MY £2 BILLION BETRAYAL

PART TWO

LAST week Soraya Khashoggi, one of the richest and most desirable women in the world, told the extraordinary story of her star-studded love life – and a bizarre blackmail plot that exposed the grandson of Winston Churchill as one of her many romances. Soraya has spent decades surrounded by the most world’s famous people, yet she has always guarded her privacy – until now. Here, in the second part of her exclusive interview with biographer ANDREW WILSON, she charts her astonishing rise from the backstreets of Leicester to a life of luxury, influence and power as the wife of billionaire tycoon Adnan Khashoggi, and describes the detail of their bitter divorce… I LOST count of how many homes we had – I think we had about 17 at one stage – but that did include our yachts. We had properties in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dhahran and one in Beirut that had its own nightclub. After dinner we would put on our coats and the chauffeur would drive us down the hill to the club.

We had apartments in London and New York (including several floors of the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue), a succession of chalets in Gstaad, homes in Somerset, Paris, Cannes, two ranches in east Africa, and a lavish property in Marbella with 5,000 acres. There we entertained people like Liz Taylor, Freddie Mercury, film star George Hamilton, Shirley Bassey, and Joan and Jackie Collins.

One of our yachts – the Nabila – named after our daughter and one of the largest in the world at the time – was used in the Bond film Never Say Never Again and also became the inspiration for the Queen song Khashoggi’s Ship.

There were times when I didn’t even have to go shopping, as Adnan brought the shops to me. Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy would send models to show me the latest dress collection in the comfort of my own home, while Cartier and Asprey would happily display their goods in our hotel rooms. Once, in New York, Adnan borrowed so many jewels for me to wear at a ball that the jeweller sent armed bodyguards to follow me all evening.

This was all very different from my childhood. I was born Sandra Daly in 1941 and grew up in a tiny, two-up, two-down house in Leicester. I never knew my father Stephen – I was brought up by my mother Celia, along with her mother Kate, and her father James. My grandma used to take me to the local baths to wash me. Of course, I didn’t know I was poor and I thought everyone had an outside loo.

My mother worked all hours to try to give me a better life. She had a job at the ambulance station, worked as a waitress at the Grand Hotel in Leicester, and also wrote articles for the Leicester Mercury under another name.

She thought it was important for me to get a good education and so she saved up to send me to a Catholic convent, a boarding school near Chertsey, Surrey. The nuns were incredibly kind. They would give me thruppence to put into the collection. I would try to slip the money into the collection without anyone seeing because all the other girls had so much more money to give.

There were times when I had to go to other schools, perhaps because Mummy ran out of money and couldn’t pay. And when my grandmother died in 1949, everything changed. My grandfather was supposed to look after me while my mum was at work but he neglected me. He was a gambler and a drunk – he would steal my mum’s money and gamble it away. Instead of taking me to the park, he would take me to the races or to a working men’s club, where I would have to sit on the step and wait for him.

In the evenings, when mum was at work, he would leave me in the house, alone in the dark. I am an insomniac now and I often think that my inability to sleep stems from that experience.

Grandad was a bully and I was scared of him. His temper was unpredictable and he had beaten Grandma before she died. I remember one day I brought home a kitten and he took it off to be drowned.

In 1957, when I was 16, after my O-levels, I ran away. My mum had paid for me to have extra French and German lessons and I had got a job as a translator in London, saved

She was just poor Sandra from Leicester... until a chance encounter with one of the world’s richest men led to marriage and unimaginable opulence. But then the affairs – and recriminations – began...

up a little money and bought a cheap plane ticket to Kenya.

I met some Indian missionaries, converted to Hinduism and helped doctors vaccinate people against tuberculosis and leprosy. I fell in love with a law student, the son of a maharaja, but when his father found out he tried to pay me off. I was so insulted that I took the first plane back home and moved back into my mother’s house in Leicester.

One day when I was in my late teens, my mother entered a competition without telling me. The prize – which she won – was a holiday for two anywhere in the world, and Mum chose Paris. It was on that holiday, while staying at the George V hotel, that we met Adnan’s family, who invited us to spend New Year’s Eve with them. They were lovely people – Adnan’s father was the doctor to the king of Saudi Arabia – and we kept in touch.

Six months later, in 1960, I met Adnan for the first time, in London. Initially I didn’t like him – I thought he was arrogant – but gradually we fell in love. I am a sucker for big brown eyes and long dark lashes and I liked his sense of humour.

I went to work for him as a translator and on trips he would always ask me to try on coats or dresses that he said he wanted to buy for his sisters. At the time I didn’t know that all these presents were for me and he was beginning the transformation of my wardrobe. One day, when we were in Beirut, he proposed.

He must have known I was going to say yes because he had already had the rings engraved.

