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Harrods was accused of a “systematic failure of corporate responsibility” by a lawyer representing alleged victims of Mohamed Al Fayed, following a slew of claims of sexual assault against the late former owner of the London department store, including rape.

Dean Armstrong KC, representing some of the alleged victims, said in a press conference in London on Friday: “This is and was a systematic failure of corporate responsibility and that systematic failure is on the shoulders of Harrods.

“We are not going to get into a situation where there is any room for anyone to seek to avoid responsibility,” he added, “so we pursue Harrods and we focus on Harrods at this stage because of the collective responsibility.”

His comments came after the BBC broadcast the allegations against Al Fayed in a documentary and podcast about the businessman, who died last year aged 94. His son Dodi was killed alongside Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris in 1997.

More than 20 women alleged to the BBC that they had been sexually assaulted by the billionaire, with five alleging they had been raped. The women, who worked at Harrods from the late 1980s to the 2000s, said the alleged assaults were carried out at the company’s offices, in Al Fayed’s London apartment or on trips abroad. In the exposé, the BBC claimed that Harrods failed to intervene and also helped cover up allegations against Al Fayed.

Al Fayed owned and controlled Harrods between 1985 and 2010, when he sold it to a Qatari sovereign wealth fund for a reported £1.5bn.

Armstrong, who is part of the legal team retained by a number of alleged victims alongside US lawyer and women’s advocate Gloria Allred and barrister Maria Mulla, added that any prospective legal proceedings were not about financial compensation but about “much, much more”. 

“If Harrods feel that they ought to compensate women financially for what they’ve done and how they failed them, then, of course, that is something which we would welcome. But we are not going to sit here and accept any suggestion that we are only interested in money,” he said.

On Thursday law firm Leigh Day, which is representing an individual alleged to have been subjected to trafficking, rape and abuse by Al Fayed, said it was also looking at possible claims, including against Harrods. The firm is working with US law firm Motley Rice. Harrods said it would not comment on individual claims.

The retailer said on Friday it had accepted “vicarious liability for the conduct of Al Fayed” in order to settle claims that had been brought to Harrods’ attention since 2023, adding it “has reached settlements with the vast majority of people” who approached it.

Harrods declined to comment on the amount paid to women who alleged sexual misconduct, and said no claims were outstanding at the time of the documentary airing.

“Harrods has received new enquiries since the broadcast which we will deal with swiftly and carefully,” the company added, saying “there were no [non-disclosure agreements] attached to these settlements” and it would not seek to enforce “any NDAs that relate to alleged sexual abuse by Al Fayed that were entered into during the period of his ownership”. 

In a statement on its website in response to the documentary, which aired on Thursday, the group said it was “utterly appalled” by the allegations. The company added that “during this time his victims were failed and for this we sincerely apologise”.

“While we cannot undo the past, we have been determined to do the right thing as an organisation, driven by the values we hold today, while ensuring that such behaviour can never be repeated in the future.”

Harrods said it was “a very different organisation to the one owned and controlled by Al Fayed between 1985 and 2010”.

Meanwhile, London football club Fulham FC, owned by Al Fayed from 1997 until 2013, said it had been deeply troubled and concerned by the reports in the documentary.

“We have sincere empathy for the women who have shared their experiences,” the club said. “We are in the process of establishing whether anyone at the club is, or has been, affected.”

Mulla was quoted by the BBC as saying the legal team were not representing any women in connection with Fulham. “But our investigations are obviously ongoing into all these entities that he had an involvement in.”

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The head of Boeing’s defence business is leaving the company after years of losses from fixed-price contracts and a high-profile debacle with its space capsule that left two astronauts in space.

Chief executive Kelly Ortberg said in a memo to employees on Friday that Ted Colbert, who has run Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security arm since 2022, would depart the company “effective immediately”. A Boeing spokeswoman said Colbert was opting to leave.

Colbert’s exit is the first change in the company’s executive ranks since Ortberg took over the top job last month from Dave Calhoun. Steve Parker, the chief operating officer for the defence business, will lead it temporarily until the company names a permanent successor to Colbert.

Boeing’s defence business reported losses in 2022, 2023 and the second quarter of 2024. The division has laboured under fixed-price contracts for several large programmes, which represent just 15 per cent of revenues but have racked up nearly $14bn in charges over the past decade. Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu estimated the fixed-price programmes could consume $2.6bn in cash this year, and $1.8bn in 2025.

The programmes include the KC-46 refuelling tanker, the T-7A Air Force training aircraft and the MQ-25 refuelling drone, as well as the US president’s Air Force One jet and the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft that was built to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

Boeing suffered a black eye last month when Nasa decided to forgo bringing astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore back to Earth on Boeing’s spacecraft. Due to technical problems, the agency now plans to bring the pair home in February on a SpaceX spacecraft.

The group’s problems are not limited to its defence business. Boeing has been bleeding cash this year, the result of slower commercial aircraft production as it tries to improve the quality of its manufacturing after a series of crises. The company has been scrutinised from all sides since January after a door panel blew off a commercial jet mid-flight and its shares are down almost 40 per cent this year.

The company’s ability to generate cash is tied to delivering planes to airlines, but that is again in question after 33,000 union workers walked off the job last week, seeking better pay and retirement benefits. Boeing is imposing furloughs and a hiring freeze to conserve cash.

