Harrods Hasn’t Fully Reckoned With Former Owner’s Abuse, Victims Say

Customers passing through Harrods can’t avoid former owner Mohamed Al Fayed. His likeness features on multiple carved Pharaonic heads overlooking the Egyptian-themed escalator hall he commissioned that’s the centerpiece of the luxury landmark.

They’re a reminder of the late billionaire, whose serial sexual abuse of women is a grim legacy the outlet is yet to shake off.

This month was meant to see one of London’s most famous stores start to close the darkest chapter in its long history. Its own investigation — using law firm Linklaters and a barrister — into whether staff knew about Fayed’s behavior is concluding. A compensation scheme that so far has seen more than 200 people come forward closes to new applications on March 31.

But a separate negotiation with hundreds of women represented by a law firm has no fixed date for conclusion. The Metropolitan Police is investigating whether anyone should be held responsible for helping Fayed. In an update Friday it revealed that three women were interviewed under caution, questioned on suspicion of several offences including aiding and abetting rape and sexual assault.

Meanwhile, a new campaign group — Justice For Fayed and Harrods Survivors — containing women the businessman mistreated, as well as lawyers and MPs is expected to launch shortly. It will call for more accountability, including potentially a public inquiry, into how the retailer and institutions like the police and doctors failed to check Fayed’s conduct.

In a statement to Bloomberg, Harrods said that Fayed, who died in 2023 at the age of 94, “presided over a toxic culture of secrecy, intimidation and abuse.” The store now is “unrecognisable from the business owned and controlled by Fayed.”

Harrods has said it would take action if it found anything problematic in its internal investigation. That process is confidential and Harrods has not made any commitments to publish the findings.

Victims say Harrods spent years trying to ignore the matter and is not doing enough.

To “still see no movement or accountability, whether from Harrods or the police, was terribly disappointing,” said Cheska Hill-Wood, who worked at the shop as a 19-year-old in the 1990s and was the first person to say publicly in a 2017 documentary that Fayed sexually harassed her.

“The reason I decided to speak on the record about Fayed’s abuse was to prompt action, to produce some form of accountability after years of people either looking the other way or suppressing knowledge of his behaviour and actions,” Hill-Wood said in an interview with Bloomberg last month.

Nearly ten years later, the world has changed in some ways: reparative action has been taken over several historical sexual abuse cases while the recent release of pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein’s emails has led to fallout across the business and political world. A 2024 BBC documentary laid bare Fayed’s misdeeds and prompted changes at his former firm.

Still, among Fayed’s hundreds of victims, frustration and suspicion about Harrods runs deep.

“They are saying they feel terribly sorry for us all and that they will do anything they can,” said Jen Mills, who said Fayed tried to rape her several times while working as an assistant for him between 1986 and 1991. “But privately, that isn’t the case. There is a difference between what they are saying publicly and doing.”Before a change of approach toward Fayed’s victims during 2023, Harrods spent years rejecting women’s claims, according to legal letters seen by Bloomberg. There were at least three payments made to women who had complained about Fayed’s actions while he owned the firm, according to documents and interviews.

Qatari Ownership

The current owner of Harrods, the Qatar Investment Authority, has not made a public comment on the behaviour of Fayed. The businessman, who held the role of chairman, sold his trophy asset in 2010 for £1.5 billion ($2 billion), after more than two decades running the luxury emporium.

Since the deal, the retailer has continued to draw wealthy shoppers from around the world, though the pandemic exerted huge pressure on the luxury sector and Harrods lost money in the year ending Feb. 1, 2025, Harrods accounts show. Its valuation could be about £1 billion, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Charles Allen, based on the real estate, its sales and the retail environment.

The accounts, filed in October, show a £62.3 million provision for “employee welfare redress and related expenses on historic allegations.”

The business is seeking to share the compensation cost with Fayed’s family. It launched a legal action in the High Court in June last year, with the aim of installing an independent administrator to his estate to replace family members.

Harrods has said this step would help those who did not work at the retailer claim compensation - while also helping it to recoup the cost of redress. A key factor in the litigation is what due diligence was done as part of the 2010 deal.

By that point, there was a series of books and articles written about Fayed’s behaviour. There had also been several payments and non-disclosure agreements between Harrods and women who had complained of incidents including serious sexual assault, according to documents seen by Bloomberg.

