When the ‘Dubai dream’ goes wrong

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the nightmare of getting trapped in debt in Dubai.

0:22Albert Douglas was out of options. He was on the run from the authorities, halfway across the world from his family in the UK, with no easy way to make it home to them. What now? So I went down to Wembley and met the UK representative of the smugglers and I paid them a deposit of£20 ,000. Albert's son Wolfgang had made contact with a gang of people smugglers. He was gambling on them being able to get Albert home. Albert was driven in a pickup truck to the agreed meeting point. The smugglers had cut a hole through a fence on the border. On the other side, another car was waiting for him to speed him away to safety.

1:05Albert wasn't trying to escape a war zone or a hostile state. He was in one of the most glitzy holiday hotspots in the world. A place that likes to think of itself as a safe haven for tourists, for business expats, influencers, and the super rich. He was trying to get himself out of the United Arab Emirates.

1:29who was supposed to go over the border, over the Oman border in LA. There we had another car waiting for him who was going to take him to the Dow boat dock of Oman to go across into Iran, where he was going to be met with another party, who was also already organised, to take him to the Pakistani border where he would go overfoot. And from Pakistan, he would lay low, where he would jump on a plane on an emergency travel document and come back to the UK. Hands up. Help me. I'm running for my life. The stakes were high. This plan came with no guarantees. Over the phone from London, on the line with one of the smugglers, Wolfgang listened in.

2:13He held his breath, anxious to hear the moment his dad had safely made it to the other side. Then it all kicked off. When I heard, I said, what's going on? in my house listening to this. And I just, my heart was just in my mouth. The phone line went dead. So I ring my contacts in the UAE and we send people to look for him. We can't find him anywhere. Weeks later, word came through. Albert was being held in prison in the UAE. And for the next four years, as the case wound its way through the courts, the Douglas family found themselves in a frightening mirror world, fighting to get Albert home. It's not a world you can see if you follow the industry of influencers who have made Dubai their home, selling the sunny, shiny fantasy that the city promises.

3:12Greetings from a very relaxing dog walk in the best and safest city in the world, Dubai. You are 100 % safer in Dubai, in Abu Dhabi, in anywhere in the Middle East, than you are walking down the street after 6pm in Manchester, Birmingham, London.

3:35And yet scores of influencers, business owners and unsuspecting tourists have been detained in Dubai, charged with breaking laws they may not even have been aware of. From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus. From paradise to prison, one family's escape from Dubai.

3:58Will Caldwell, you're a freelance feature writer and you've written about Albert Douglas's case. Now, to begin with, can you set the stage a little? Can you tell us how and why he ended up living in Dubai?

4:11Will Coldwell:So Albert's from a Roman Egypt family from Enfield, North London, and he ran this successful wooden flooring company. He decided to move out to Dubai in the late 90s, seeing a lot of potential there to expand. The Burj al-Arab, or Arab Tower Hotel, now dominating the shores of the Persian Gulf, from a man-made island off the coast of Dubai. Obviously, this was a time when Dubai was booming. Stretching five and a half kilometres into the Arabian Gulf lies the most audacious engineering project the world has ever seen. It's a very exciting place to be. There was new buildings and developments popping up everywhere.

4:51Will Coldwell:You know, the Dubai we know today with skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa were still kind of under construction and, you know, huge amounts of money were pouring in. It's just amazing. You know, I look at this and I say, I've never seen anything like it before, but then again, no one has. I think for businessmen such as Albert and his family, it felt like a place with a lot of potential. And so he encouraged his son Wolfgang to also move out there and set up another business. You've interviewed them both at length. Can you tell me a bit about that and about the father-son dynamic? Yeah, so it was a kind of family business in the UK.

5:30Will Coldwell:And when Albert moved to Dubai, Wolfgang continued to run the UK company. And, you know, things were going so well in Dubai for Albert that he suggested that Wolfgang close up the UK company and join him there. The Gulf was the big gold rush to come. We're an entrepreneurial-minded person. How exciting the concept of being a part of something that has new scales, new dimensions, new levels. So Wolfgang did this to start a kind of separate company, which they say was to act as a friendly competitor so they could take more of the market as a family, I suppose. And so the family moved to Dubai. There were two family businesses sort of concurrently in operation, both in flooring.

6:17They're doing really well. How did they settle into their new life in Dubai? Like what kind of circles were they moving in? What did the expat family life look like at that point?

