who led the CPS when women came forward in 2017 and 2018, has not explained why a prosecution did not ensue.
This is not simply a failure to investigate. It is a safeguarding institution functioning as a de facto instrument of a trafficking network.
Harrods knew nothing
In September 2024, Harrods MD Michael Ward told press: “I was not aware of [Al Fayed’s] criminality and abuse. While it is true that rumours of his behaviour circulated in the public domain, no charges or allegations were ever put to me by the police, the CPS, internal channels or others.”
Managing director of Harrods since 2005, Ward joined a company that was engaged in protracted litigation to block former Directors’ testimony about internal employment practices (though unrelated to allegations of sexual misconduct) including the “Chairman’s Ladies” – now known to have been the front for trafficking operations – and whose owner was interviewed under caution in 2008 over the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl. Harrods used litigation to suppress Al Fayed’s name in reports and was reportedly subject to unusually high rates of wrongful dismissal suits.
Between 2005 and 2010, at least three payments were made to women who had complained about Al Fayed’s conduct, including a six-figure sum routed through the Harrods payroll. Given Michael Ward’s role as MD, he should have been scrutinising the company accounts closely – was he really unaware of this payment?
In 2017 and again in 2018 Harrods was reportedly given a right to respond prior to a Channel 4 broadcast detailing survivor testimony.
Mounting internal costs, escalating legal exposure, and its corrosive impacts on morale and productivity would surely have seeped into Harrods’ core operations. Ward told the Evening Standard that “I had a cup of tea with [Al Fayed] every night and told him what we were doing.”
When Harrods was sold to the Qatari Sovereign Wealth fund in 2010, legal advisers conducted acquisition due diligence on a company that had compelled hundreds of young women to sign NDAs and undergo sexual health testing and was subject to a pattern of abuse allegations and police scrutiny – and approved the sale.
As David Hooper, Vanity Fair’s defence lawyer in its libel suit brought by Fayed, stated: “The Qataris would not have had to look far to find this out.”
The government that shrugs its shoulders
To date, four individuals have been interviewed by the Met Police under caution for offences including human trafficking and facilitating rape. The Met expanded its investigatory strategy to include trafficking (as one offence under investigation within the enquiry) nearly 18 months after beginning its investigation, following pressure from survivors, and in spite of widespread recognition of trafficking flags by legal and policing experts and investigators in France.
A trafficking investigation examines all perpetrators and the whole network, not just one individual within it. It asks why medical professionals were conducting invasive examinations on employees. It asks about the other London-based doctors – still alive, still unnamed – who treated women and girls following abuse. It asks about the lawyers who drafted coercive NDAs, and the systems that kept women silent.
NOA has written to the Prime Minister asking for an independent assessment of the scope of the investigation. If the investigation remains as narrow as it is, Britain will produce an account of what one dead man did – and nothing more. The institutions and individuals who participated and enabled him will remain untouched.
Al Fayed is dead. The machine that protected him is not. Britain must now decide whether that matters.
The authors are survivors of the trafficking and abuse linked to Mohamed Al Fayed and Harrods, writing through No One Above (NOA) – a collective calling for full accountability: criminal, civil, and institutional.
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