Fayed renews legal fight for British passport

Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed demonstrated yesterday that he has no intention of giving up his fight for a British passport when he opened a new round in his six-year battle in the courts to get citizenship.

His counsel, Michael Beloff QC, told the court of appeal that it should allow a judicial review of the home secretary's decision on May 6 last year to refuse the Egyptian-born businessman to go ahead because Jack Straw's decision had been biased and should be quashed.

The home secretary refused to give Mr Fayed a British passport on the grounds that his payment of cash and benefits to MPs to ask questions and his role in the break-in to a bank safe deposit box belonging to his business rival, "Tiny" Rowland, meant he could not pass the necessary "good character" test to qualify for citizenship.

But Mr Beloff repeated claims yesterday that an unsourced Sunday Express article on September 6 1998, which claimed Mr Straw had "told friends" that he could not see how Mr Fayed could have citizenship if he did pay MPs, meant that he had not approached the decision with "an open mind".

He should have delegated the decision to another home office minister. Mr Straw has said he has no recollection of making such a remark.

Mr Beloff argued that his role in the safe deposit box incident and the "cash for questions" affair should not have outweighed other factors such as Mr Fayed's employment of 3,000 people in Britain, that he paid his taxes in full, and faced "compassionate circumstances" at the time - the decision came not long after his son, Dodi, died in the car crash with Diana, Princess of Wales.

He said the safe deposit box incident was "one regrettable lapse" and Mr Fayed had not broken into the box himself or asked others to do so but had failed to stop the "actions of others". As to the payment of cash and benefits to MPs, he said there was a "risk of applying the standards of the 1990s to the events of the 1980s".

They were more a reflection on the bad character of the MPs who had accepted them rather than on Mr Fayed, who did not believe them to be unlawful.

But Jonathan Crow, for the home secretary, said the appeal court application was nothing more than an attempt to appeal against the merits of a decision Mr Fayed did not like.

The fact that he was a well-known individual and there had been considerable media interest did not affect Mr Straw's decision.

The decision by the high court judge in October 1999, who ruled that Mr Straw had taken the right decision for the right reasons, should not be disturbed, Mr Crow said.

Judgment was reserved.