by Lee, M
In view of that he asked for a twelve-month delay in the payments Sunland currently owed on the two plots (around AED40 million or AUD17.5 million) as well as the payments that would soon be due and those that would fall due in the next year. I explained that we had been flooded with these kinds of requests from buyers large and small, and they were being dealt with on a case-by-case basis by the newly formed Nakheel Sales Committee (or, as we called it in-house, ‘the crisis committee’). As far as I knew the longest extensions granted so far were for three months. Looking panicky Brown said Sunland had to have twelve months. I told him the best thing to do would be to put the requests in writing and I would make sure they were presented to the committee at the next meeting.
A week or so later, the committee made its decision: Sunland could have an extension, but only for six months and only after it had paid the outstanding amount. When I passed this decision on, as requested, in a call to Brown, he again responded angrily. Clearly Brown and his boss, Soheil, were very used to getting their own way. I reiterated the details of the decision and left it at that.
But it wasn’t the tense requests or the furious responses I would take away from these encounters. What I kept returning to later was a conversation between Brown and Matt Joyce, which seemed completely inconsequential at the time.
When Brown was in talking to me about Sunland’s woes, Matt had popped into our meeting room to say hello. Brown said, ‘Oh, Matt, while I have you, I’ve had someone asking questions about our purchase of plot D17 last year.’ He said he didn’t know who they were, but they had come to his office to collect some documents. In Australia it would be highly suspicious if someone started asking about business dealings without explaining who they were. But in Dubai it was par for the course. Emirati men wearing national dress, with no ID visible and no explanation given, would come in on some official purpose. That’s what it had been like at first with the Dubai World Internal Audit officials who were in our offices. Brown said he thought the men he had spoken to might have been from Nakheel or even Dubai World.
Matt said, ‘Oh, what were they asking about?’ Brown said the questions were about Sunland’s contracts with a company called Prudentia (and a person called Reed) and also with Nakheel. Matt seemed strangely interested in this. He asked if Brown had a copy of the relevant contracts and a copy of the cheque. Yes, Brown had these things with him. Matt took the documents off him to be photocopied and then left us to wrap things up.
Shortly afterwards, Matt went to Australia for his annual three- or four-week holiday. Once a year, as part of our employment contracts, the company paid for us and our wives to travel to our home countries. I’d decided I couldn’t take this kind of break right now, much as I’d have liked to. It was just crazy at work. We were down a third of the management and staff, and trying to manage unhappy defaulting purchasers and suppliers.
With Matt’s departure I was more or less left running the day-to-day business, but there were issues on which I needed background, or decisions he needed to sign off on. So we were in constant email contact and every second day he would call me to run through the points we needed to discuss.
In these calls he often asked about Brown and the enquiries about D17 Brown had talked about at our meeting.
Matt would say, ‘So, that conversation with David Brown about the questions he was getting about D17, has anything more happened about that?’
The first time it happened I said, ‘No, why?’
‘Oh, no reason,’ he responded.
I felt slightly impatient, wondering, ‘Well, why are we wasting time on it when we have so much to get through?’
During one such conversation he said, ‘Look, can you go down to Jeff Austin’s old office and see if you can find any files or even a folder for Sunland/D17?’ Jeff Austin had left Nakheel a year or so before but as Director of Planning he would have had the most contact with Sunland, whose projects were then in the planning stage. I sent an email to Don Pollock, one of Austin’s staff, saying I’d been asked to get a copy of any information they had about Sunland. The answer came back, ‘Sorry, we can’t help you, we don’t know where it might be. The guy left his office in a mess, and we’re still trying to sort everything out.’
By January Matt should have been back at work, but he would say, ‘Oh, my flight’s been delayed’, even though there were two direct flights a day from Melbourne to Dubai. Or ‘We got bumped from the flight we were scheduled on.’ The guy was a super-platinum frequent flyer and the whole family flew first class or, at a minimum, business. I thought to myself, who did they bump you for, George Clooney?
I figured he was dragging his heels because he just didn’t want to deal with crap at Dubai Waterfront. I was pretty annoyed at being left to handle it alone, but he kept assuring me he would be back soon.
Finally, around mid-January, he did come back. The situation at Nakheel had worsened: contractors weren’t being paid, contracts were being suspended and almost no purchasers could meet their payment schedules. More job cuts were on the horizon. Matt again mused that Dubai Waterfront and Palm Jebel Ali would merge and he’d be out of a job.
A week later Chris O’Donnell emailed an announcement: Matt was leaving, the company would restructure and Marwan Al Qamzi would take over the newly merged divisions. This was to take effect immediately. However, Matt would stay on for a month or more to do the handover with Marwan. A day or so later Marwan called me into his office, gave me an overview of his planned restructure and reassured me that there would be a place for me in it. He said the newly combined division would have a staff of more than 500, and there was still quite a task ahead. I wasn’t sure how I felt about things, but I thought it only right to give Marwan some time to get things sorted out rather than resigning right after Matt’s announced departure. I had made a three-year commitment and I should see that out. The finish line was almost within reach — just half a year or so to go — and Estate Master was keen to talk to me about a role back in Australia as soon as I was free, possibly even as their CEO.