6:26Will Coldwell:Albert says that he was kind of never particularly in Dubai for the lavish lifestyle that people kind of associate it with. He was just a British businessman who his son describes him as quite an old fashioned kind of guy. He's a very well-dressed, very softly spoken, three-piece suit, even on a hot day at the beach. You know, British gentleman-like to the next degree. You know, he believes in that stuff, you know. He's straight, very honest, very hard work. He was just focused on growing his company. Wolfgang, his son, is a more kind of high-energy, obviously younger person who threw himself into the sort of social scene in the city and became quite close and entwined with many powerful people in the country.

7:14They sort of wanted you to be at every event and every party. They want me there. You were like a business celebrity. Yes. To a degree, I was a business development celebrity. And what I was to everybody else was proof in the pudding.

7:29Will Coldwell:And business was booming. They were living in the Palm Jumeirah, which was, you know, a very luxurious place to live. Yeah, I bought the Bentley convertible car at the time, which was quite a newish thing. The Lamborghinis. And things were exceptionally good. Business was great, you know. Every day was a lottery winner. Foreign businessmen such as Wolfgang and Albert were very much embraced by the Dubai elite at that time. You know, a fact that kind of really comes through when you hear about the fact that Wolfgang was gifted a pet tiger by the ruler of Dubai, which they sort of briefly kept at their home in the Palm Jumeirah until it grew too big for them to look after and it had to be returned to the Sheikh's private zoo.

8:08Wow. So very flashy lifestyle, lots of bling.

8:12Will Coldwell:Very flashy. Tiger clubs, I mean, a whole different world. In their telling, Will, when do things start to go a bit wrong? So the businesses were growing and everything seemed to be going swimmingly. And I would work on these large scale projects like Le Maire Beach, the Burj Khalifa, City Walk. And I'm talking tens and tens and tens of millions of pounds. But at some point, he says, it became increasingly difficult to get paid. This, he says, caused his businesses to start to run into debt. And, you know, he began to struggle to pay his own creditors and causing a kind of domino effect in which more and more financial problems are starting to be associated with his company.

9:06You said that Wolfgang began to get more and more worried when his clients weren't paying him on time. Why would that be so particularly concerning in the UAE?

9:15Will Coldwell:Being in debt is a very kind of vulnerable position to be in Dubai because financial offences can be met with severe penalties, bounce checks, even a dispute over an unpaid taxi fare can result in jail time, and even civil cases can lead to lengthy prison sentences. On top of this, the legal system there can be very difficult for a foreigner to navigate, and power is concentrated in the country within a very small number of kind of Emirati population, which means that there have been a number of cases over the years which sort of show the way that this system can be quite easily weaponised against people who fall out of favour, have them thrown in jail, seize their assets or kind of extort payments out of family members in order to kind of pay off debts for something that they may or may not have anything to do with.

10:06And what has happened to other British nationals who found themselves caught up in what looks like this debt trap?

10:13Will Coldwell:Yeah, so one of the most shocking cases is that of two property developers, Ryan Cornelius and Charles Ridley, also from the UK. So the United Nations has called for the immediate release of the British businessman Ryan Cornelius, who has been imprisoned in Dubai since 2008. Who were arrested and charged in relation to a kind of fraud connected to a bank loan they had made from Dubai Islamic Bank as part of a kind of huge development project. 65-year-old Ryan Cornelius was sentenced to 10 years for fraud over a property deal. But after serving his time, he was then given another 20-year sentence.

10:50Will Coldwell:They were thrown into jail. All their assets have been seized and been in prison ever since.

11:05Well, so Wolfgang is beginning to grow more and more worried about how much debt his company is accruing. What happens next?

11:12Will Coldwell:So at this point, you know, things are kind of falling apart for Wolfgang's company. He's back in the UK. He needed some medical treatment. I was genuinely very ill. And I'm looking at it and I'm ill. And I'm not being paid. And it's become very, very dark. And, you know, while there, he also sought legal advice, which very much warned him against returning to Dubai, making it quite clear that numerous people wanted him in prison at this point. and if he went back, that's what would happen. Albert Douglas, at this point, returned to the UK to see his son and discuss the situation. And I said to my father, do not go back.

11:53Stay home here. That's not safe anymore. And my father, he said, I'm not going to leave what I've built.

