“Bad”. “Slimy”. “Sick.” These are some of the adjectives used by female former employees of the Harrods department store to describe its owner, Mohamed Al Fayed, who died last year aged 94.

To date, at least 111 of them have reported that they were sexually abused or raped by him.

The youngest victim is said to be just 13 years old.

According to lawyer Dean Armstrong, of the legal team collecting evidence against the dead Egyptian billionaire, more than 420 people have contacted her to make similar allegations.

As the days pass, more and more revelations about the behavior of the Egyptian Croesus.

Last week 12 men who worked at Harrods claimed they were verbally or physically abused by him and his bodyguards.

On Thursday, the Metropolitan Police announced that it was investigating at least five people in Al Fayed’s inner circle. It is being investigated whether they had helped him commit the crimes he is accused of or cover them up.

Most complainants are from the UK. But complainants are also residents or nationals of the USA, Australia, Spain, etc.

Although from time to time many and various things had been heard about the identity of the former owner of Harrods, he himself always denied any accusation against him. It is rumored that even when some cases did reach the police, they were not followed up, due to negligence or fear of the police or, worse, because the police were bought off.

An internal investigation is thus under way at Scotland Yard: the purpose is to establish whether or not there was deception on the part of the police.

The scene began to change dramatically when, last September, BBC documentary brought the subject up again, very forcefully. The British television network was able to locate more than 20 women who reported assault and physical violence by Al Fayed in various cities around the world. From London and Paris to St Tropez and Abu Dhabi.

According to the report, the late multi-millionaire often walked through the sales areas of his department store and spotted which young saleswomen he liked. He would then request that they be transferred to his offices — where he would carry out his attacks.

Al Fayed he is also accused of committing some of his crimes in his London flat, in rooms at the Paris Ridge Hotel (which he owned), in his country residence, or even during trips abroad.

The Guardian newspaper in an extensive related report among others noted that the scale of Al Fayed’s crimes ranks him “as one of Britain’s most notorious sex offenders and urgently raises the question of how he got away.”

Mohammed Al Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1929. He was the eldest of three sons of a primary school teacher.

Together with his brothers, they first founded a shipping company in their hometown that they later moved to Italy, simultaneously opening an office in London. In the 1960s he moved to the United Kingdom, where he began to work with businessmen from Saudi Arabia and the Emir of Dubai, investing in construction and buying and selling real estate. His fame began to spread far and wide in 1985, when he bought the Harrods department store in central London, which he sold 25 years later, in 2010, for £1.8 billion. euros to Qatar’s state investment fund, the Qatar Investment Authority.

Harrods’ current owners expressed their “utter disgust” at the allegations. “As a business, we disappointed our employees who fell victim to it and for that we sincerely apologize,” they said in a statement.

Next week the Metropolitan Police is expected to decide whether to launch an independent investigation to draw up a report and look into the allegations in depth.