Mohamed Al-Fayed was born in Alexandria and was the son of a schoolteacher.
Mohamed Al-Fayed was an outspoken and profitable Egyptian enterprise tycoon. His dying comes nearly 26 years to the day after the automobile crash in Paris that killed his eldest son, Dodi, and Diana, Princess of Wales, on August 31, 1997.
Listed here are 5 factors on the self-made billionaire:
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Removed from being the scion of a dynasty of cotton and delivery barons he made himself out to be, Fayed was the son of a poor Alexandrian schoolteacher who, after an early enterprise flogging lemonade, set out in enterprise promoting stitching machines.
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He later had the nice fortune to start out working for the arms seller Adnan Khashoggi, who recognised his enterprise talents and employed him in his furnishings export enterprise in Saudi Arabia. He turned an advisor to the Sultan of Brunei within the mid-Sixties and moved to Britain within the Seventies.
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Fayed lived most of his life in Britain, the place for many years he was by no means removed from the headlines. However to his frustration, he was by no means granted UK citizenship or admitted into the higher echelons of British society.
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The defining tragedy of Fayed’s life got here in August 1997, when Dodi and Princess Diana died when a automobile pushed by one in every of Fayed’s staff, chauffeur Henri Paul, crashed in a Paris street tunnel. For years afterwards, Fayed refused to simply accept that the deaths have been the results of rushing and intoxication by Paul, who additionally died. The distraught Fayed accused the royal household of being behind the deaths and commissioned two memorials to the couple at Harrods.
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In keeping with Forbes listing of the world’s billionaires, Fayed was value $1.9 billion in November 2022. With a enterprise empire encompassing delivery, property, banking, oil, retail, and building, Fayed was additionally a philanthropist whose basis helped kids within the UK, Thailand, and Mongolia.