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

by Lee, M

  Rod explained that, provided they were not Muslims, both tourists and residents could drink alcohol in Dubai under certain conditions. In a bar or nightclub you were covered by the venue’s licence to serve alcohol. A dilemma arose when it was time to go home, in that technically you were not permitted to remove alcohol from those licensed venues. Even if you had consumed it, you were ‘removing’ it because it was present in your body. Walking between venues with a blood-alcohol content above zero was actually a crime, as was getting a taxi home.

  If you were over 21 you could also buy takeaway liquor to consume at home, provided you had a licence to do so. Expatriate residents had to apply for this licence, which involved getting written approval from your employer, including a salary certificate, and proving that you were renting a property. The salary listed on your employer’s certificate would be used to determine what monthly spending limit was specified on your licence. Married women were not allowed to apply for their own licences, but if their husband gave them permission they could apply to be listed on his card. Once you had been through this process and the licence had been granted, you could present it to buy alcohol at certain, specified authorised dealers, all of which were run by companies wholly owned by the Sheikh.

  The following day was Thursday. At the time, this was the first day of the weekend in the UAE and many other Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia. Thursday was the day of rest and Friday was the day of prayer. Not long after my arrival Dubai’s weekend was officially changed to Friday and Saturday, because the emirate had learned that being uncontactable for so much of the western working week was a big problem for a place with such major international ambitions.

  I was up early and, itching for some exercise, decided to go for a walk. Even before 7 a.m. the temperature was over 40°C. No wonder the construction workers I passed — mostly Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi — looked startled to see someone on foot, and a westerner at that. Wearing standard-issue blue overalls they laboured on these dangerous, dusty sites in searing heat day after day with no respite. The idea that someone might be outside by choice seemed to strike them as bizarre or hilarious, judging from the way they nudged one another and pointed me out.

  Rod had to go to a client meeting in neighbouring Abu Dhabi, 130 kilometres or so away, and I decided to tag along. We drove out to Sheikh Zayed Road and I wondered if I would ever be brave enough to drive during my stay. The cars around us simply flew, there was no other word for it. Everyone knew where the speed cameras were located, and they would slow down to around 130 km/h until they had passed them, then get back up to 160 km/h, 180 km/h or even 200 km/h. I couldn’t get those road-toll figures out of my mind.

  That evening, back in Dubai after Rod’s presentation, we headed out to the enormous Mall of the Emirates. I can safely say I’d never seen anything like it. Along with 500-plus stores, cinemas and eateries, it boasted Ski Dubai, ‘the Middle East’s first indoor ski resort and snow park’. This included an 85-metre slope with five ski runs, toboggan slides, ski lifts, a snowball play area and more. All indoors in one of the world’s hottest, driest countries. Well, I’d wanted a change of scene and I’d certainly got it.

  Rod was flying back to Australia the next day and the apartment he was using had already been booked by someone else, so on the way back we called at the adjoining Oasis hotel to arrange a room for me to move into. I had assumed it would be a simple, straightforward transaction but, again, it was a learning experience.

  The first thing that struck me was that the cost was negotiable. Forget about the idea of a hotel rack rate, from which you might get, say, a 10 per cent discount for a long stay. Rod bargained hard, even ruthlessly, and in response the desk clerks seemed to grow increasingly frantic. They clearly didn’t have the authority to set the rate themselves, so the haggling was punctuated by them making a series of loud, seemingly agitated calls to whoever it was who held the power. Eventually, we reached an agreement: a room for the rest of June and all of July for 550 Emirati dirhams (AED) a night, which at the time came to a little under AUD200.

  Almost AUD1400 a week (which Estate Manager was to pay) seemed an awful lot for a hotel that was, in reality, not even three-star quality, despite being newly built. But construction wasn’t the only thing that was booming in Dubai. The economy as a whole was growing rapidly and prices were inflating to match. Accommodation was very hard to find because people had already started flooding in from other parts of the world to make money from the construction boom. Even getting a restaurant booking was often difficult and things would only get worse.

  Rod assured me that the seemingly aggressive negotiations had in fact been a perfectly normal, everyday commercial transaction in this region. That kind of hard-edged, steely manner was expected in all kinds of interactions. Even something as simple as asking a waiter for whatever you wanted rather than speaking brusquely could mark you as someone who could be ignored or given poor service. And it wasn’t about being a westerner; the expatriates looked like Miss Manners compared to the way Emiratis acted in these situations. It took me a long time to get used to the idea.

  At dawn the next day I went downstairs and farewelled Rod as he caught a taxi to the airport. Watching him drive away I thought, ‘Well it’s sink or swim now, it’s up to me to make this work. It’s only for two months, after all.’

  I got to the office early the next day and sat down with Matt Joyce, who briefed me on Dubai Waterfront. He explained that it was one of more than half a dozen separately run development projects owned by Nakheel. Nakheel was what’s called a PJSC, a Private Joint Stock Company, part of a corporation called Dubai World, an investment company that was, in turn, wholly owned by the state and controlled by its ruler. So while Nakheel had very strong ties to the Sheikh, it was, in theory, a private company. This distinction would become important to me in ways I could never have guessed.

