THE VAMP IN THE VEIL
She claims to be a Saudi princess who dated Colin Farrell. As her trial hears wild tales of cocaine, sex and the occult, what IS the truth about...
SHE arrives at court each morning in a black Rolls-Royce Phantom with a personalised number plate bearing the initials ‘HRH’. As cameras flash, a team of Middle Eastern security guards descend from a Range Rover to help her cross five yards of pavement to the building’s revolving front door.
Some are entrusted with her handbag. Others look after her €60,000 diamond-encrusted luxury Vertu mobile phone.
A snappily dressed flunky named Mohammed pushes a wheelchair, in which she occasionally chooses to park her derrière.
This regal creature, who invariably has her face veiled, always wears a black burka, sometimes with gold silk stitching or a jewelled trim.
Underneath, you can catch a glimpse of designer shoes with five-inch killer heels. Occasionally, she stretches out an arm to reveal a gem-studded Rolex and a wristful of gold jewellery.
The apparently wealthy woman calls herself Sara Al Amoudi. She claims to be 31 years old, though others say she’s 43. She has dark brown hair, greenish eyes and appears to wear a lot of make-up. Oh, and for most of the past month, she has been at the centre of one of the most sordid and downright surreal court cases in living memory.
The trial at London’s High Court, which has just finished its third week, revolves around an alleged €16 million property fraud in which Ms Al Amoudi — who is widely known as ‘the Vamp in the Veil’ — stands accused of posing as a Saudi princess.
She assumed the false identity, according to her opponents, to conduct a ‘very accomplished’ con trick i n which a middle- aged couple were duped out of six high-end properties in London’s Knightsbridge. So far, so straightforward. Yet as the high-stakes civil proceedings have progressed, the ‘Vamp in the Veil’ case has grown increasingly strange and sleazy. On Wednesday, for example, Ms Al Amoudi attempted to prove that she is incredibly wealthy — and presumably therefore does not need to defraud anyone — by insisting, under oath, that she spent more than €1 million on perfume in just a few weeks.
‘I have a problem with shopping,’ she declared. ‘In the past two months, my perfume, only the perfume… $1.4 million. I can show you the pictures.’
Earlier, key players in the case were accused of conducting illicit sexual affairs, concealing addictions to drink and drugs, and prostituting themselves, more of which later.
Then there is a dark back-story involving a dead former business associate — and alleged ex-lover — of Al Amoudi, who is accused of dabbling in the occult with her at the Cliveden estate in south-east England, scene of the Profumo scandal, again more of which later.
At the centre of these dizzying claims and counter claims there sits a huge unanswered question: Who exactly this woman?
For, as proceedings have progressed, it has become apparent that no one — least of all Judge Sarah Asplin, who must decide the eventual outcome of the extraordinary trial — is entirely sure.
For example, several acquaintances have told the court that for years Al Amoudi has described herself as a Saudi royal. One, an elderly hereditary peer called Lord Mereworth, who met her several years ago, said she had even talked to him of being the estranged wife of King Abdullah, the country’s monarch.
‘I understood she was married to the king of Saudi,’ he said.
Yet in her own evidence to court this week, Al Amoudi — who has produced no credible birth, marriage or other document confirming her identity — denied having made such a claim.
A former boyfriend once told reporters that she spoke of being Osama Bin Laden’s daughter, claimed to be a friend of Kate Moss, and talked of dating two Hollywood film stars — Irish former hellraiser Colin Farrell and Gladiator star Joaquin Phoenix — as well as former Arsenal footballer Freddie Ljungberg.
However, there is no evidence of her having any link to the Bin Laden family, and none of the supposed celebrity acquaintances will admit to having anything to do with her.
A few years ago, in a successful application for a €4.5 million mortgage from HSBC, that was shared with the court, Ms Al Amoudi claimed to be the daughter of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, one of the world’s wealthiest men.
Yet the Ethopian-Saudi billionaire’s legal representatives, who were in court all week, have issued a formal denial of paternity.
