Predator Mohamed Al-Fayed sponsored a Metropolitan Police car a year after he was publicly accused of raping and sexually assaulting dozens of women, can reveal.
In pictures likely to cause major embarrassment to Scotland Yard, the depraved billionaire grins from behind the wheel of the blue and white marked Rover wearing a police-issue peaked cap.
The driver’s door bears the inscription, ‘This car is sponsored by Harrods’, in the store’s distinctive script.
discovered the long-forgotten photos days after a BBC documentary showed the Egyptian-born businessman and TV star to be a prolific sexual predator who for more than three decades used wealth and status to abuse girls and women on his payroll.
More than 20 told the Corporation how he’d assaulted them, with four saying they’d been raped.
It comes as a former Metropolitan Police officer who was recruited to work as a Harrods security guard reveals the uncomfortably close relationship Fayed had with law enforcement.
Deborah Bull, 64, said: ‘I would say the car would be sat outside Harrods most days and the officers in the vehicle would come into security or the store. I saw them on a couple of occasions having a cup of tea in the security office.
‘If it wasn’t his idea Al-Fayed was certainly on in, his head of security John MacNamara was an ex-Met copper and they would’ve laughed at something like this.’
In a statement during the 1996 publicity stunt, Fayed said he was gifting the vehicle because ‘we all have a stake in making our city a safer and better place’.
Two years before the picture was taken, MacNamara, dubbed ‘Mac the Knife’ – a former Met Superintendant – allegedly had a woman arrested after learning she planned to accuse Fayed of sexual assault at a tribunal.
MacNamara was allegedly at the heart of Al Fayed’s chilling campaign to silence his victims.
He was described by one former Harrods colleague as a ‘nasty piece of work’.
The ex-security guard told the BBC: ‘He would threaten people and use his power as an ex-copper. I know for a fact MacNamara knocked on someone’s door personally and threatened a girl.’
In 1995 – a year before Fayed bought the police a car – Vanity Fair published an article alleging racism, staff surveillance and sexual misconduct by him against Harrods staff.
Deborah told that she first started working at the department store in 1996 after she was headhunted by a security recruitment firm.
She said: ‘I was approached by a recruitment agency called Met Shield, which are ex police officers that recruit that sort of work. They approached me and said: ‘look, we think you’d be amazing for this job’.
‘They wouldn’t tell me what the company was, but they said: ‘look, when you agree to come for an interview, then we’ll tell you where it is’.
‘The money was amazing, and it looked good on paper, from what I could see. So I went for the interview, and obviously I found out it was Harrods security.
‘I got the job the following week, and it happened very, very quickly, which was good in a way, but I was sort of taken aback.’
She described her time working for the Egyptian billionaire as a ‘living hell’ during which she was physically abused by other security staff, ‘99% of which were men’.
Deborah told about the ‘sinister and horrible’ atmosphere at Harrods, recalling one incident where a woman was allegedly ‘indecently assaulted’ by Al-Fayed inside his soundproofed office.
The mother-of-three quit in 1997, the year after joining and re-joined the Met from 2002 to 2009.
She decided to take the company to a tribunal, after seeking advice from lawyers who told her had a claim for sexual harassment and discrimination, following the physical and verbal abuse she received from male colleagues.
It was only years later that she appeared in court for the tribunal hearing, during which, she claimed Al-Fayed and his team had put her under surveillance.
‘During that time, I found out that they’d been following me, taking photographs of me and my daughter, and bugged my house phone.’
She claimed she was also tailed by members of the security team who also took photos of her and her family when they went to the supermarket.
‘So many of us lived in fear and we kept it secret for so long as nobody thought we were telling the truth,’ she said.
‘I have never gone back into Harrods since I left in 1997, I was too terrified to go back there.
‘But thank goodness we are now in a position to be able to talk about it.’