£7.6m blackmail payout over affair

THE ruler of Dubai’s wife paid £6. million from her ten-year-old daughter’s bank account to four men who allegedly blackmailed her over an affair she had with her bodyguard, it was revealed yesterday.

Princess Haya said that she had been ‘desperate’ to hide the affair from her powerful husband, Sheikh Mohammed

She told the High Court in London that she had been ‘scared’ after a former member of her security team started the blackmail

in 2018, while she was still married to the sheikh and they were living in Dubai.

Five months later two more members of her security team also began to blackmail her, the court was told.

Haya, the sister of King Abdullah II of Jordan, admitted that she had taken millions of pounds from a bank account belonging to her then ten-year-old daughter,

Jalila, and used it to pay off the blackmailers.

The princess told the court that she had used the girl’s money because ‘I was scared and that was the money available in that account’.

The child’s monthly allowance was paid into the account and Haya said that she had intended to repay the money.

The court was also told that Haya was allegedly blackmailed by her lover and paid him about £1.2million from her own account. Lawyers

for the sheikh argued that Haya had used £28.6million of her children’s money to pay off the blackmailers and to buy horses and send money to her brother in Jordan.

The judge, Mr Justice Moor, said that Haya had paid about £6. million to the four men, and said that it was ‘a most unsatisfactory episode’.

He added: ‘It sticks in the throat that these people have been able to get away with this and have not been prosecuted.’ In his judgment, he said: ‘I realise I have not heard from the alleged blackmailers, but nobody should be blackmailed and HRH [the princess] must have been very frightened.’

He said that she should have used her own money to pay the blackmailers, but said she had been in a ‘very difficult position’.

Haya fled Dubai in 2019 after a loaded gun was left in her bedroom and she said that she feared for her life when her husband discovered her adultery.