At various other points, she has told acquaintances that her father is Mohammed bin Aboud Al-Amoudi, the super- wealthy owner of the Intercontinental Hotel in Jeddah.
But the businessman’s representatives have vigorously disputed that claim, too.
Then there is the question of the source of Ms Al Amoudi’s apparent wealth. In l egal papers, she has claimed to be a Saudi-born heiress, married at 13 and exiled from the country in the Nineties because of an adulterous relationship.
AFTER arriving in London almost two decades ago, she says she has existed t hanks to a € 115,000 weekly allowance, sent by her family in the form of suitcases filled with banknotes.
Yet one of the two plaintiffs in the f raud case, 56- year- old property developer Amanda Clutterbuck, a well-preserved blonde, alleged this week that Al Amoudi earns her crust as a high- class prostitute, who for years worked from a €900,000 flat, with two sisters, yards from Harrods in central London.
‘ Far f rom being Saudi Arabian princesses, they were all prostitutes,’ she i nsisted, claiming that the women would trawl Harrods in search of clients.
Asked about that allegation in court, Al Amoudi claimed ‘in the name of Allah’ to be ‘a good Muslim woman’.
Certainly, there are questions about how rich Ms Al Amoudi actually is. In court on Tuesday, she claimed that her wealth was genuine, citing her expenditure on perfume as evidence. ‘ I’m afraid I’m addicted to spending money and get through enormous amounts of cash,’ she said. ‘I can easily spend £50,000 to £100,000 [€60,000 to €115,000] in one spree.’
Yet the very next day, despite her luxury cars and huge entourage of employees, she suddenly declared herself ‘ broke’, telling the judge: ‘I don’t have anything!’
It was a typically odd moment in a surreal three days during which Al Amoudi gave evidence to the court.
She had agreed to remove her veil in court, but sat behind a wall of document files, so that her face was invisible to most of the onlookers.
During hours of rambling testimony, at times she talked so softly that she could barely be heard; at other times she raised her voice and broke into hysterics or tears.
Often (but not always) she adopted a heavy Middle Eastern accent.
ON SEVERAL occasions, Al Amoudi insisted she could barely understand proceedings and needed t o speak t hrough an interpreter — only to break into eloquent English moments later.
At one such point, the court dissolved into laughter when the opposition counsel thanked her for suddenly being ‘fluent in English again’.
Things were similarly odd during Ms Al Amoudi’s last brush with the law, a 2010 trial in London, when a former boyfriend, Swedish male model Patrick Ribbsaeter, stood accused of assaulting her driver.
Back then, she appeared in a bejewelled burka to give evidence for the prosecution, who claimed Ribbsaeter was a ‘gold digger’ after her money. Following his acquittal, he claimed Al Amoudi’s devout appearance during the trial was a façade.
During their short, volatile relationship, he claimed, ‘she didn’t wear the burka as a rule — she wore designer clothes,’ many of them revealing.
Al Amoudi also frequented upscale London bars, restaurants and nightclubs. ‘She was drinking champagne every night,’ he said. ‘She had a lot of issues… who knows what the truth is about this strange woman?’
One person who claims to know the truth is London furniture dealer Negat Ali, who came forward after seeing Al Amoudi’s unveiled picture in the Daily Mail and told the court she knew her of old.
The ‘Vamp in the Veil’ is not a royal or even a Saudi, Ali claimed: she is an Ethiopian who later lived in Yemen and Dubai, she insisted.
Ms Ali, who is originally Ethiopian but now works in London, claims to have met Al Amoudi in 1985.
She then ran i nto her again by chance in 1996 at the London strip club Stringfellow’s, where they were attending a ‘ladies’ night’.
The two women went on to share a flat, she said.
In 2000, Al Amoudi fell pregnant and gave birth to a daughter at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, where the Prince William and Kate Middleton’s son, Prince George, was
born this week. That daughter, who is now aged 13, is at boarding school.
Ms Ali claims that she lived with Al Amoudi for several years — during which time the infant was used to seek maintenance payments from a variety of men — before they fell out over an alleged unpaid debt of €600.
