Princess Anne's £400 an hour Olympic job

Sep 10, 2007, 12:00 GMT

Britain's Princess Anne is being paid £400 an hour to attend planning meetings for the 2012 London Olympics.

The payments - which are shown in documents filed by the Games' organising committee - have been condemned by critics of the ever-expanding Olympic bill.

Princess Anne - who represented Britain in the equestrian event at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 - is a non-executive director of the International Olympic Committee.

She was paid £4,000 last year for attending four board meetings, totalling ten hours of work, for the organising committee.

The princess' fortune was most recently estimated as amounting to around £21 million.

Princess Anne's spokeswoman told Britain's Mail on Sunday newspaper: "The Princess Royal has received a fee, in common with other directors of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games.

"What the princess does with the payment is a private matter, but you should be aware that the princess makes considerable donations to charity every year from a number of sources as income."

The cost of the 2012 London Olympic Games was originally estimated by the government in 2003 as £2.3 billion. This estimate has now been increased to £9.3 billion, but in July the Chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee has warned costs could now exceed £10 billion.

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