Bribes to bent coppers, secret recordings and even threats with a gun. How corrupt ex-police chief stored his intercourse abuser boss Al Fayed out of the dock

In 1995, libel lawyer David Hooper was hired by magazine publisher Conde Naste to defend it against a lawsuit brought by Mohamed Al-Fayed. The Harrods boss had taken exception to a Vanity Fair article that exposed his repugnant and highly sexualised behaviour towards his female staff. For David, it was the beginning of a decades-long pursuit of Fayed and the complex web of criminality around him… 

In my investigations into Mohamed Al-Fayed’s wrongdoings as owner of Harrods, the extent soon emerged to which John Macnamara, his overall director of security, had established corrupt or improper links with the police. 

A former deputy head of Scotland Yard’s fraud squad, it seemed he had no difficulty getting employees at the upmarket store arrested on trumped-up allegations of theft if they were troublesome or uncooperative. 

His links were particularly close with West End Central and Chelsea police stations. He once boasted that it was ‘amazing what they would do for a few readies’.

A detective constable typically received £100 for each assignment, a handsome backhander back in the 1990s, though Macnamara was heard to complain that one officer was ‘getting greedy’ and visiting the store too often for items like free suits.

Harrods food hampers to the value of £120 (£290 in today’s money) were liberally distributed to the lower ranks, while senior officers such as commanders received the £300 (£725) hamper.

Sometimes they were auctioned for police charities but by no means always. Macnamara would also tie in accommodating officers with the perk of well-paid security jobs at Harrods and other Fayed companies when they retired, often at an early age and on top of their police pensions.

Such links came in handy in June 1993 when Salah Fayed, Mohamed’s drug-using younger brother, left his shoulder bag in a taxi when being driven from Aberdeen airport to the family’s Scottish estate, Balnagown Castle.

The driver was a special constable and handed it in to Elgin police, who found £4,000 inside, in sterling, dollars and Swiss francs, plus Salah’s passport. It also contained crack cocaine, a home-made pipe and white tablets.

Macnamara’s young assistant Rachel Crowe, a Harrods executive trainee, was persuaded to tell police the cocaine was hers and she was charged, though it soon became obvious to police that she had no idea how to use the pipe and was most likely innocent.

When the matter was raised with Macnamara by Bob Loftus, one of his senior security colleagues, Macnamara hinted that he would sort it out and a few days later, in the area just outside Fayed’s fifth floor office at Harrods, he introduced Loftus to Sir David McNee, a former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Glasgow-born McNee, who had recommended Macnamara to Fayed as head of security, was now supplementing his police pension with consultancy work for Fayed, apparently screening employees for Balnagown Castle.

A few weeks after meeting McNee, Loftus was phoned by the detective in charge of the case in Elgin, who told him he had been instructed by the Procurator Fiscal’s office that no further action would be taken against Ms Crowe. Macnamara told Loftus that McNee had intervened.

He also told Loftus that Ms Crowe had been seen with a black eye – inflicted by Salah Fayed – but she had been paid to keep quiet.

Macnamara’s contacts with the police enabled Fayed to intimidate dissenting employees and to secure their silence.

Macnamara would arrange for people to be beaten up, Loftus told us, recalling a time when Macnamara was informed by police that, no, they had not found a billy club in the car of one of his henchmen, so no charges were brought. It was even reported in September last year that Macnamara used a gun to intimidate female employees.

Another weapon at his disposal was surveillance, as Sandra Lewis-Glass found out.

She held a responsible position at Hyde Park Residence, a Fayed company that generated £4million annually from renting out 170 luxury flats in Park Lane, the profits from which were funnelled to another company in Liechtenstein. 

(Fayed’s businesses operated through a network of companies, many registered in low-tax and offshore jurisdictions; Harrods under Fayed was engaged in tax evasion, money laundering, bribery and corruption.)

When Westminster Council raised a levy of £1.1million for underpaid rates on the basis that these were short tenancies rather than long leases, Ms Lewis-Glass was ordered to alter letting documents to deceive the council into believing they were long leases, enabling the lower rate to be paid.

When she refused, she was not only sacked but Macnamara sent a surveillance team to record her anxiously discussing the problem with two of her colleagues in a Bayswater restaurant.

Shortly afterwards, four officers from West End Central arrived at her Surrey home and arrested her for the alleged theft of two computer floppy discs worth 80p.

She was locked in a cell at West End Central for seven hours before being released without charge. She later received a £13,500 pay-off from Fayed.

Something similar happened to Hermina da Silva, a nanny at Fayed’s home in Oxted, Surrey. He persistently molested her and propositioned her for sex and when she complained to a Harrods manager, she was dismissed.

Macnamara told Loftus, ‘She’s going to get nicked’ and she too was arrested and detained at West End Central, falsely accused of stealing property from Salah Fayed’s flat in Park Lane, where she had previously worked. She too was not charged and later had £12,000 compensation from Fayed.

Fayed and Macnamara shamelessly used tactics like these against all their opponents, however senior in the organisation.

