Haya of Jordan and the Emir of Dubai divorce is a record

The record held by Tatiana Akhmedova, who had obtained 532 million euros from her ex-husband Farkhad Akhmedov last April. The sum that theEmir of Dubai Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, according to the British High Court, he will have to pay to his ex-wife, the princess Haya Bint al-Hussein, sister of the current King Abdullah of Jordan, far exceeds it: 552 million pounds, equal to about 650 million euros in total, of which 300 million, just a check for his wife. In one solution.

It ended like this the largest divorce case in all of English legal history: the seventy-two-year-old Middle Eastern multibillionaire, prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, was not satisfied with the array of very fierce lawyers he had deployed to oppose the lawyer hired by his ex-wife. Fiona Shackleton – who, after representing Prince Charles in the divorce from Lady Diana, took charge of the case of the Jordanian princess – managed to tap the Emir not only hefty divorce allowance for his ex-wife, but also the fixed payment of six and a half million a year each for the maintenance of the couple’s two children, Jalila e Zayed, aged 14 and 9, e a guarantee of € 341 million.

“Every effort has been made to arrive at a reasonable solution, given the exceptional wealth and living standards to which these two boys they were used to it during their parents’ marriage, ”the High Court said. “A case totally out of the ordinary, in which a 9-year-old child is given three very expensive cars just because he is used to receiving cars as gifts, ”said one of the judges.

Such a heavy sentence, however, was not unexpected. Already at the beginning of 2021 the High Court had established that Mohamed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum hacked the cell phones of his ex-wife, his lawyer and several of his employees using Israeli military technology Pegasus; and that Haya of Jordan and her children were “actually very vulnerable”, especially the children, who needed “to be protected in the UK, not from external threats but from their own father.”

And from 2019 that the Jordanian princess found refuge in London after fleeing the Emir’s palace with her children, and ever since the spotlight has turned on the usually tight world of Middle Eastern royal families and on the complicated situation of this family in particular.

Is, 47 years old, the youngest of the Emir’s six wives, claimed to feel in danger and fear for the life of her children: first for the publication by her ex-husband of a poem in which they read threats to a woman guilty of an extramarital affair with a bodyguard (just like her, accused of having had a love affair with her bodyguard), then for having discovered that two of her husband’s daughters – Latifa e Shamsa – had been kidnapped and brought back to Dubai against their will. He, who has always rejected both charges, on the other hand, has done everything to get rid of his ex-wife and keep his two children still minors.

Now the battle – at least the legal one – has been closed. But the war is not necessarily over.