Word: egyptians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...final explanations, there are the conspiracy theories. The Internet, naturally, is full of them. Everywhere in the Arab world, where Dodi's relationship with Diana had become a source of national pride, there is speculation that a British plot killed the princess to prevent her from marrying an Egyptian. It's more likely that the Windsors may have been thinking that marriage to Dodi, a man routinely described as a foreign playboy, would have been a public-relations blunder for Diana and a badly needed plus for them. For once it would make their tweedy rectitude seem appealing...
...weeks this summer, much in the world seemed right for Mohammed al Fayed. In July, at his villa in St.-Tropez, the Egyptian tycoon personally set in motion a romance between the Princess of Wales and his eldest son Dodi by plucking him off one family yacht to join his father on another one nearby, where Diana was tanning. As the romance blossomed into the possibility of an engagement, al Fayed feigned nonchalance. "Normal people fall in love," he told an interviewer. "That's it." But al Fayed surely exulted inside. His battles with the British establishment--over...
...whose flagship was Harrods). Two years later, the Department of Trade and Industry--at the instigation of al Fayed's chief rival for control of Harrods--began investigating the family. Its report, published in 1990, concluded that the brothers did not hail, as they had claimed, from "an old Egyptian family" with a 100-year history of landownership and shipbuilding. "The image created...of their wealthy Egyptian ancestry was completely bogus," the report said. The government further concluded that the money al Fayed used to purchase Harrods could not have come from an inherited fortune, as he claimed...
...Fayed was not accused of breaking any law, and he and the Sultan denied the charges. Al Fayed bitterly attacked the report as a smear. "They could not accept that an Egyptian could own Harrods, so they threw mud at me," he once said. But acquaintances of his in Alexandria also describe the Fayeds as a modest family: al Fayed's father was a language teacher, and al Fayed grew up on the rougher side of town. He started as a small-time trader there, selling Singer sewing machines and Coca-Cola. In the early 1950s the future Saudi billionaire...
...bought it in 1984, and he has given generously to British charities. "You don't want to work hard for 40 years and have a bunch of crooks and bastards and gun runners insult you," he recently told the New York Times. "They say, 'You own Harrods, you bloody Egyptian coming from Africa. How can you dare buy Harrods?'" Al Fayed got a measure of revenge against the Conservative Party, which he particularly blames for his rejection, when he helped bring down John Major's government by disclosing that Tory Members of Parliament took money from him in paper bags...