A 15-year-old girl had gone to the police in 2008 to complain about a sexual assault by Fayed, which the media reported at the time. The Crown Prosecution Service decided to take no action and Fayed denied it.

One of the earliest public airings of Fayed’s misconduct was by Vanity Fair in 1995. Fayed sued the magazine and the dispute was settled in 1997. There was also an ITV documentary that was critical of Fayed in the 1990s and Tom Bower, a writer, published a biography outlining allegations of misconduct by Fayed.

At the time of the deal, the QIA conducted due diligence with the assistance of several external advisers including UK law firms and the process did not identify allegations of serious misconduct related to Harrods, according to a person familiar with the matter. The QIA’s advisers on the deal included Credit Suisse and law firm Latham Watkins. A spokesperson for UBS, which now owns Credit Suisse, declined to comment while a request for comment to Latham Watkins wasn’t answered.

According to David Hooper, a lawyer who defended Vanity Fair in the libel action, the picture should have been clear to Harrods’ acquirer and its advisers.

“The Qataris would not have had to look far to find this out,” Hooper said. “They either shut their eyes and held their noses or else they took a calculated risk that no one would ever go after Fayed for his crimes.”

The Fayed family was advised by Lazard, which said in a statement that it condemns “the behaviour these reports have brought to light.” Fayed’s law firm Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Longstanding Leaders

Senior figures have stayed on at Harrods through the change of ownership, stoking concern among victims who question how Harrods could overhaul itself without change at the top.

Michael Ward was hired by Fayed as managing director in 2006 and is still in the role today. He recalled in an interview in 2017 with London’s Evening Standard that it had been important to win Fayed’s trust.

“You had a great relationship with him once you earned that because he wasn’t on top of you all the time. I had a cup of tea with him every night and told him what we were doing,” Ward told the Standard.

Ward expressed “personal horror” in a statement in September 2024. He was responding to a documentary aired by the BBC, in which 20 women shared their stories over a 30-year period, many speaking publicly for the first time and some revealing Fayed had raped them.

“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,” Ward said. “Had they been, I would of course have acted immediately.”

According to documents seen by Bloomberg, at least three women received payments and signed NDAs with Harrods between 2006 and 2010 including a six-figure payment through Harrods’ payroll in June 2009 to Gemma, then 24, who was a personal assistant for Fayed from 2008 to 2009 and who asked to be identified only by her first name.

Ward was “forensic about numbers,” according to former executive Christopher Kitley, who held a senior role in the women’s wear division at Harrods. “Given how obsessed with figures he was, it is very hard to imagine he did not know about the compromise agreements, and importantly the reasons for them.”

In 2008, Kitley raised a serious concern with colleagues about a young woman he believed was being exploited by Fayed. Soon after, he was given a poor performance review and left with a pay-out.

Ward’s position is also questioned by Keaton Stone, whose own six-year investigation into Fayed led to the 2024 BBC documentary. Stone began researching after discovering that his wife, Sophia, had been attacked multiple times when she worked as Fayed’s assistant between 1988 and 1991. He’s continued to build a network of people who knew about Fayed’s behavior and gather documentary evidence in the years since.

“The buck is famously supposed to stop somewhere,’’ Stone said. “I suppose we now know that somewhere isn’t Michael Ward’s desk.”

Legal Letters

Another longstanding Harrods staffer is Dan Webster, who joined as a lawyer in 2004, working his way up to general counsel in 2013.

Webster responded to a letter sent to Harrods in 2018 by the woman who had made the police complaint against Fayed a decade earlier. In his 2019 response, Webster rejected her claim for compensation citing various reasons, including that Fayed by that point suffered from dementia, according to correspondence seen by Bloomberg.

Also in 2019, Sophia Stone submitted a 33-page account of what had happened to her alongside a legal letter that said she had been been “the victim of a number of instances of attempted rape and sexual assault” by Fayed. Harrods, via its law firm Simkins, rejected her claim, according to correspondence seen by Bloomberg.

“Harrods told me over and over that they did not believe me and made clear if I ever dared take things further they would make sure they saw me in court, where they would obviously be able to ensure I wouldn’t be able to afford to pursue it,” Stone said in an interview last month.

As well as rejecting her claims, Harrods refused Stone’s request to receive a psychological assessment by a female trauma specialist. Cheska Hill-Wood also made a claim in April 2023, which was initially rejected, a legal letter shows.

