FAYED PAID ME NOTHING

Neil Hamilton, writing about it for the first

time, denies there were any money-stuffed brown envelopes — and much else

`WELL DONE, thou good and faithful servant.' So Stewart Steven's fawningly pro-Fayed editorials in the Evening Stan- dard on 4 January and 10 November 1995 (perhaps there were others) have finally paid off. In that fine Salvationist phrase, he's been promoted to glory from the edi- tor's chair at the Standard to be His Mas- ter's Voice at Harrods. But, in Stewart Steven, the mountebank has come to Mohamed.

Cash for editorials, perhaps? Perish the thought. Although, unlike Steven, I never enjoyed or sought the pleasure of having my mouth stuffed with Fayed gold, I also sympathised with Fayed in his battle with Lonrho in the 1980s. Mine was a simple view — I didn't believe that the govern- ment had any public policy interest in the ownership of a grocer's shop in Knights- bridge.

Whatever the procedural deficiencies of DTI inspections, they are the acme of jus- tice compared with trial by media, which I have endured these last two weeks. Of course, Stewart Steven believes I was paid by his boss — it is more than his job is worth to believe otherwise. I agree that the inspection procedures could be fairer, but we don't have to rely solely on the inspectors' conclusion that the Fayeds 'were witnesses on whose word it would be unsafe to rely on any issue of importance, unless their evidence was confirmed by some dependable inde- pendent source'.

A word of caution to Mr Steven. Caveat editor! Remember the fate of Christoph Bettermann, former deputy chairman of Harrods. Bettermann resigned in 1991, after discovering that Fayed had been bug- ging his private telephone calls. He was paid off and sought new employment in the Gulf, where he had previously run a Fayed trading enterprise, International Marine Services (IMS).

Fayed threatened that, if he tried to move back there, he would 'make it very embar- rassing for him and destroy him'. As will be no surprise to Mr Steven, Fayed was as good as his word. He wrote to the Emir of Sharjah, falsely saying, 'I fired Christoph Bettermann from IMS due to his dishonesty and the abuse of his position in running the company by embezzling millions of dollars.'

For good measure, the new proprietor All my life I've worked hard to sing grand opera — and no one ever told me about the groupies.' of Punch showed his impish sense of humour by beginning criminal and civil proceedings in Dubai against Bettermann, who was summoned by the police, arrested, stripped of his passport and told to pro- duce financial guarantees or go to jail.

Over two years, Bettermann had to endure 25 court appearances and suffer the indignity of being locked up each day in a caged dock with common criminals and assorted Arab riff-raff. All the witnesses against Bettermann were Fayed employees.

Throughout all this, Fayed ensured that his false claims were widely reported in libellous articles in the press in the UAE and in England (sounds familiar?). At length, Bettermann was acquitted on the criminal charges and the civil proceedings against him were dismissed. But still Fayed would not give up. He took the case to appeal, still insisting that Bettermann had stolen $900,000 of IMS's money.

The appeals failed and costs were award- ed against Fayed, and he refused to pay or withdraw his false accusations and apolo- gise. So Bettermann began libel proceed- ings iii England, contending that Fayed had fabricated the allegations 'as part of a wicked scheme to exact a cruel revenge upon Bettermann for his resignation from the Fayed group.'

In February 1996, in a statement in open court, Fayed at last had to admit that Bet- termann had not been guilty of any embez- zlement or fraud, and paid him a sum in damages and costs amounting to nearly £1,000,000. In the process, Fayed had to admit implicitly that he clandestinely bugs his senior employees' phones, invented a pack of lies about Bettermann and pursued him relentlessly, using his wealth to wear him down and his position in the Middle East to have him thrown into jail.

Last week, Stewart Steven wrote in The Spectator: 'I have chosen to ally myself with Mr Fayed because I believe him to be the victim of an injustice so great that it is impossible, once one becomes aware of the facts, for a good man to turn aside.'

No doubt, so long as the pharaonic gold continues to clink into the bank account, Steven will continue to apply the telescope to his blind eye as far as Fayed is con- cerned. But I ask him to ponder on Fayed's absurd and untruthful allegations that he paid me colossal sums of money to secure my support in Parliament ten years or so ago.

