A FORMER supermodel has been awarded a £53 million cash settlement in a High Court divorce money battle with her Saudi billionaire ex-husband.
Christina Estrada, 54, was fighting for £196m from international businessman Sheikh Walid Juffali, 61, to meet her “reasonable needs”.
Her lawyers said the total settlement she is to receive, taking into account her own assets, is in the region of £75m.
She rejected an offer which, added to her own assets, would have given her some £37m to live on.
Her lawyers said the award of approximately £75m is “by more than £50m the largest needs award ever made by an English court”.
Ms Estrada said in a statement: “I always wanted to resolve the matter amicably.
“Walid and I were happily married for 12 years and have a beautiful daughter together. He took both a second wife and divorced me without my knowledge.
“His use of diplomatic immunity to try to prevent me from access to a legally binding settlement set a worrying precedent.”
Ms Estrada was intensively cross-examined in court on her needs, including her claim that she requires £1m a year for clothes, including £40,000 for fur coats, £109,000 for haute couture dresses and £21,000 for shoes every year.
Ms Estrada’s lawyers estimate her ex-husband is worth £8 billion. But Dr Juffali, who has had three wives, said in a written statement that was a grossly exaggerated “fantasy” figure and put his current net worth at about £113.8m.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article