12:01Will Coldwell:It didn't kind of make sense to him that he should be held liable for the debts incurred by Wolfgang's company. He also sought legal advice and had got a letter which clarified this too. And as far as he was concerned, there was no reason why he shouldn't be able to return to Dubai to continue to operate his business. I believed in their system. I thought the people that got put in jail were there because they must have done something wrong because they have the laws like we do in the UK. So they've been found guilty fairly, properly, you know, by a jury, which they don't have there. And I just never, ever thought that so many innocent people go to prison.

12:45And so he did go back, despite the advice that he probably shouldn't. What happens to him then?

12:53Will Coldwell:Yeah, so Albert did go back. He landed at Dubai Airport and was arrested.

13:06so albert a grandfather who had lived and worked in dubai for two decades with a considerable amount of success and has from what you've described like pretty decent contacts in the country he's arrested on arrival at dubai international airport then what happens

13:22Will Coldwell:As Albert and Wolfgang tell it, this sort of was the beginning of a kind of fairly dizzying legal process in which Albert was charged, found guilty of various financial offences. He was bailed, but, you know, had kind of various hearings and appeals during this period, during which he struggled to kind of make sense of what the charges were against him. It was only later, they say, that he started to find out what evidence was being used that was connecting him to Wolfgang's company. And according to the Douglases, there was an outdated business license which had Albert's name on, which the Dubai prosecutors said showed that he was part of Wolfgang's business.

14:08Will Coldwell:The prosecutors also pulled out a bounced check which they said Albert had signed. However, Albert has always denied signing this check and forensic analysis of his signature, which was commissioned by the family as expert witness evidence, was disregarded by the courts. So from everything as you understand it, it sounds like there were pretty trumped up charges against Albert. And the whole process was presumably quite confusing because the entire trial was conducted in Arabic, of which he wasn't or isn't a fluent speaker. Yeah, so even after Albert was arrested and charged and found guilty, he still believed in the system and thought the truth would prevail, that eventually this whole mess would get sorted out and things would be fine again.

14:54Will Coldwell:He was appealing against the judgments and these appeals went up through the higher and higher courts until it eventually reached the highest appeal court. And Albert was watching this hearing and this was sort of the moment when he kind of realised that maybe things weren't going to go his way. Ultimately, this appeal failed and Albert now was facing a lengthy prison sentence. and it was at this point really, as he says, kind of right up to the kind of last minute that he decided that he had nothing to lose really but to try and flee the country. And I told him to flee the country when he was first arrested so I'd already made contact with all the parties.

15:35He said, press the button. He was arrested while trying to find the hole in the fence that they'd cut for him to escape through and he was taken to prison. What did he say about the conditions inside?

15:49Will Coldwell:So, I mean, being in prison in the UAE is not a great place to be. Albert and many other people that have spent time in prison in Dubai have talked a lot about the overcrowding and other kind of abuses that they've experienced. The system has a kind of bad reputation for that. Everything is filthy dirty. The blanket is something that has been reused and reused. They never get washed. All the rooms are filthy and dirty, and they're built to accommodate. There's three bunk beds, all the same, so six people. But you could quite easily have 15 people there. I was sleeping in a room. The majority of them were murderers, and they were there on the death sentence.

16:39They got nothing to lose.

16:41Will Coldwell:And Albert himself claims he was a victim of torture during this period, being interrogated while having his sleep deprived, experiencing beatings. Beating and torture is commonplace. Beat you and torture you, then ask you a load of questions. It's commonplace. I couldn't believe it's wholesale. Now, if you go in there... During his time in prison, Albert met inmates from all around the world, including fellow Brits and Americans. But most people imprisoned in the UAE are from South Asia, migrant workers whose visas are tied to their employment status and who can risk detention just for trying to leave their job.

17:22Because Albert's family were back home in the UK, he rarely had any visitors. But every now and then, Wolfgang was able to speak to him by phone and you recorded some of those conversations. My beatings relate to some eight months ago. There were several injuries. Perhaps the most striking was where the bone was sticking through my shoulder and I had an operation on last week but I still have head injuries caused by the same beating causing severe pain, migraines and dizziness. I also have two broken bones in my right hand and I also have a disc slipped out of my back. What has been the response from the Dubai government when you've gone and asked for a right of reply in writing this piece?

18:35Will Coldwell:Yeah, I contacted the Dubai media office and they didn't respond.

18:46Well what recourse did Albert have at this point? I mean he's gone through this trial endured really horrific conditions. Weren't the British consular able to help?