Harrods: The red flags missed when Qatar bought store from Al Fayed

Catriona Watt, partner at Fox & Partners, says it looks as if Qatar may have known about the allegations but went ahead anyway.

“It seems to me that it wasn’t a complete secret. It was probably a calculated risk,” she says, adding the due diligence process “depends on the questions you ask”.

“You might say, ‘I only want to know about this if it has a value of X,”‘ she says.

Virginia Albert, former marketing professor and current account director at advertising agency DeVito/Verdi, also believes the Qatari government’s views on women’s rights are relevant.

She questions whether it would have considered sexual abuse allegations as something sufficiently serious enough to warrant dropping the deal

“You could argue that brands align with brand values during mergers,” she says, adding the Gulf state would have considered if its values “aligned with what they knew, if they knew, about the values of this department store”.

Lazard, which represented the Al Fayed Trust during the deal, told the BBC: “We strongly condemn the behaviour these reports have brought to light.”

Harrods and the Qatar Investment Authority did not reply to multiple requests for comment on the due diligence process when the company was bought. In its previous response to the BBC, Harrods said it had been settling claims “since new information came to light” last year.

Meanwhile, Harrods’ managing director Michael Ward said on Thursday: “While it is true that rumours of [Al Fayed’s] behaviour circulated in the public domain, no charges or allegations were ever put to me by the police, the [Crown Prosecution Service], internal channels or others.

“Had they been, I would of course have acted immediately.”

Credit Suisse, now owned by UBS, represented the Qatar Investment Authority in the deal and declined to comment.