A spokesperson for Harrods declined to comment on behalf of Ward and Webster.

Human Resources

Sarah Andrews was hired by Fayed as retail director in 2003 and also made head of human resources from 2007. Andrews told an episode of the business’s podcast series, True Tales from Harrods, that she also acted as the “liaison with the shareholder.”

Andrews left Harrods in June last year, her lawyers told Bloomberg. A lawyer for Andrews said she strongly denied knowing anything about Fayed’s behaviour and that she was not responsible for recruiting women to work for him.

Three people who have spoken to Bloomberg believe Andrews knew about Fayed’s misconduct.

In 2009, Gemma compiled detailed allegations of Fayed’s multiple sexual assaults, which included descriptions of lewd language, repeated sexual touching and exposing his penis, according to a document, seen by Bloomberg. Some of the details were taken directly from the transcript of recordings she had secretly made of Fayed.

She says she asked her lawyer to send this document to two senior figures in human resources, including Andrews. Gemma also recalled having a conversation with Andrews when she moved from working as an assistant to the head of Harrods’ homewares department to being Fayed’s assistant in 2008.

Claire, another woman, recalled that in 2008, Andrews asked her to go to work for Fayed in his office, after he had spotted her on the shop floor. Andrews told Claire not to say anything about the request, Claire recalled. She says she was then assaulted, made a complaint to the business and was eased out.

A third woman, who asked not to be named to protect her identity, said she remembers Andrews being present in a meeting in about 2009 when she discussed being mistreated by Fayed. The woman was asked to sign an NDA and leave the business, she said.

Gemma, Claire and the other woman have said they were employed directly by Harrods.

According to Kitley, Harrods was an “an extremely detailed, cost-center-driven business. People in the chairman’s office were still on payroll somewhere, and that would not have bypassed HR.”

The Shift

It took until 2023 for Harrods to change its position from rejecting claims to offering settlements. Since then, “it has been our priority to ensure survivors receive compensation in a trauma informed way,” Harrods said.

That year, “new information” came to light, the business said. That led to Harrods “actively reengaging” with women who had come forward before with complaints.

Harrods has in recent years overhauled its processes, introducing a sexual harassment policy in 2023 and bringing in 90 sexual harassment support officers. It has set up an anonymous helpline and annual training. Since 2024, UK law requires employers to take steps to prevent harassment in the workplace.

Bloomberg has seen legal correspondence for seven women showing Harrods offering settlements in 2023 alone. Harrods wanted to “do the right thing” by its former employees, the letters said. It sympathised “enormously with anyone who has been subjected to inappropriate behavior in the past.”

Those letters argued that complaints would not hold up in court, and also cited a 2022 failed legal case of historic sexual abuse involving Manchester City Football Club, which several of the women saw as a warning to settle or risk getting nothing.

The compensation program that closes this month is being administered by MPL, a Colchester-based law firm. In a recent update, Harrods said more than 60 people have now received payments and that it was engaged with about 200 more.

Yet there are hundreds – some of whom have previously had payments from Harrods that they now believe were unfair – who do not want to use this route and are instead using lawyers to pursue separate claims.

One firm, KP Law, which represents nearly 280 people, has criticised Harrods’ scheme, saying its existing management team is in charge of it. Those people “were part of the senior management team present during the years of abuse,” KP Law partner Kingsley Hayes told Bloomberg in November.

Several women are also unhappy that Harrods has asked them to help with a possible legal case against the Fayed estate, making it a condition of the settlement process that they allow their personal information to be given to the estate, they have told Bloomberg.

Harrods has highlighted the fact that it is paying victims’ reasonable legal costs who use its scheme, while those using their own lawyers will have to pay fees out of any compensation they receive. Some lawyers believe the Harrods program is the best way for women to get access to compensation relatively quickly and easily.

A recurring request from many women is for more transparency and accountability about the past. Lindsay Mason, who says she was attacked when she worked as an assistant for Fayed for several months between 1989 and 1990, said: “They said they were carrying out an investigation into the cancer that was running through that store, so why have they not published the findings to prove no one responsible is still there?”

Gemma believes the Epstein scandal should be instructive for how people are handling the Fayed one: “I hope anyone who is associated with Fayed receives the same pariah status as those who did business with Epstein are now receiving.”

Of the victims, she said: “There are literally hundreds of us.”

By Katherine Griffiths