Princess Haya, who was the sixth wife of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, paid around Rs 12 crore to her British bodyguard lover to keep quiet about their two-year-long affair, a report said on Monday.
It added that Haya also paid a similar amount to three other Dubai royal family bodyguards, who came to know about the alleged affair. They were probably ‘bought off’ for not discussing the affair.
Daily Mail has reported that besides the whopping amount to buy silence, 46-year-old Princess Haya, the daughter of the late King of Jordan, gifted her lover – now identified as 37-year-old Russell Flowers – luxurious items such as a watch worth around Rs 12 lakh and a vintage shotgun worth around Rs 49 lakh.
The secret affair came out in the open during Princess Haya’s child-custody hearing against her husband in London’s High Court.
Flowers served in the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment for five years. He began working full time for the princess in 2016 and escorted her on many trips abroad.
The affair ended Flowers’s four-year marriage.
Daily Mail has mentioned the friends of Flowers’s ex-wife as saying that the ‘cheating’ had left her ‘devastated’.
They claimed that she told them that Russell Flowers had been seduced by Princess Haya by the “money and gifts. She gave him lots of expensive gifts and made sure that he was always by her side.”
“When she was in the UK she would be out with him almost every night and sometimes they did not return home until the following morning. I was told Russell had his head turned and went from a loving husband to someone his wife did not recognise,” the friend was quoted as saying.
Notably, it is being reported that the princess dismisses a number of claims being made about the two-year affair.
After her husband confronted her, the princess fled to London from her home in Dubai along with her two children in 2018. She has won the custody of their two children – an 11-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son.
The princess and her children now live in a house worth around Rs 850 crore at Kensington in London. ( DNA )
