![]() ![]() At the end of the day, it’s a personal issue,” he says. "There’s nothing shocking about it, these settlements happen. He has many friends inside the Emirati royal clans, has easy access to every detail of the salacious case, and insists that he and others in his circle are treating the divorce judgment as routine. While the royal court has said little about the latest developments, “everybody has the Internet here,” points out one expatriate businessman who has lived in Dubai for decades. The barrage of revelations and court judgments has divided Emiratis. The justice cited the sheikh’s abductions of his two runaway daughters, his use of sophisticated spyware to track down both Latifa and Haya, and an attempt by his agents to purchase a £30 million ($47 million) estate next door to Haya’s country home near Windsor Castle-which he called “a very significant threat to her security.” The risk to the estranged family, Moor said, was “clear and ever-present." In the latest blow to Sheikh Mohammed, Judge Moor called the Dubai ruler the “main threat” to Haya and their children, citing a long campaign of “intimidation.” About one third of the financial settlement would go toward maintaining round-the-clock protection for Haya for the rest of her life, and for her children until they finish university. Sir Philip Drury Moor, a judge of the High Court of England and Wales, ordered the sheikh to pay at least £540 million ($720 million) to his ex-wife, in what the local press called the highest divorce settlement ever awarded by a British court. Then, in late December 2021, the scandal leapt back in the news. The sheikh denied all allegations, and Haya continued to live quietly in a London mansion with her son and daughter. She also received anonymous notes warning her that “your life is over.” That, together with the discoveries she'd made about the brutal treatment of Shamsa and Latifa after their own escape attempts, she revealed in court, prompted her to flee. On two occasions, Haya says she found a gun on her bed with its muzzle pointed toward the door and the safety lock off. In March 2020 a British family court judge a released a 34-page judgment in Haya's child-custody petition that laid bare the royal family’s dysfunction and her desperation: The findings revealed that Haya had conducted an affair with a male bodyguard in 2017 or 2018 that enraged her husband and prompted him to begin making threats against her. My report into the scandals in the royal court of Dubai remains as relevant and troubling as ever (it appears below). Why were female members of the sheikh’s immediate family making runs for it? And it was spurred, also, by two attempted escapes by the sheikh's daughter Latifa (from another marriage) and, on one still earlier occasion, of her older sister, Shamsa. The article was occasioned by the recent flight of his sixth and youngest wife, Princess Haya, the daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan and half-sister of King Abdullah, who escaped first to Germany, then London with their two children, now 9-year-old son, Zayed, and 13-year-old daughter, Al Jalila. ![]() In late 2019, I wrote a detailed investigation into the flight of several women from the court of Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum.
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