  Dubai Waterfront, for which I was consulting, was the largest project of its kind in the world, a planned development of 14,000 hectares (twice the size of Hong Kong Island), sprawling over an enormous area from the coastline inland to the desert. It was to be a mix of villas and high-rise towers, intended to house more than 1.5 million people. I momentarily puzzled over this, given that the population of the emirate was fewer than two million, of whom no more than 15 per cent were Emirati nationals.

  Matt explained that the first stage of the development, about 5 per cent of the total area, had been sold. This covered about 300 plots intended for high-rise buildings between twenty and 100 storeys high. Bizarrely, the salespeople scattered throughout the offices were Dubai Waterfront employees who were on-selling the individual plots at a profit on behalf of the original purchaser, in exchange for a fee. I asked him why Nakheel hadn’t simply sold the plots themselves at the higher prices in the first place. He chuckled and said, ‘It just didn’t happen that way.’

  He went on to say that the people now purchasing the land had been promised they would have access to it in a state ready to be built upon — in other words, with roadways, electricity, water supplies, sewerage and other essential elements in place — by 2007. That was less than six months away and yet none of this work had begun. I asked how many people were currently working on the Dubai Waterfront development excluding the salespeople. Five, he answered: himself, his newly appointed assistant, the Chief Financial Officer, an engineer and a General Manager. The GM and CFO had been on the payroll when Matt started, and neither had any experience in property development. He was busily recruiting, with a dozen Australians he had hired due to start over the next couple of weeks. I certainly didn’t envy him his task.

  He needed three things from me:

  1. I was to set up some sort of cost-coding system so that project costs and expenditure could be tracked and reported on.

  2. I was to implement the use of Estate Manager software so that the feasibility and profit of potential projects could be determined.

  3. I was to appoint quantity su
rveyors who could make estimates of what the development of the plots would cost (i.e., with the sewerage, power, water and roads buyers had been promised).

  Afterwards, when I explained to people how things had stood at Dubai Waterfront, they thought I was exaggerating. This was a multi-billion dollar development. It was one among a number of multi-billion dollar projects being run by Nakheel. Surely they must have had some systems in place to track expenditure and estimate value? How had the Palm Jumeirah land been reclaimed then? How were employees being paid? I must be speaking hyperbolically when I say there was nothing like this in place, right? Unfortunately not.

  The situation was the subject of endless conversations among senior team members. Up till then, despite the actual construction work it had done, Nakheel had been run much more like a marketing agency than a property developer. Presumably Chris O’Donnell, the new CEO who had come from Investa, had been brought in to address this, even if his own expertise was more in property funds management than in development per se.

  There was a lot to be done, so I got stuck into it. I created a detailed project plan with an end date and the deliverables to be completed within the eight weeks I would be there and set about achieving those aims.

  Meanwhile I tried to get used to a different culture. The way I was assigned an assistant, for instance. I was in a meeting one day when one of the Nakheel Emirati executives came in and said to me, ‘You will take a Filipino, you come and interview three of them.’ I learned that Philippine nationals, referred to dismissively as ‘Pinoys’, are commonly used as office assistants because they tend to speak good English and are very cheap to employ. Shockingly, salaries were determined by race — the different pay scales were actually documented and rigidly followed. Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis were at the bottom, along with Filipinos. Sri Lankans were slightly higher and up it went with Australians, Americans, Britons and Canadians near the top of the scale, under the Emiratis. The whole society was rigidly stratified based on your nationality, your religion and your gender.

  I’d been there for less than three weeks when Matt called me into his office and said something that took me completely by surprise. He offered me a full-time job once the consultancy was done. He said he could see the value I was bringing to the company and while we would have to work out the specifics, there would definitely be a role for me on the Dubai Waterfront team if I wanted it. My job title would be Commercial Manager.

  It might seem surprising that I didn’t run a mile, given what I knew about the state of the company. But that was the point: it was a challenge. A new team was being brought in to fix the problems and get things on track. As long as it was approached in a systematic and organised manner it was perfectly achievable. I’d never seen a situation quite this chaotic, but what needed to be done was very similar to what I’d achieved for smaller businesses. I had worked with companies that had grown from tiny operations into reasonably sized players, but were still being run like a corner shop. I’d seen scenarios where, if people had an idea for a new project, they’d just ring up the head honcho, talk him through it and get a yay or nay. In every case I’d been able to oversee the introduction of professional, accountable business practices into these kinds of companies. This was the same thing, except on a much, much bigger scale.

  I told Matt I’d think about it and discuss it with Julie. He offered to arrange a return flight to Dubai for her, paid for by Nakheel. I thanked him but declined the offer. I didn’t want to feel beholden; I wanted us to be able to make up our own minds free of obligation. Julie and I would pay our own way.

  JULIE

  Marcus rang me up and told me about the offer. It was definitely a surprise. We hadn’t even talked about it as a possibility before he left. But I was open to the idea from the start.

