Princess tried to evade £5m hotel charge

A SAUDI princess has been caught trying to sneak out of a luxury Paris hotel with her entourage of 60 staff because she couldn’t pay her £5 million bill.

Maha Al-Sudairi attempted the 3:30am escape from the five-star Shangri-La hotel after being “cut off” by Saudi King Abdullah for overspending.

But hotel staff called police, who prevented her loading scores of suitcases into a fleet of limousines in the street outside early last Friday morning.

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Princess Sudairi was confined to a palace in the Middle Eastern state by the king last year after leaving behind a trail of unpaid bills across Europe in 2009.

But the wayward wife of Saudi Crown Prince and deputy prime minister Nayef ben Abdel Aziz skipped to France last December.

She checked into an entire 41-room floor of the Shangri-La Hotel on 23 December.

Since then she has dodged demands from the hotel to settle her ballooning bill, French daily Le Parisien reported. She had also run up huge bills at luxury boutiques, the paper said.

Police said they would be asking the Saudi embassy in Paris to help settle her accounts, but were unable to arrest her as she has diplomatic immunity.

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