THE SUNDAY TIMES. Ailing king spends £3m a day on family holiday.
The monarch may be under the weather, but his summer sojourn with thousand of nearest and dearest at his enormous whitewashed palace resort on the Costa del Sol, has brought joy to Mareblla, where locals are enjoiying an unprecedented boom in tourism revenues.
According to accounts in the spanish press, the regal caravan extends to 3,000 hangers-on, most of them membersof the royal family who arrived in Spain last month aboard private jumbo jets. The total cost to the king is estimated at £3m a day. that does not include the shopping.
Such is the largesse of the wahhabi ruler that even while he recovers from cataract surgery, he is happy to splash out on other people's fun. Saudi "princelings" and their children have been swarming into El Corte Ingles, the Spanish department store, for privately arranged shopping prees that conclude with telephone calls to the palace for confirmation that "el rey pagarį": "The king will pay".
His last, two-month summer break at the palace, in 1999, pumped some £50m into local coffers.
It is only the fourth time that 79-year-old Fahd, whose personal fortune is estimated at £20 billion, has stayed in the palace complex, which was built in the 1970s and renovated last year at a cost of £8m. It is considered much less opulent than his habitual lodgings in Riyadh.
The main residence was said to have been modelled on the White House. There is a separate palace for Salman, the king's brother, as well as landing strips for the retinue's three helicopters, sports centres, mosques, a hospital and a host of lesser villas for guests, their families and servants.
Yet how much Fahd gets to enjoy the facilities is a subject of great debate. Since suffering a stroke in 1995, he has left the burden of running the world's biggest oil-exporting country to Crown Prince Abdullah, a half brother. Poor health - he is said to be suffering from heart trouble, diabetes, arthritis and obesity - has kept the continually convalescing king lonely confinement.
He is seen only rarely in Marbella: on August 29, a Rolls- Royce carried him in a convoy of 15 vehicles to the dock. Under the gaze of a handful of foreign tourists, the exhausted-looking king, accompanied by 30 women in dark robes, was pushed in his wheelchair up the gangplank of his royal yacht, the 71 metre Al-Diriyah, for an afternoon cruise in the bay.
Salman has his own vessel, the Tweq, which is slightly longer than Fahd's. Both ships are so large that they have to go all the way to Gibraltar to refuel: the pump in Marbella does not have the capacity to fill them.
No expense, it seems, is spared in putting the king's guests at ease.
Fahd's secretary rented 500 mobile telephones for distribution among the most intimate cronies. A crockery supplier received an order to provide a new set of knives, forks and plates for the palace each day, adding an extra £75,000 to the king's weekly holiday bill.
A local florist is delivering bouquets worth £1,000 to the palace each day.
Other items are flown in from Saudi Arabia, such as lamb and water for the king's table.
His departure date is as yet unknown but his household is used to pulling up tent pegs at a moment's notice: in 1999, the palace was vacated in a single morning when the king decreed that it was time to go home. This time, however, his doctors may be advising a longer rest from Riyadh-whatever the strain on his wallet.
|
Questions
or Comments? klein@kleinandpartner.com
<<
Back
|
rticle