Ms Ali suspects the ‘Vamp in the Veil’ is not actually a Muslim and uses her burka as a disguise during public appearances to prevent old acquaintances, and clients, from recognising her. Al Amoudi’s barrister, for his part, accused Negat Ali of being a dis- gruntled former servant trying to settle an old score with claims that are untrue.
But the nuts and bolts of the court case revolve around a disputed property deal.
The plaintiffs, Ms Clutterbuck and her partner Ian Paton, allege that Ms Al Amoudi cultivated their friendship over several years. She then carried out a ‘very accomplished’ face-to-face fraud, convincing them to sign over six properties to her as security for a major future cash advance.
They say she claimed to be hugely wealthy and willing to act as a partner helping to secure finance on a deal to buy properties worth €200 million on Hans Place in Knightsbridge.
Al Amoudi allegedly told them she could secure a loan of €53 million from contacts in the Middle East. In exchange, they signed over to her the titles to six London properties.
But t he massive l oan never materialised, and now the couple want the properties, which are worth €16 million, to be returned.
‘I thought I was living through an Alfred Hitchcock film, in which r eality seemed t o be t otally distorted,’ said Ms Clutterbuck, recalling the moment she came to believe she had been conned.
Al Amoudi, for her part, claims that Paton signed over the flats to her in order to repay debts he owed her from years as a crack cocaine addict.
She claimed Mr Paton had been her ‘ l over’ f or about a decade, taking millions of euro from her over this time.
Mr Paton has denied ever sleeping with Ms Al Amoudi and says he has never taken crack cocaine.
As is common in civil proceedings, the case, which continues, will be decided by Judge Asplin, not a jury.
CRUCIAL to the eventual verdict will be Sara Al Amoudi’s love life. In court, Ms Clutterbuck and Mr Paton’s barrister identified a string of men to whom she i s believed to have been attached during the years she claims to have been conducting an affair with Mr Paton.
They include a man known only as ‘ Sammy’, who is the father of her child, and one Gerald Jerko Zovko, who i s believed to have been married to Al Amoudi until he was killed in Iraq in early 2004 while working as a private security contractor.
His vehicle was hit by rocketpropelled grenades in the town of Fallujah, and his mutilated body was then dragged through the streets by a mob.
Then there is Cliff Besley, an Australian triathlon champion who, the court was told, was introduced as her fiancé at business meetings in 2008, and an alleged boyfriend called Ryan Bish.
Another man, still in her life, is Lord Mereworth, an 83-year-old divorced, heirless and apparently very wealthy hereditary peer, who lives in southwest London. He appears to have become entranced with Al Amoudi after meeting her a few years ago.
They have dined together at the House of Lords, and he agreed to give evidence in her support.
During cross- examination, in which Lord Mereworth denied that she had ever proposed marriage to him, he claimed to be convinced of her legitimacy.
‘I may have been misled, who knows? But I still trust her,’ he said.
The final player in this extraordinary soap opera is an acquaintance of Amanda Clutterbuck, a man named Elliot Nichol, with whom Ms Al Amoudi appears to have had a lengthy affair.
Mr Nichol, who died of alcohol poisoning in December 2009, is said to have been completely obsessed with the occult. He would speak with Ms Al Amoudi on a mobile phone that had a number ending in 666 — which is popularly associated with the devil.
In the run-up to his death, Nichol was l i ving with Al Amoudi at properties in central London and on the Cliveden estate, Ms Clutterbuck told the court.
‘At Christmas 2006, Mr Nichol phoned i n an almost totally incoherent state, singing at the top of his voice: “I am drowning in Vuitton handbags and Cavalli, we’re thinking of floating them down the Thames.” ’
The ‘Vamp in the Veil’ denies being with Nichol at the time of that call.
As with almost everything about this mysterious woman, the truth is hard to ascertain. Now a judge will have the unenviable task of sorting fact from fiction in this most modern tale of greed and guile.