Trapped: A Couple's Five Years of Hell in Dubai

by Lee, M

  Even on our healthy incomes our dream of buying a house in Sydney’s Balmain was still a way off. We made a plan to clear ourselves of the remaining money we owed, including HECS debts, and build up a decent deposit for a mortgage. Little cottages in Balmain, nothing fancy, were then selling for close to a million dollars — sometimes more. Even if you save $200,000, you’re still borrowing $800,000. I know many people do it, but I couldn’t sleep at night with an $800,000 mortgage. We hoped to save $400,000 and thought it might take a decade to do it. We did allow ourselves one small treat, taking a brief holiday in Hong Kong in 2002, our first overseas trip together.

  It all worked well for a few years. Even being limited to seeing each other on weekends for months at a time wasn’t so bad. If you’re both working in a city like Sydney it’s common to leave for work at 7 o’clock in the morning and not get home until 7 o’clock at night. By the time you cook and eat dinner you might have an hour slumped on the couch together, then you fall into bed exhausted and you get up and do it all again. Instead, we treasured our time together.

  We had friends but we’ve never been social butterflies. I’m not the kind of guy who needs to go out to the pub with his mates to get out of the house and Julie’s never been big on lots of girls’ nights out; we were content to spend the concentrated time we had together.

  JULIE

  Sometimes it was a little lonely during the week when Marcus was away, but we talked all the time and I was busy completing my CPA qualification, which required studying a number of extra subjects (as well as having three years of mentoring). Besides, I had our lovely Yorkshire terrier, Dudley, for company.

  We’d got Dudley in October 2000 when he was an eight-week-old puppy. When I was growing up we’d had all kinds of animals — a dog, a cat, a tortoise, rabbits, guinea pigs, everything. The need to get Dudley was linked in a funny way to my dad’s long-term illness; I was ten when he was diagnosed with emphysema and by 2000, when he was 81, it was clear he really was dying. Somehow what was happening to Dad got me thinking about animals in a really emotional way. He had always been fond of dogs and so had I. I started really wanting to get a dog of our own. Marcus was a bit hesitant because he’d never really had pets, but the way things were I was the one who would be around more, so I’d be the one taking care of a dog. I was going out to work every day and we didn’t have a backyard as such, so it would have to be a small breed that was happy to spend a lot of time indoors.

  When we lived on the beach in Mermaid a neighbour had a Yorkshire terrier. He was an independent little thing who would trot along the beach each morning and come to our place for the day. In the evening we would drop the dog back to the neighbour’s house. He was such a lovely dog; I wanted one just like him.

  When we brought him home, Dudley was a gorgeous tea-cupsized ball of fluff. It was wonderful having him around and soon I couldn’t imagine life without him. Having children hadn’t really been a possibility for us while we were doing uni. When I finished studying I started to think about the idea. But I was already 37 at this point and somehow the moment for having children just seemed to pass. I’ve heard the expression ‘fur kid’ and that’s really what Dudley was for us right from the start. With his arrival we became a family of three.

  MARCUS

  By 2006 we had saved up enough to get our foot on the property ladder, buying a tiny investment property on Chevron Island on the Gold Coast. We borrowed 90 per cent of the purchase price and rented it out. That first little bit of equity enabled us to get a loan to buy a second apartment in the block when it became available. The years of doing without were starting to pay off.

  But all the travel and time apart took its toll. Once in an idle moment (probably waiting for a flight to depart), I worked out I’d taken more than 200 flights in a two-year period. So when, in March that year, I received a text message out of the blue that read, ‘Are you interested in Dubai? Rod,’ I was ready to listen.

  Rod was Rod Gilbody, Chief Operations Officer of Estate Master, a small company that had developed eponymous specialist software for commercial-property development management. The software was used by property developers to do feasibility assessments in order to determine the best course of action: should a site become a commercial or a residential development? Should it be high rise? All the various considerations and possibilities were in play, and through the program you could quantify costs and likely outcomes. I’d used the software in several projects I had worked on.

  Rod and I arranged to meet and talk about his offer. He explained that he had recently returned from Dubai where there was currently a boom in development. One of the biggest projects underway there was the Dubai Waterfront, run by an Australian called Matt Joyce, who worked for its parent company, Nakheel. Matt had seen the Estate Master software in action and thought it might work well for his company, which desperately needed to bring in some systems to formalise decision-making.

  Matt had asked Rod if he knew anyone with the kind of detailed knowledge of Estate Master needed and Rod thought of me. Now he asked if I might be interested in a two-month consultancy onsite in Dubai to get it bedded down. While Investa had been my sole client for the past three years, I was a consultant who put in an invoice every month, not a staff member. This arrangement suited both parties: expert acquisition consultants are extremely useful when acquisitions are being made but companies really don’t want us on their books, with all the usual attendant overheads, in fallow periods. And from the consultant’s point of view, it suits us to be able to move to the next challenge. I told Rod yes, I was potentially interested, and we agreed to keep in touch.

