Princess director may scoop £124m

A GERMAN leisure entrepreneur on the P&O Princess Cruises board stands to scoop a windfall payment of

e200m (£124m) if Carnival succeeds in its £3bn hostile takeover bid, it has been alleged.

Horst Rahe, 61, joined the Princess board last May after selling his Aida Cruises to the company, and stands to earn massive payouts in the event of a change of ownership of Princess. Aida forms a key part of Princess's Seetours operation in Germany.

Carnival has asked for more details on the conditions of his earn-out arrangements, which could be yet another potential block to a Carnival deal, on top of the complex poison pill arrangements which Carnival chief executive Mickey Arison said could end up costing it up to $1bn(£695m).

Meanwhile, a former senior US monopoly official has blown a hole in one of P&O Princess s key reasons for rejecting Carnival s approaches. Princess has claimed its planned merger with Royal Caribbean has more chance of getting through the US monopoly regulators than a takeover by the world s biggest cruise operator.

But Ken Starling, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's anti-trust division, told an independent conference of investors that either deal would raise equal concerns among Washington officials. Both would be fair game in terms of the announced levels of concentration that are of concern to the US enforcement agency, he said.