03-05-2025
Al Fayed's son: ‘We treat the planet like my father treated women'
When Omar Fayed ran away to sea, his father was convinced he had been kidnapped.
'I told him exactly where I was going,' said Fayed, 37. 'I just don't think he believed me. And I was completely out of touch in the middle of the ocean.'
His father, the billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed, had been preparing his youngest son to take over Harrods, the flagship of his business empire, but the younger man — 22 at the time — had decided he wanted a different life.
He joined the crew of the Heraclitus, a research vessel built in the 1970s by Californian environmentalists, which had carried out scientific, environmental and anthropological research from the Pacific to the Antarctic, the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
'I