  Julie agreed it was a possibility worth considering and I did a little light research. At that point I’d never heard of Nakheel, the company that would come to cast a shadow over my life, and, despite the fact that Dubai seemed to be on every second travel show that year as ‘the new hot destination’, I couldn’t have located it on a map without help. I knew that it was in the Middle East, but not a lot more.

  As I learned, Dubai isn’t actually a country. It’s an emirate (equivalent to what we might call a principality), with a hereditary sheikh ruler. It has a coastline on the south-east of the Persian (‘Arabian’) Gulf, 12,000 kilometres from Sydney, and is one of seven emirates that make up the UAE — the United Arab Emirates. Its principal city is also called Dubai.

  One day a couple of weeks after I’d met with Rod I was at Investa’s Sydney headquarters for an early morning meeting. At the end of the discussion we all walked out into the central office area, which seemed strangely deserted. Someone passing by explained that the CEO, Chris O’Donnell, was about to make an announcement to staff.

  Chris told the 200 or so people in front of him that having spent five years setting up and running Investa, he was leaving. It was the next part of his speech that really surprised me. He said he was heading to Dubai, where he would become the CEO of a company called Nakheel. What an intriguing coincidence, I thought.

  The next day’s business pages covered the announcement with headlines about how Chris was ‘to take on the World’, a reference to another Nakheel project called ‘The World’, a huge residential and resort development on a reclaimed group of islands that formed the shape of a map of the globe. I searched online to find out more about Nakheel’s operations.

  What I saw was mind-boggling. Investa was a significant player in the Australian market and for it, 50 to 100 plots would be the standard size of a stage-one property development subdivision. By contrast ‘The World’ was just one of the developments on Nakheel’s slate. Its website boasted man-made palm-shaped islands, massive tower complexes, all kinds of amazing visions. Its developments contained thousands of plots — the scope was monumental.

  Suddenly I was seeing references to Dubai all over the place. From our house in Balmain I could see the name of Dubai-based Emirates airlines emblazoned on a skyscraper. It may have been there for months, or even years, but I’d never noticed
it before. The top-rating TV show Getaway seemed to have one report after another on the attractions of what they inevitably called a ‘desert oasis’, complete with luxury hotels that welcomed western tourists.

  Julie and I agreed that if the opportunity firmed, I would say yes. Estate Master were slightly wary about the job — they were confident I’d deliver, but concerned about whether Nakheel would pay for the services provided. Even in those early days, it had a poor reputation internationally as a bill-payer. It didn’t so much default on payments as drag its feet. That might have been acceptable in Dubai, but it wasn’t going to work for Estate Master and it wasn’t going to work for me. It was, however, impossible to change things without being on the spot.

  Our eventual arrangement was that I would stay as little as two weeks if it looked like a hopeless case, or for a maximum of two months if all went well. I’d assess whether it was possible to initiate basic systems allowing Nakheel’s expenses to be categorised and coded, and purchase orders to be raised. These were vital, not just to understand how much Nakheel was spending and on what, but also for the prompt payment of suppliers — in the first instance, Estate Master, and through it, me.

  If it looked promising I would stay on and do as much as possible to bring business practices up to scratch within two months, the maximum time allowed on a tourist visa. Working visas for Dubai took an absurdly long time to organise — so long that it was pointless to even start the process for a short-term project like this one. While official regulations stated that people entering on a tourist visa were not permitted to work, those, like me, categorised as consultants rather than full-time employees, could. Rod himself would be there when I arrived but would have to leave just a couple of days later because of the visa situation.

  I visited the doctor for the vaccinations nicknamed the Middle East 3-pack — malaria, TB and hepatitis — but otherwise when Julie waved me off at Sydney International Airport on 3 June 2006, it wasn’t so very different from all the times she’d dropped me at the domestic terminal for an interstate stint. It was certainly different at the other end, though.

  We touched down in Dubai just after sunrise. Given the insistent marketing of the place, I was startled to look out the plane window as we made our final approach over what seemed like, well, a wasteland. I mistakenly figured we must be far from the city itself.

  Stepping out of the plane’s air-conditioning was a major shock to the system, even for an Australian used to heat. It was just after 5.30 a.m., but this was summer and the temperature was already well over 40°C, heading quickly to 50°C. All passengers boarded a bus for the arrivals building, but to my surprise only two other people beside me were staying — the rest were all in transit.

  The arrivals hall, however, was packed. I was one of the few westerners. Some of those waiting to be processed I guessed were Emiratis, but many more were people who seemed to be from India and its neighbours or various African countries. As I would learn, Dubai was basically powered by the sweat of these people, drawn by the desperate hope of improving life for their families back home.

  Rod had said he would pick me up, but there was no sign of him inside, so I ventured out. Despite the wealth that was driving the emirate’s growing world profile, it really was like stepping into a third-world country. It was a chaotic assault on the senses. Taxis weren’t regulated — anyone with access to a car could call themselves a taxi driver, so there were cars left at all kinds of crazy angles while their drivers came up to the exit doors and surrounded every likely prospect as they walked out, shouting offers and tugging on their clothes. Other vendors and touts were insistently pushing various kinds of food towards me or trying to convince me to come with them to ‘very nice’ hotels.