Again, in the words of the DTI inspec- tors: 'One of the difficulties confronting anyone seeking to test the truth of the Fayeds' account . . . is that the story changes as different parts of it are demol- ished or discredited.'

To begin with, in September 1994, Fayed asked the former Sunday Express editor, Brian Hitchen, to tell John Major that I had been paid £50,000 by Ian Greer for putting down 17 Parliamentary Questions. Then, in October 1994, the Guardian pub- lished his claims that I had been paid by Ian Greer for putting down 11 PQs at £2,000 a time.

Later, Fayed said he could not remem- ber the exact going rate, but thought it was `about' that and claimed that he paid Greer £18,000 in 1987 for this purpose. But last week, the Guardian, ignoring the confidentiality of documents disclosed only for court proceedings, published an article stating (accurately) that this money actual- ly went to the 1987 election fighting funds of 21 Tory MPs, two Labour MPs and one Liberal. One of the Labour MPs was Doug Hoyle, chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but the Tories did not include me.

Realising that neither the figures nor the stories added up, in December 1994 Fayed changed tack. He then said that on eight occasions in 1987-89 he paid me £2,500 in crisp £50 notes and on four occa- sions he gave me a total of £8,000 in £100 Harrods gift vouchers. Conveniently, he says there were no witnesses present on any of these occasions.

Fayed is a man so meticulous at record- keeping that he could produce my hotel bill from the Paris Ritz seven years later. But, surprisingly, he had no records of the Harrods gift vouchers, despite their appar- ently having serial numbers like banknotes.

By the time the case was nearing trial two weeks ago, Fayed obviously thought there might be some scepticism about these claims. Reinforcements were need- ed. Bring on the security guards and assorted employees past and present! Last month, he produced a series of wholly novel claims put forward by his hapless employees that, in addition to receiving all the cash supposedly showered on me by Ian Greer and himself, I had also been in the habit of calling at Harrods and his flats in Park Lane on unspecified dates to col- lect brown envelopes containing unspeci- fied amounts of cash.

With more time, who knows what new Tales of the Arabian Nights might have been produced? Perhaps men with wheel- barrows delivering the stuff to Westmin- ster, matching his earlier assertion that my wife was accustomed to undertake up-mar- ket trolley-dashes around Harrods in free shopping expeditions?

Mr Fayed is a man with a strong sense of public duty. We know that because he has told us so. Having failed, via his emissary, Brian Hitchen, to secure by threats a meet- ing with the Prime Minister to demand withdrawal of the DTI report and the granting of a British passport, he declared that it was his 'public duty' to expose the `corruption at the heart of the British par- liamentary system' in which, though the chairman of a major public company, he had hitherto (so he confessed) cheerfully participated.

Odd, though, that it took him until October 1994 to recognise this 'public duty' in respect of events which occurred between 1985 and 1989. Even more odd, given his strong sense of probity, that he should have written to me on my appoint- ment as Corporate Affairs Minister in April 1992 a most effusive letter of con- gratulation, inviting me to lunch to discuss his case against the DTI in the European Court of Human Rights, through which he hoped to overturn the DTI inspectors' report which condemned him as a liar and a fraud.

Although brought up to be polite, I did not reply to this letter (on advice from DTI lawyers who warned me that any response, however anodyne, might be used to question the bona fides of the Depart- ment in resisting his claims in Strasbourg). Although assured that I was perfectly enti- tled to do so in law, I ruled myself out of taking any decisions or even seeing any papers in relation to the Fayeds, House of Fraser or Lonrho, on account of my pro- Fayed stance in the 1980s.

No wonder, as Stewart Steven said last week, Fayed felt let down. Perhaps he thought that he was buying me with his lavish Ritz hospitality. The truth is that, unlike his buying of Steven, Fayed could not buy me. His real complaint is not that government in this country is corrupt, but that it is not. Of course, one could not expect a newspaper like the Guardian to believe that. Hence the Fayed-Guardian axis — perhaps the most surprising alliance since the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Having learned his lesson with politi- cians, Fayed has turned now to a more receptive profession. He has discovered the elementary truth:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.