World: Ex-cop was hired to threaten bodyguard as part of campaign of intimidation on behalf of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a British daily newspaper revealed.

According to the Daily Mail, a British private eye hired by Dubai’s ruler to threaten his runaway wife’s security chief can today be unmasked as a former Scotland Yard anti-terror officer.

It added that Stuart Page, whose identity was previously a secret, helped wage a campaign of intimidation on behalf of billionaire Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a friend of the Queen, the High Court found.

He threatened to damage the reputation of a senior bodyguard hired by the sheikh’s youngest wife Princess Haya after she fled to London in fear of her life with their children in 2019 unless he stopped working for her, a judge ruled, the newspaper said.

The princess and her autocratic ex-husband have been locked in the costliest child custody battle in UK legal history at the High Court.

It has been raging for more than two years and the High Court has made damning findings including that the sheikh previously orchestrated the armed kidnap of his runaway daughter Princess Shamsa from Cambridgeshire.

The Daily Mail noted that in the excoriating findings earlier this month, the High Court ruled Sheikh Mohammed had run an illegal phone hacking racket on UK soil to tap the phones of Princess Haya and her British solicitors and bodyguards.

Now it can be revealed he also hired the services of 70-year-old Mr Page, a former Metropolitan Police officer turned private security consultant who has a long track record of being embroiled in cases involving hacking.

In June 2019, soon after Oxford-educated Princess Haya – the sheikh’s sixth wife – escaped Dubai to the UK in a private jet with the couple’s young children, Mr Page went to meet her security chief, himself a former senior policeman, in London and delivered a ‘clear threat’ to discredit him personally and professionally, a judge found.

In a ruling last year, the High Court said that the 45-year-old princess’s unnamed security chief, who had ‘a distinguished career as a police officer at a high level’ and was ‘used to very challenging conversations’ had been left ‘seriously troubled and concerned’ by the encounter. 

The court’s finding was made without evidence from Mr Page who denies any wrongdoing.

Previously, the High Court has referred to him as ‘SP’ – but now a court order has unmasked him as Stuart Page.

The meeting happened two days after racehorse owner Sheikh Mohammed was pictured with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at Royal Ascot, and two days before he published poems which his wife interpreted as death threats.

Mr Page was an anti-terror officer with the Metropolitan Police in the 1970s and an Army reservist before reinventing himself as a troubleshooter for Middle Eastern regimes. 

The Bentley-driving private investigator – who charges up to £220,000 ($300,000) a month and has a £5million London townhouse – and his security firms Page Group Ltd and Page Protective Services have worked for the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. 

And until recently, he provided security for British embassies including the UK mission in Tel Aviv, Israel, through Page Protective Services.