Al Fayed tried to control me with envelopes of cash says ex-Harrods director

Receiving cash ahead of business trips - large-value notes of pounds, francs or dollars depending on his destination - continued over the following six months.

Three senior colleagues suggested to Mr Brilliant at the time that Al Fayed was trying to get him to compromise himself.

Mr Brilliant says they told him: “He was trying to get you to come back and say ‘oh, I spent money on drugs or I spent money frolicking, doing something that I shouldn't have been doing,’ and that he would then use that information against you if you should ever turn on him.”

He adds: “I am certainly aware of people who... succumbed to the temptation.”

Mr Brilliant continued trying to return the money, until his family arrived in London and he started looking for a home. With Al Fayed’s consent, he put it towards the purchase of a property.

Al Fayed had form for using envelopes of cash as a tool of power and control. It had caused a scandal in the 1990s after he paid MPs to ask questions in the House of Commons - and then exposed those who had accepted his gifts.

Mr Brilliant believes he was not immune to Al Fayed’s extensive use of bugging and surveillance, carried out by the Harrods owner’s large team of security guards.

“Even when I tell this story to you right now, I get kind of goosebumps and the hair stands up on the back of my neck, realising that my phones were being listened in on,” he says.

Mr Brilliant’s first suspicion that he may have been bugged came in 2002, shortly before he was fired. After a disagreement about the funding of Fulham FC, words from a private phone conversation with someone in the US were quoted back to him in a meeting.

Another former Harrods director, who wanted to remain anonymous, told us he had moved into an Al Fayed-owned property when he started at the store and one of the security team warned him it was bugged.

The director says he and his wife would jokingly say “good morning” to the security guards who might be listening when they woke up.

He noticed that many directors kept a personal mobile phone as well as a work phone, because they feared the Harrods phone might be bugged.

Mr Brilliant says Harrods’ managers were set in opposition to each other and then expected to keep a watchful eye on their rivals.

In addition to his core role, he was given partial oversight of a range of Al Fayed’s interests, including Fulham FC and the Paris Ritz.

“I was asked to oversee people I had no right overseeing,” says Mr Brilliant. In turn, he found that “people were looking over my shoulder”.

Information was treated like a “currency” and people would jockey to share it to “curry favour” with the boss, he says.

This has been corroborated by an anonymous director. “There was no trust between directors,” he told us. “Everyone was on the defensive.”

In his 1997 biography of Al Fayed, journalist Tom Bower described Harrods as a “medieval court” where executives’ survival depended on “utter loyalty” and “a drip of salacious gossip to sow doubts about rivals”.

Senior managers at Harrods were sacked with such regularity that Mr Brilliant says it was a “running joke” in the store.

Managers were sacked or quit so frequently that The Sunday Times began to publish a regular count, which reached 48 in 2005 - before a legal letter put a stop to it.