'Secret wife' of late Saudi king wins payout worth more than £20m

High court judge rules Saudi royal family must honour promise that Janan Harb would be looked after for the rest of her life

The Guardian, Tuesday 3 November 2015

Janan Harb told the court she married King Fahd in 1968, when she
was 19. Photograph: REX Shutterstock

A woman who claims to be the secret wife of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has won a payout worth more than £20m to honour a promise that she would be looked after for the rest of her life.

Palestinian-born Janan Harb, 68, claimed she had lived a cosseted life in the embrace of one of the world’s richest and most secretive families for more than 20 years and had married Fahd in 1968.

The Saudi royal family has fought her claims through the high court for more than a decade, insisting that no official marriage took place and that she was owed nothing.

On Monday, however, a judge ruled in Harb’s favour, saying she was entitled to more than £15m plus the value of two expensive west London properties.

Mr Justice Peter Smith also ordered Fahd’s son, Prince Abdul Aziz, to pay legal costs estimated at more than £1m.

The prince, who did not attend the court hearings to counter Harb’s claims, must pay damages of £12m with interest of £3.25m for leaving her without her money for years.

Smith also ordered the prince to transfer two luxury flats in Chelsea worth around £5m to her name, making a total award of £20.25m.

As she left court, Harb said: “I am very very happy. This has been 12 years of misery for me. I am very happy with British justice, otherwise they wanted me to go to Saudi Arabia where they could have stoned me.

“I am very relieved and only wish the prince could have honoured what his father wanted and stopped delaying things. He is just being very mean.”

Harb told the court she had secretly married Fahd in 1968, when she was 19 and he was still a prince and his country’s interior minister.

Born to Christian hoteliers in Ramallah, she said she had met her future husband the year before in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she was working as a translator at the Venezuelan embassy.

She said she had accompanied him on trips to Europe and the US, and that she had been introduced to world leaders and wealthy businessmen.

Harb said she was banished from Saudi Arabia by the king’s immediate family in 1970 after they “wrongly” blamed her for his addiction to methadone. She thought then that banishment had led to a divorce.

She has also said that although Fahd had other wives, he continued to keep in touch with her after she married a second man, a Lebanese lawyer, in 1974.

By the late 1970s, Harb also had a home in London and two daughters and had set up an aerobics franchise, opening branches in Europe and the Middle East.

Fahd would occasionally fly to London in his private jet to visit her, but their marriage was dictated by his schedule, friends said.

Harb has said she continued a relationship with Fahd until he suffered a stroke in 1995, and that his advisers were enraged when it emerged that she had abandoned Islam to become a Scientologist.

Monday’s court case rested upon her claim that Abdul Aziz, the son of another of Fahd’s wives, had met her at the Dorchester hotel in London on 20 June 2003 when the king was seriously ill.

She said he agreed in the early hours of the morning to pay her £12m and transfer two flats in Cheyne Walk to her name, to honour his father’s promise of lifelong financial support.

The prince made written statements to the court denying her claim, but Smith ruled that there had been an agreement.

He said Harb has received £5m from the Saudis in the past, but that she has used £3m of it to pay off debts, including an £85,000 gambling debt, before spending the balance within two years on what he described as her lavish lifestyle.

He said: “It is fair to say that she maintained a high maintenance lifestyle as she says, to which she had become accustomed whilst being supported by the late king.”

Smith added that the £5m “was plainly payment to buy her silence in respect of her relationship with the late king”.

He also said that while her evidence was unsure and at times bizarre, he believed she was telling the truth about the 2003 agreement with Abdul Aziz.

Harb intially launched a much larger claim against the Saudi royal family in 2004. Fahd, however, died the following year aged 82, and the high court ruled that her previous £400m maintenance claim died with him.