  There was an intense concentration of smells in the heat, but the scent that underpinned everything was diesel fumes, lying heavy on the air. It was produced by the thousands and thousands of generators on building sites throughout the city. As I was about to see for myself, Dubai was basically one giant construction site.

  Finally Rod appeared, apologising with a yawn — he had been there all along, but had fallen asleep waiting in the terminal. He had caught a taxi to the airport. If he’d had a big night, that was a wise choice. While drinking alcohol was permitted for non-Muslims under very strict conditions, driving with even a trace of alcohol in your blood was an extremely serious criminal offence; unlike Australia, there was no such thing as an acceptable blood-alcohol limit. We got into a taxi and he gave the driver the address of his accommodation.

  We raced along Sheikh Zayed Road, the Dubai section of the E11 superhighway, which helps the UAE reach a shockingly high annual road toll (around five times that of Australia and seven times Britain’s rate, per capita). On both sides of the highway gleaming new towers were interspersed with building sites where more towers were going up. While boning up on Dubai I had read that it currently had more cranes on-site and in use than anywhere else on the planet, and it looked like that could very well be true. The scale of the work being undertaken was staggering.

  Rod had a two-bedroom serviced apartment in the newly constructed marina section of the city, and had invited me to stay until his departure. The tower we were in was part of what was known as the Jumeirah Beach Residences or JBR for short. JBR encapsulated the Dubai boom. Its construction had been announced with fanfare by its development company, the subsidiary of another company whose majority owner and controller was the ruler of Dubai, now Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. It had 40 high-rise residential and hotel towers within a two-square-kilometre area stretching along the waterfront, and was the world’s biggest single-phase development, meaning that instead of starting and completing one section before moving onto the next, the whole thing was being built simultaneously.

  The tower we were staying in was one of the few finished ones; half-completed towers rose around us from the desert sands. There was no attempt to differentiate the buildings; they were uniform, down to the exterior colour. It was a reality far different from the glossy brochures and travel-show puff pieces.

  That afternoon Rod and I went into the Nakheel offices so he could introduce me to Matt Joyce and his team. The office was located on the site of one of the enormous Nakheel developments, Palm Jumeirah, the world’s largest artificially created island, reclaimed from waters of the Gulf and shaped like a palm tree. It featured a two-kilometre-long ‘trunk’, off which branched seventeen ‘fronds’, with the whole thing encircled by a crescent-shaped breakwater. At that stage, work had been going for five years and the plan was that by the end of 2006 — six months away — the first residences would be ready. The company’s office was then located at the base of the ‘trunk’ and the lobby featured intricate scale models of what Palm Jumeirah would eventually look like, along with models of other Nakheel projects, current and planned. The intended effect was to impress, even dazzle, visitors.

  At the time, the company was far smaller than it would eventually become, with fewer than 400 employees, but the lobby was bustling. Things were much quieter once we moved into the non-public area. Unlike many Australian offices with open-plan layouts, workstations in the central area and a few offices and meeting rooms along the walls, here everyone had an office, and the size was a direct measure of its owner’s status. It was not uncommon for higher-level executives to have offices large enough to accommodate an eight-seater board table and a couple of sofas, although, as I was to realise, they might rarely make use of the space.

  So many offices of varying sizes made for a labyrinthine feel. At various points in the midst of the twists and turns there were sets of facing sofas, since the Arabic custom is generally to have business meetings over tea, sitting at sofas.

  After a brief walk-through Rod took me to Matt Joyce’s (relatively small) office. Rod introduced us and Matt told me he had only arrived a few weeks ago and was still settling into the new role and life. We were joined by a small group, including a number of other westerners
who had been brought in to assist the company. A detailed conversation began about the task of how to institute cost-coding systems.

  I knew I was in a jetlag haze and I knew I was there because Nakheel lacked a systematic approach to its development plans, but even so I couldn’t quite understand why we were spending so much time on such absolutely basic details. I would soon find out.

  The meeting finished and before we left Rod introduced me to a couple of other Australians, Ed Sutton and Greg Downer, who were working for Nakheel. They were in the Developments division and introduced me, in turn, to the Emirati head of the division, Mohammed Rashid. He wore the traditional national dress worn by virtually all local men, a white over-robe, known as a kandura, with a white gutra headdress topped by the loops of black cord known as an agal (a gafia skullcap is worn under the gutra).

  The next day was my first official day on the job. It was similar to walking into any new situation as a consultant, where people are trying to find a space you can work from and you’re trying to figure out who’s who and where the toilets are. Normally, though, the consultant is the odd one out, the interloper among people who are getting on with their usual routine. But here, even this early on, I was struck by how fluid and impermanent the whole place felt. Everyone else also seemed to be figuring things out as they went along.

  Chapter 3

  THE SIZE OF THE CHALLENGE

  MARCUS

  That night, Rod and I went to a small bar near the beach. Even though it was evening, we were the only ones willing to sit out in the heat. From the beginning of June to the end of August anyone who had the means and opportunity to leave Dubai did so, generally heading to Europe for the summer. Those who remained tried to ensure they were within AC (air-conditioning) whenever possible.