Editing Mohamed Al-Fayed (section)

===Relationship with the Sultan of Brunei===

Al-Fayed became a financial adviser to the then [[Sultan of Brunei]] [[Omar Ali Saifuddien III]] in 1966.<ref name="Independent20071006" /> Al-Fayed told [[Maureen Orth]] that he had known [[Hassanal Bolkiah]], who succeeded Saifuddien on his abdication, since the sultan's childhood and that they had met during the building of a trade centre in Brunei.<ref name="maureen-orth" /> Tiny Rowland told DTI inspectors that Al-Fayed had told him that he negotiated an introduction to the sultan for $500,000 plus a percentage of any resulting business with an Indian holy man and alleged fraudster, [[Chandraswami|Shri Chandra Swamiji Maharaj]].<ref name="maureen-orth" /> Rowland later admitted this account was untrue.<ref>Bower 1998, p.164.</ref>

In mid-1984 Al-Fayed received several powers of attorney and written authorisations from the sultan to carry out tasks for him. These gave Al-Fayed access to large sums of the sultan's money. The sultan was then the richest man in the world.<ref name="maureen-orth" /> During this period, the bank of the three Fayed brothers, the [[Royal Bank of Scotland]], received a transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from Switzerland into their accounts.<ref name="maureen-orth" />  RBS assumed that the money belonged to the sultan, but Al-Fayed told the bank that his portfolio was separate from the sultan's. The DTI report noted that "It may be no more than coincidence that this vast increase in disposable wealth followed quickly on the admission of Mohamed to the sultan's confidence ... It is, however, a very powerful coincidence."<ref name="maureen-orth" />

Using a power of attorney, Al-Fayed bought the [[Dorchester Hotel]] for the sultan in 1985.<ref name="maureen-orth" /> Al-Fayed accompanied the sultan to [[10 Downing Street]] to visit Prime Minister [[Margaret Thatcher]] in January 1985, with [[pound sterling|sterling]] in decline and threatening the economy.<ref name="maureen-orth" /> The sultan, who had moved £5 billion of assets out of pounds, moved the assets back into sterling. Al-Fayed took credit for this and for persuading the sultan to give half a billion pounds of contracts to British defence industries.<ref name="maureen-orth" />