Dubai ruler organised kidnapping of his children, UK court rules
Source: The Guardian
The Guardian and other news organisations can reveal the ruling following months of private hearings and a legal dispute that reached the supreme court. It details an extraordinary family saga spanning 20 years during which the sheikh, 70, organised international kidnappings, imprisoned two of his daughters and “deprived [them] of their liberty”.
Much of the 34-page fact-finding ruling by Sir Andrew McFarlane, president of the family division of the high court in England and Wales, records the events surrounding the notorious disappearances of Princess Shamsa from Cambridge in 2000, when she was 19, and of Princess Latifa, who was seized by Indian army commandos from the Indian Ocean in 2018, when she was 32, before being forcibly returned to Dubai.
...
The sheikh’s actions only emerged after his sixth and youngest wife, Princess Haya, 45, fled to London last April with their two young children. His attempt to return the children to Dubai triggered a legal action in the family courts.
Haya resisted it with a counter-claim seeking a forced marriage protection order in respect of their daughter, alleging that the sheikh was trying to marry her off to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. ‘MBS’, as he is better known, has been accused of involvement in the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The court did not prove this allegation to be true.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/05/dubai-ruler-sheikh-mohammed-organised-kidnapping-of-his-children-uk-court-finds
Despite being vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, 70, is very much a part of the British establishment.
The billionaire sheikh is on friendly terms with the British royal family and spends a considerable amount of time at his multiple UK residences. In June last year, just over a month after initiating proceedings against Princess Haya in the high court, he received a trophy from the Queen when one of his horses won a race at Royal Ascot.
...
It would be hard to overstate the sheikh’s importance to British flat racing, which has soaked up colossal amounts of his money in the decades since Hatta became his first winner , at Brighton in 1977. His two giant stables in Newmarket, at Moulton Paddocks and Stanley House, are just the beginning of his holdings in the town that calls itself racing’s HQ.
...
While he owns hundreds of racehorses directly, in yards across the country, many others are owned by his associates or family members. Insiders estimated on Thursday that well over half of all the racehorses in Newmarket could be linked to him one way or another and he is a major employer there. “If he decided to leave, the economy in this town could collapse,” one said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/05/kidnapping-court-judgment-can-sheikh-mohammeds-reputation-survive
= new reply since forum marked as read