Christoph Bettermann had been deputy chairman of Harrods and chairman of Harrods Estates. He was also president of International Marine Services Inc, a Fayed-owned maritime services company in Dubai where he had converted a $20million loss into a $15million profit. 

Despite this, when Bettermann resigned from Harrods in 1991, Fayed, who looked on anyone walking out on him as a personal betrayal, was utterly vindictive.

Before he left, Bettermann shared with Fayed his happy news that he was going to marry Francesca Armitage, a solicitor in the legal department at Harrods.

Fayed’s response was to disparage her in crude terms to Bettermann, then offer to show him medical reports of two invasive and unjustifiable gynaecological examinations, including for AIDS, he had insisted she submit to when she was recruited. He’d propositioned her for sex when she accompanied him on a trip to Paris.

He then banned any Harrods employees from attending the couple’s wedding, threatening dismissal to anyone who did. A security manager was sent to stand outside and photograph guests to see if anyone disobeyed the order.

Even more harmful, though, was when Macnamara cooked up allegations that Bettermann had embezzled $900,000 during the salvage of an oil tanker damaged in the Gulf War and that he had over-calculated his annual bonus.

Fayed sent a letter setting out these false accusations to the ruler of the emirate of Sharjah in the Gulf, and International Marine Services brought civil and criminal proceedings against Bettermann in Dubai. His passport was impounded and he had to lodge financial guarantees to secure bail.

Between February 1992 and December 1994 he was summoned 25 times to court, where he was detained in a caged dock. Eventually the charges were dismissed and Bettermann received £160,000 for wrongful dismissal and £127,000 for his legal costs. He sued Fayed for libel in England over the false accusations made to the ruler of Sharjah, which Fayed’s solicitors aggressively defended.

As usually happened, Fayed’s defence was eventually abandoned and he had to pay £125,000 libel damages plus £287,500 costs. The case probably cost him well over £1million in all, just to satisfy his need for vengeance.

Similar tactics were employed against Graham Jones, financial director of several Fayed companies from October 1987 to January 1990. After he resigned, Fayed suspected him, wrongly, of fraud. He then discovered that Jones had given evidence to the Bank of England about alleged irregularities at Harrods Bank. He sought revenge.

As Jones’s plane sat on the tarmac at Heathrow, en route to his family in Sydney, four police officers boarded the Qantas jet and arrested him for fraud. Macnamara had falsely claimed that Jones was fleeing the country.

After being interviewed at Guildford police station, with Macnamara in an adjoining room, Jones was released and free to take a later flight to Australia. The Press, however, were briefed by Harrods and carried dramatic accounts of his arrest. 

When Jones was later appointed finance director at, of all places, Qantas, articles appeared in newspapers in Australia and England from sources close to Fayed claiming he faced a fraud probe.

After intensive investigations, Qantas exonerated him.

Another very senior Fayed executive Peter Bolliger was managing director of Harrods for three years. After he resigned in April 1994 Fayed told him he was fired and he was to leave the house Harrods provided for him immediately. The house was put under surveillance and Bolliger and his family pictured as they came and went.

Initially he was falsely accused of dishonesty over his phone bill. Then he was accused of involvement in a £2million fraud and D J Freeman, Harrods solicitors –seemingly unperturbed at the frequency with which Harrods employees great and small were accused of dishonesty but subsequently paid compensation when allegations proved groundless – aggressively obtained a £400,000 freezing order on Bolliger’s assets.

Michael Cole, director of communications at Harrods and Fayed’s well-paid mouthpiece – estimates of his salary ranged up to £1million – briefed that Bolliger had been fired for incompetence, dishonesty and dereliction of duty. Loftus was asked by Macnamara to lodge a complaint against Bolliger with a senior CID officer at Chelsea police station.

To no one’s surprise, proceedings against Bolliger were dropped, the freezing injunction was lifted and his furniture, which had been impounded at the Harrods depository, was released. Bolliger recovered damages of £50,000. Police declined to pursue the complaint.

Similar unsubstantiated allegations had been made in 1995 against Gerhard Eggert when he resigned as director of information services at Harrods. He too was falsely accused of the theft of commercially sensitive information, but police took no action.

Another employee to feel the menace of Fayed and his henchmen was the security executive Bob Loftus. It was only thanks to him courageously agreeing to give evidence for Vanity Fair that we were able to expose the full extent of Fayed’s criminality.

When Fayed got wind of his willingness to cooperate with us, he threatened: ‘If Loftus starts throwing pebbles at me, I will throw dynamite back at him.’ Macnamara got to work on Loftus in characteristically ruthless manner, not only dismissing him but concocting a litany of false allegations, including sexual harassment, perjury and drug offences.

To shut him up he was offered a £90,000 compensation deal, plus the promise of a good reference for his next job as director of security at Harvey Nichols, provided he did not give evidence for Vanity Fair. But Loftus refused to be muzzled, at personal cost.

What he received after substantial litigation was only £39,000 compensation and the reference he was given made false allegations of dishonesty against him, which caused Harvey Nichols to withdraw their earlier offer of employment.

It was from Loftus that we obtained evidence of the widespread bugging of phones. Anyone thought to be of interest in the paranoid atmosphere that then prevailed at Harrods would be recorded, including managing or finance directors, managers, concessionaires at Harrods, secretaries, chauffeurs, engineers and bodyguards.

