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Court battle: Sara Al Amoudi
A multimillionaire couple who say they were bankrupted by a woman dubbed “The Vamp in the Veil” have lost a six-year battle for her to face criminal prosecution.
Amanda Clutterbuck, 64, and Ian Paton, 53, accused Sara Al-Amoudi of pretending to be the daughter of a Saudi billionaire and an Arabian “princess” and claimed she had swindled them out of a £14 million property portfolio.
But the couple lost a 2014 High Court battle when a judge concluded six luxury Knightsbridge flats had been handed over to Ms Al-Amoudi by Mr Paton to repay loans from their “clandestine relationship”.
They never accepted the judge’s ruling and have been campaigning for the last six years for the Met Police to bring a prosecution against Ms Al-Amoudi.
A police investigation was shut down and the couple have now lost a High Court bid to compel the force to reopen the probe.
Ms Al-Amoudi’s identity remains shrouded in mystery, almost a decade after the original High Court battle where she attracted the “Vamp in the Veil” nickname.
She would arrived at court in a Rolls Royce Phantom with HRH number plates and sweep into the building flanked by minders and wearing a selection of veils paired with five-inch platform heels.
Ms Clutterbuck and Mr Paton accused her of being a cocaine-using prostitute from Ethiopia, suggesting she had posed as a billionaire and calling her evidence to the court a “farrago of lies”.
However Mrs Justice Asplin concluded Ms Al-Amoudi was “a woman of some wealth”, with at least £2 million in an offshore bank account, and she accepted that while Ms Al-Amoudi had not referred to herself as a “princess” she had suggested she had been married to “a member of the Saudi royal family”.
The judge dismissed the suggestion that she was a prostitute and accepted evidence from a member of the House of Lords that Mr Paton had been “using Ms Al Amoudi’s money”.
The latest court battle heard how the couple had been told the Met Police investigation was closed and exercised their “victim right to review” which failed.
Seeking judicial review of that decision, Mr Paton’s brother George Paton told Judge Richard Hermer QC that Ms Clutterbuck and Mr Paton had been financially ruined and that their relatives have lost millions too.
"They have lost their homes, they have been bankrupted. Their wider families have lost millions of pounds,” he said.
“The suspect (Ms Al-Amoudi) has stolen tens of millions of pounds of property and money. The loss of the victims is extraordinary," he claimed.
Mr Paton claimed there is evidence Ms Al-Amoudi used a fake Saudi Arabian birth certificate to establish her credentials with HSBC in 2008 and suggested they had “admissible, cogent DNA evidence” about her true identity.
However lawyers for the Met said detectives who analysed the evidence had pointed out many legal and evidential obstacles any prosecution would face going to trial.
They highlighted the key fact that Ms Al-Amoudi had been exonerated in the fraud case brought by the couple at the High Court, where the standard of proof was far lower than in a criminal court.
Detectives handling the case had also pointed out that they had received no proper cooperation from the Saudi Arabian government when trying to pin down Ms Al-Amoudi’s true identity.
The police said there was insufficient evidence to prove Ms Amoudi was guilty of identity fraud.
Delivering his ruling, Judge Hermer said the couple’s case is “unarguable”.
“The events have clearly had a profound impact on them; by events I mean not only the criminal behaviour they contend they have suffered from, but also their evident frustration at the failure to prosecute that individual”.
But he said a court would be reluctant to interfere with a police decision which had been taken after detailed analysis.
