Princess left €15 million debts
Judge allows creditors to open Saudi royal’s boxes to seize designer clothing, artworks and jewellery
BOXES containing what is thought to be tens of millions of euros worth of designer clothing, handbags, artworks and jewellery are to be opened in a bid to repay €15million of debts owed after a Saudi Arabian princess fled Paris.
Maha al-Sudaïri is being sued by luxury Paris palace hotel Shangri-La after leaving the hotel in the middle of the night with her retinue of 60 staff – and without paying the bill of six million euros for her six-month stay where she took over the seventh-floor.
She skipped out in mid-June last year and after details of her debts were revealed another seven creditors came forward with unpaid bills ranging from €6,000 for chocolates to €11,000 for dry-cleaning and €1.5m to the car-hire company Cinquième Etoile for the use of two Rolls-Royce and around 30 chauffeurs.
Now a judge in Nanterre has ordered that property that the 50-year-old left behind at Clichy-la-Garenne (Hauts-de-Seine) should be opened to help pay her debts.
The princess, widow of Saudi prince Nayef ben Abdelaziz Al Saoud (who died last year), was already well-known in Parisian shops – for leaving a trail of unpaid bills in 2009. She has diplomatic immunity.