An engineer, operating on the orders of Macnamara, would bug phones of employees and, when they lived in one of the numerous Harrods or Park Lane flats, their homes as well. In our defence in the Vanity Fair libel action, we named 49 individuals in various Harrods departments who we discovered had been bugged.

Loftus and his deputy were ordered to transcribe the parts of the bugged conversations that might interest Fayed. If couples in the Harrods flats were unwise enough to discuss their love lives, Loftus was required to rewind the tape to the relevant section so that Fayed could listen to any salacious details. 

He was, apparently, particularly delighted when threesomes were discussed by the unsuspecting tenants.

Phone bills would be printed out to see who had been called. Those chatting on their private phones about former Harrods employees or phoning them could find themselves accused of disloyalty and face the sack.

In offices, recording briefcases were used to surreptitiously record meetings, with Fayed particularly keen to listen in to communications between Usdaw union officials and their lawyers.

He disliked unions in general and Usdaw in particular, as many of the officials were black and championed the rights of black and Asian employees.

Another employee was deputed to access the Police National Computer to get details of criminal records, vehicle registration numbers and bank account details. To defeat the audit trail used to detect unauthorised accessing of the police computer a string of inquiry agents would be used to make the source of the inquiry more difficult to discover.

From Loftus we also learned how the safety deposit box of business tycoon Tiny Rowland at Harrods Bank had been broken into, an incident that exemplified the arrogant disregard for the law Fayed displayed. 

In 1995, when Harrods got its banking licence from the Bank of England, Rowland was secretly filmed by Fayed’s security cameras opening his safety deposit box in the much vaunted ‘citadel of security’ in the department store basement.

This was reported to Fayed, who’d had a long, bitter rivalry with Rowland after the two of them battled for the ownership of Harrods and Fayed won, by cheating according to Rowland.

Fayed ordered Macnamara to break into the box and remove its contents – later revealed to be £1.4million of emeralds, rubies and other gemstones. Macnamara deputed the task to Loftus, who protested, ‘There’s loyalty, blind loyalty and downright stupidity.’ 

Fayed overruled his objections, ordering him: ‘You know he has a box here. Go and find it.’ Harrods’ locksmith was called in and paid £200 in £50 notes for the break-in. The safety deposit box was removed and taken up to Fayed’s office.

After a complaint to police, five Fayed executives were interviewed by Scotland Yard’s Organised Crime Group – Macnamara; Mark Griffiths, Fayed’s private secretary; John Allen, senior security manager at Harrods; Colin Dalman, manager of the safe depository; and Paul Handley-Greaves, Fayed’s head of personal security. Along with Fayed, they attended the police station voluntarily and were released without charge after a few hours.

Later Fayed and his confederates sued police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment but the judge threw out the claim saying they attended the police station voluntarily, Fayed’s interview lasted only 43 minutes and police had reasonable cause to detain them.

Once again, Fayed appealed a decision he did not like but Lord Justice Auld in Appeal Court was forthright in dismissing it. The whole litigation, he ruled, had been ‘disproportionate and a disgraceful waste of public and private resources. The claims had no merit in law or on the facts’.

Fayed also lost another case when Rowland sued for the value of the items that had gone missing from his deposit box. Fayed’s legal director dismissed the allegations of theft as ‘malicious, vindictive and wholly without foundation’, but after nine days of a fiercely contested trial, Fayed was advised that he was bound to lose.

His cause was not helped when, in the trial, it emerged that in an unrelated incident a safety deposit box belonging to a Swiss woman, Mrs Schwarzschild, had been broken into and rifled through. 

The reaction of the trial judge to all the cameras and methods of surveillance at Harrods when all at court traipsed off to Knightsbridge to inspect the security arrangements may also have encouraged Fayed to settle.

He agreed to reimburse the estate of the by then deceased Rowland for the contents of the safety deposit box valued at £1.65million and to pay legal costs of £1million as well as his own legal bills, which were likely to have been significantly north of £1million.

With his characteristic contempt for truth and the law, Fayed then sought to put the blame on Loftus, despite the clear evidence as to how the safety depository had been entered and Rowland’s broken-into box taken up to Fayed’s office.

Fayed sought an indemnity against Loftus, whom I successfully represented at trial. Loftus was awarded costs against Fayed. Even then, Fayed continued to blame Loftus, who had to sue for libel, recovering generous damages a year later.

But despite this settlement, Fayed was unrelenting in pursuing Loftus, especially after he discovered that Loftus had been helping Tory MP Neil Hamilton in a libel action against him.

Six police turned up early one morning on Loftus’s doorstep alleging theft of a tape containing a recording of Fayed worth no more than a couple of pounds.

His house was searched and in true Harrods fashion the Press including his local paper was briefed about Loftus’s arrest. Needless to say, no charges were ever brought against Loftus.

Adapted from Buying Silence, by David Hooper, to be published by Biteback, at £11.99 on March 11. ©David Hooper 2025. To order a copy for £10.79 (offer valid to 22/02/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.