‘He was never an arms dealer’

Adnan’s family was wealthy when he and Soraya married, but not extraordinarily so. His transformation from the son of a doctor to one of the world’s richest men began in the Sixties after he won the dealer- ships of Rolls-Royce, Chrysler and Kenworth trucks in Saudi Arabia. He then became an agent for Marconi and the aerospace company Lockheed, which reportedly paid him $106 million in commissions between 1970 and 1975. By the early 1980s, his fortune had rocketed. ‘Never before, and probably never again, will one man make so much money so quickly,’ wrote Khashoggi’s biographer. But how does Soraya feel about the allegation that much of her former husband’s fortune came from arms dealing?

‘In my eyes, an arms dealer is someone who sells guns and bombs and weapons, something Adnan never did,’ she says, bristling. Soraya says: ‘We married in Beirut in 1961 and then took a fabulous sixmonth honeymoon around Europe and America, staying in the best hotels. Adnan already owned a gypsum plant in Saudi Arabia, but when we returned from the honey-

moon we still lived in a small flat in Riyadh. I was the only foreigner there and thought that everyone was talking about me. When I learned Arabic I realised that they were – but only in a nice way.

Before the marriage I converted to Islam and changed my name to Soraya, after the brightest star in the sky. Taking the veil was one of the best things that ever happened to me because I never got sunburned and wrinkled. And it was lovely to be part of a big family. My father-in-law told me that from now on I was his daughter, that I was just as important as one of his own daughters, and that made me feel very special.

For one birthday, Adnan hired a whole casino in Cannes for my friends, and we had a dinner with champagne. That night, sitting out on the terrace and watching fireworks explode over the Mediterranean, I thought I was the luckiest woman in the world. For another birthday Adnan took over Le Pre Catelan, a restaurant in Paris, and hired the cast of the musical Hair to come and sing and mingle with the guests. Yes, we did make a lot of money – it was even reported that at one point that Adnan was worth up to £2billion – but it was what he did with it that sticks in my memory.

Our marriage was happy for a number of years until one time, when I was pregnant with one of my children, I started to have my suspicions about Adnan. We were going to an Inaugural Ball in Washington to celebrate a new president and I stopped off in London for a final fitting of my gown, made by Yves Saint Laurent.

The first thing I did in London was call one of my best friends, a South African model, but her husband told me that she was modelling in New York. She and I would normally tell each other everything, so I thought it was odd that she hadn’t said anything to me.

The mad thought that she was sleeping with Adnan – who had already flown to America – flashed through my mind, but surely that couldn’t be true? The novelist Harold Robbins, whom Adnan and I knew from the South of France, found me a private detective who trailed Adnan and my friend and got all the evidence. When I discovered the truth I felt terrible, absolutely devastated. How could Adnan, the man I loved, do this to me?

OF COURSE, to begin with Adnan denied the affair, but finally he admitted it. I was expecting a baby and I decided to forgive him, but then a few years later I caught him again, this time with a woman I didn’t know. That was the end for me and I decided I wanted a divorce.

I was living at a house in Eaton Square, London, when I met a lawyer who put me in touch with the high-profile American divorce law- yer Marvin Mitchelson. In 1979 he agreed to take on my case even though I didn’t have any money.

Looking back now I realise that both Adnan and I behaved appallingly. Marvin Mitchelson wanted to find a forum, a country where the papers could be served and a divorce could be heard. During one hearing the judge asked Adnan where he lived.

‘On my planes,’ he replied and so the judge ordered an official to go to inspect the three planes. When I heard this, a sickening feeling engulfed me because I knew it to be sort of true. On each plane Adnan kept a wide range of clothes, right down to socks, pants, pyjamas, ties and tie pins.

But then Marvin decided to play Adnan at his own game. There was one plane ready to leave Los Angeles, another stationed in Long Beach, California, and the third in London. In his Rolls-Royce, Marvin drove up to the plane in LA, started chatting to the pilot and asked him about his destination. ‘London,’ said the pilot. ‘I’m afraid you’re not,’ Marvin replied and stuck the writ to the plane. He did the same thing to the aircraft in Long Beach and got another lawyer to serve a writ on the plane in London.

I only went down this aggressive route because Adnan had taken my children. Like most mothers, I would do anything for them, and at the time I believed that they needed to be with me, and me alone. The custody battle that raged between us was horrible, absolutely horrible, and yes, I’m afraid the children did suffer. I will never forgive myself and I hope one day they will forgive me for the childhood they had.

However, finally, Adnan and I realised that the lawyers were the only ones benefiting from our feud – Marvin was a publicity junkie – and we decided to sort it out ourselves. Although it was reported that I received nearly $900million in a settlement the reality was I didn’t get any cash from Adnan. All I wanted was the children – they were the most important thing for me.

Today, I’m really good friends with Adnan; after all, we are grandparents now. I get on with his two subsequent wives, Lamia and Shapari, and he calls us his Charlie’s Angels.

Adnan has done amazing things for me – he has helped bring up the children I had apart from him, given them his name, sent them to the best schools. When people ask how much money I got from him, I say I got millions in love, which is more than all the diamonds in the world.