Credit rating agencies have said Boeing’s cash generation is a critical factor in whether they continue to rate the company as investment grade or cut it to junk. The company is under pressure to raise more cash by selling shares, possibly worth as much as $10bn.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Israel said on Friday it had killed senior Hizbollah commanders in an air strike on the militants’ stronghold of southern Beirut, a devastating assault on the group that heightened fears of a full-blown war.

Hizbollah’s special operations commander Ibrahim Aqil was killed along with at least 10 members of the “senior chain of command of the Radwan Force”, an elite unit within the group, the Israel Defense Forces said.

The group confirmed late on Friday that Aqil was killed in the Israeli attack, and described him as one of its “greatest leaders”.

Aqil’s death is arguably the most damaging blow Israel has struck against Hizbollah, Lebanon’s dominant political and military force, since the movement’s formation in the early 1980s.

The Radwan Force is the arm of Hizbollah responsible for cross-border operations into Israel and defending southern Lebanon against a ground invasion. Israel has been targeting the Radwan for months, with the stated aim of pushing it back from the border.

Striking Hizbollah’s top commanders on such a scale would also deal a blow to Iran, which considers the Lebanese group its main proxy and closest ally in the region.

The attack comes after Israel said it was entering a “new phase” of its nearly year-long conflict with Hizbollah, which had previously been largely contained to the Israeli-Lebanese border region.

It will increase pressure on Hizbollah to respond robustly, even though it is in disarray after consecutive days of assaults on its military capability and wary of being drawn into full-blown war with a far more sophisticated army.

Hizbollah has not confirmed that Aqil was in the building at the time of the strike. Lebanese authorities said 14 people were killed and 66 wounded.

Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported that an F-35 warplane launched four missiles into the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, striking a residential building. Israel’s military said the commanders were killed while conducting a meeting under the building.

The strike capped a week of deadly mass detonations of Hizbollah’s communications devices that killed 37 people and injured thousands more. Hizbollah has blamed the attacks on Israel, which has not directly commented.

The Israeli strike was the second targeting of a senior Hizbollah commander in southern Beirut since the conflict erupted last October. A July strike on a residential building in the capital killed Fuad Shukr, Hizbollah’s top military commander.

Aqil, like Shukr, was one of the group’s earliest founding members and sat on Hizbollah’s Jihad Council, its highest military body, according to four people familiar with Hizbollah’s operations. After Shukr’s killing, Aqil took over some of the slain commander’s responsibilities, said the people.

The US suspected Aqil of involvement in attacks 41 years ago in Beirut at the US and French barracks, which killed 307 people, and the US embassy, which killed 63.

Lebanon’s civil defence authorities said rescue efforts on Friday were ongoing, with people still being pulled from the rubble after two residential buildings collapsed.

Television footage circulating showed burnt-out cars and large piles of debris covering a narrow street.

The strike came amid intensifying salvos between Israeli forces and Hizbollah, which have been exchanging cross-border fire since the group started launching rockets at Israel on October 8, the day after Hamas’s attack on the Jewish state.

The UN’s special co-ordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, called the strike “another alarming escalation”. “We are witnessing an extremely dangerous cycle of violence,” she said. “This must stop now.”

On Thursday night, the Israeli military said its jets struck about 100 rocket launchers in Lebanon that were due to fire at Israel “in the immediate future”. It was one of Israel’s heaviest rounds of strikes on Lebanon since the start of the war.

Hizbollah fired more than 140 rockets at Israeli-controlled territory on Friday, according to the Israeli military, sparking fires in several areas. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Following the strike on Beirut, Hizbollah said it had launched more rocket salvos targeting what it said were defence installations, including one military intelligence headquarters it said was “responsible for assassinations”.

US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Washington still did not see a wider war as “inevitable”.

“We don’t want to see escalation. We don’t want to see a second front in this war opened up,” Kirby said. “Everything we’re doing is going to be to try to prevent that outcome.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who condemned the “criminal” attacks this week, said he had requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. “All the communications I received yesterday from senior international officials confirmed that the Israeli enemy crossed red lines,” he said.

Mikati said he would head to the US for talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly “to assert that there is still space available for a diplomatic solution”.

Additional reporting by Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut and Felicia Schwartz in Washington

I much enjoyed reading Stuart Kirk’s column “Politicians and bosses need to prioritise beauty” (Opinion, FT Weekend, September 7).

On the subject of housing and beauty, as an architect I feel new developments are not just lacking in performance, spatial quality and energy efficiency but originality, contextual appropriateness, and also aesthetic merit and “soul”.

This is depressing. Many buildings constructed today will be lucky to last a few decades — mainly because of the poor quality and the fact no one will want to save them. There are many complex reasons for this — but a lot of it is because today “form follows finance”, as opposed to Le Corbusier’s dictum that form follows function. Housing is seen more as an investment than as a place to live or a long-term contribution to our environment.

Despite the fact that only about 5 per cent of new homes in the UK are designed by architects — the rest being the handiwork of volume housebuilders — many people would categorically assert that architects do not build beautiful buildings! My father would — and he would agree with King Charles’s attack on the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1984, when as Prince of Wales he described the designs for the National Gallery extension as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”.

What’s missing today is a collective notion of beauty and a way to implement it to a high standard. Buildings and streets are of extreme importance to the future of our country as they are what we will leave to the next generations.

So yes to more arts funding! But as William Lethaby, the English architect whose ideas had a major influence on the Arts and Crafts and Early Modern movements, said: “Bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can protect us from buildings in the street.”

Amelia Hunter
London EC1, UK