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The wife of Oman’s foreign minister is being ordered to pay £1m lost at the Ritz Casino in London. She has already paid back the initial £2m lost in April of 2012.
Noora Abdullah Mahawish Al-Daher, who is married to the foreign minister of Oman, signed checks in exchange for gambling chips. Those checks were later dishonored, according to court documents.
She and her family later gambled away £3m ($5m) in Las Vegas. Mrs Al-Daher would later claim she had a gambling problem and that the Ritz Casino should have exercised better care in restraining her from betting.
High court deputy judge Seys Llewellyn QC ruled there was no legal authority that supported her case and gave judgment to the casino "in the sum of £1m, as claimed", plus interest.
"I hold that there was no unlawful giving of credit to Mrs Al-Daher," he said.
On the question of a duty of care, he said: "In my judgment authority does not support such a duty."
The judge said he had no doubt that, if Mrs Al-Daher had been refused permission to carry on gambling at the Ritz casino, she "would have been eager and inclined to gamble at other casinos thereafter, and very probably during her stay in London during the days or weeks after 3 April 2012".
"It is striking that she and her family gambled away $5m in Las Vegas in June some two to three months later," he said.
Judge Llewellyn rejected Mrs Al-Daher's counter-claim to recover the £1m of her debt she had paid in December 2012.
- Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com