  Working in Dubai meant Marcus’s salary would be tax-free, but countering that was the fact that every single thing except petrol and phone calls was more expensive in Dubai. Even though Marcus had only been there a few weeks he had clearly picked up on that, both from his own experience and from talking to other expatriates.

  It was June, which made it a perfect time for me to take holidays before everything got really busy with the start of the new tax year in July. Even if nothing came from it and Marcus decided not to take the job, it would be a nice break. And it would be great to see one another again. This was about the longest we’d ever been apart and he still had more than half of his consultancy stint to go.

  Work was fine about me taking enough time off for a ten-day visit. Over the next couple of days I read up on Dubai. Other than Marcus, I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been there. Its geographical position, basically in the middle of the world, was very appealing. It was such a short trip from there to Europe, where I’d always wanted to go.

  I flew out on 21 June. Marcus was at work and unable to meet me, but he sent a driver whom he’d met through the hotel. I was very glad to get inside the car. Even though I had travelled through Asia in my younger years, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more conspicuous than I did outside that airport terminal as a blonde, white woman travelling solo.

  We drove to Marcus’s office past the Burj Al Arab, that huge, glittering, sail-shaped hotel. After everything that’s happened to us, that building has become a symbol of pure evil for me now, but at the time I remember thinking how pretty it looked.

  When we got to the office I was struck, as Marcus had been, by the unusual layout, and also by how thrown-together and temporary things looked. I saw Marcus, which was lovely, met his assistant and briefly met Matt Joyce and a couple of the other Australians working there. I went back to the hotel for a rest after the flight, then out in the afternoon to the Mall of the Emirates for a look around. I caught a cab from the hotel, and I knew from the reading up I’d done before I left that I was required to sit in the back of the taxi, and to dress modestly, which meant no plunging necklines or short shorts or mini-skirts. That wasn’t my style anyway, so it was no problem.

  I took it all in, the men in their traditional dress and the women, most of whom wore the flowing black outer robe called the abaya and matching headscarf, the shayla. Here and there were women also wearing the face mask known as the burkha, which leaves just the eyes showing, or a thin black face veil. I didn’t spot any other western women that day, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable about it. I was travelling, and the point of travelling is to see a another side of life to what you have at home.

  I did a little basic clothes shopping. It was a workday back in Sydney and here I was relaxing. I started to think about what life would be like if we decided to say yes to the job offer. I’d worked and studied my whole life; perhaps I could indulge myself in a real break here. Not just a few days off, maybe a whole year as a lady of leisure — well, apart from my ongoing CPA studies. I knew that if he did take on the new role Marcus would be working very hard, but I could make my own way around. It would be new and different and I’d be just fine.

  Marcus and I talked it through over dinner. We were both feeling very positive about the move. We would be there for three years, which seemed a good, manageable length of time. That night and over the next couple of days we considered it from all angles. We were inclined to say yes. If we didn’t do it, we’d always regret not giving it a go. If it all went as well as we hoped, it would be a feather in Marcus’s cap professionally, and it would be an interesting experience for us both.

  We also talked about the fact that we could really make headway on saving to buy a house of our own. When we did the calculations, we realised we’d be able to save enough for a deposit while we were in Dubai, buy a little place in Balmain and move straight in at the end of the three years.

  I would have to resign from Holden & Bolster, but I’d been there a solid four years and I knew my boss would understand and wish me well. I would be able to continue my CPA professional studies by correspondence. Then there was our rented house in Sydney. As it happened, our lease would be
up soon, and we were on great terms with the agent, who was happy to let us wrap things up a little early.

  There was just one more box to tick: Dudley, now five years old. We agreed that if it wasn’t possible for us to bring Dudley over and then take him back to Australia at the end of the contract we would have to say no. That may sound very strange, maybe even slightly mad, to people who have never loved a pet, but he was part of our family. What would the alternative have been — for us to just dump him on someone? There’s no way that was going to happen. We got online and looked at the Australian and UAE government information about pets. There were various permits we’d need to apply for, and on re-entering Australia Dudley would have to spend some time in quarantine, but that was fine.

  So, our decision was made. We were excited. ‘What is there to lose?’ we asked one another. Never in a million years could we have guessed the answer to that question.

  As it happened, during my visit Nakheel had a major celebration scheduled that Marcus would be attending. No plus-ones though, so Rana, the wife of one of the Arab men who worked there, organised a ‘girls’ night out’. As well as me there would be two other Australians, Meg and Donna, who were also brand new to Dubai, having just moved over with their husbands who were joining Nakheel, and Angela, Matt Joyce’s wife, whom I hadn’t yet met.

  The arrangement was to meet at TGI Fridays in Crown Plaza at 9 o’clock. It seemed like a slightly odd choice, but, as I was to learn, themed chain and fast-food restaurants are very popular in Dubai. I saw Meg and Donna a day or two before. None of us were sure if the 9 p.m. time indicated we were to have dinner or whether we’d be expected to have eaten beforehand. We arranged to go in a taxi together and Rana was waiting at the restaurant, along with her sister or sister-in-law, I couldn’t quite catch the introduction. Then Angela came in, heavily pregnant with her third child.