I felt I’d earned a couple of days off and Julie and I made the hour-long drive to the nearby emirate of Fujairah for a long weekend. Chris called and said he just wanted to reiterate what Marwan had said and reassure me they valued me and wanted me to stay. He said Marwan was still figuring out the restructure, but he was interested in having me serve as his Chief Operating Officer, playing a crucial role in helping him steer the organisation through the crisis.
Julie and I spoke about it over the next few days. While Nakheel was a draining place to work, this was a real opportunity. I could do good work, and at the end of it all I’d have built up experience that would boost me even further up the career ladder. We agreed I’d definitely see things out to the end of my residency period, in mid-August.
Just after our little break in Fujairah, Julie was due to go back to Australia for her mother Bet’s eightieth birthday. There was a big celebration planned and Julie had arranged with her family to make a surprise appearance, which they knew would be a wonderful present. I’d thought about going along too. But work was so busy and as I was turning 40 in a little under a month, Julie and I decided it would be better for me to work through now, then take time off in late February and celebrate my birthday in Paris. It would be another short break — just a week — but we were going to make the most of it, staying in Montmartre. We had made the bookings and were both looking forward to it enormously.
Julie headed off early on the morning of Saturday, 24 January. That morning I got a haircut and took care of some work emails. I went for a walk in the afternoon. It was winter, so the daytime temperature was pleasant, around 25°C to 28°C — often at this time of the year Julie and I would wrap up our weekends with a good walk in the afternoon, taking advantage of the small window of palatable weather. While I was out Julie texted to let me know she’d reached Thailand, her transit stop, safely. Back home I watched a little TV, cooked a meal for one and went to bed in
preparation for work the next day. It was all so normal and ordinary, but as it turned out, it was the last time I would sleep in my own bed for nine months.
Chapter 8
THE START OF THE NIGHTMARE
MARCUS
Sunday, 25 January, started out as a normal day, the beginning of our working week. Matt was in the offices that morning and I briefly said hi to him. The auditors were also in and I saw Matt going in and out of their office throughout the morning, along with some of the people who worked in the legal department and customer relations. I called Julie in Sydney. We spoke for a while and I said I’d call her again the following day to see how the trip was going.
About 10 a.m. I popped into Matt’s office, but he said he had to race off. He looked flustered and muttered something about the police having called him about a car lease. We leased many ‘site cars’ for Dubai Waterfront — sturdy four-wheel drives that you could take out if you had to visit the site. I guessed that there was probably some kind of administrative hitch about the leases.
A little while later I was called into the auditors’ office. A man in there introduced himself simply as Mohammed. I thought he was from the internal audit group but I wasn’t sure. Pointing to some plans of Dubai Waterfront land plots, Mohammed asked me what I knew about those that had been ‘gifted’ in the first stage of the land release.
‘Gifting plots’, a form of corporate gift-giving, was a very common occurrence at Nakheel, done at the direct instruction of one of the more senior Emiratis, usually Manal Shaheen, Director of Marketing and Sales. Occasionally I was asked by the legal department to locate an unsold plot of a specific value. I recalled the details of the plot Mohammed wanted to know about. Late one night in 2007, Matt had called me at home to say that he had just received a call from ‘the Chairman’, that is, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who ran Nakheel’s parent company, Dubai World. Matt had been directed to find a plot worth AED100 million (roughly AUD32 million) before sunrise. Early the following day Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, would announce that he was donating it to a local children’s charity called Dubai Cares.
I logged in from my home computer and found a cluster of four adjoining plots earmarked for possible use by the Nakheel retail division in their shopping-centre portfolio. The Sheikh’s desires would always win out over shopping centres so the retail group would simply have to adjust their plans. I emailed Matt the details and the next morning the Sheikh announced he had made an AED100 million donation to the charity. As very often happened in these cases, the charity then sold the land at a profit. Perhaps that was what the Sheikh had intended all along. Certainly no-one raised an eyebrow.
Mohammed then asked me what I knew about some other specific plots. He was interested in a group of eight or so that had ‘Nakheel’ marked next to them on the land register. These were known as residual plots. A master plan marks out the perimeter of an overall development, and the area within that is divided into individual plots. Residual plots are the odds-and-ends left over. Often a developer puts them aside for later use — either to develop themselves or to sell them.
This was completely ordinary, standard procedure, but Mohammed clearly wasn’t familiar with it at all. He asked me where the business case or board approval was for the residual plots. I explained that business cases were only prepared for land marked for sale to a sub-developer or to be built on directly, not for plots like these, whose fate hadn’t been decided. I was polite and helpful, of course, but privately I thought it was bizarre that someone assigned to audit a property company didn’t have this basic knowledge.
Mohammed had another question. Pointing at plot D17, he asked ‘What about this?’ I said that D17 had been sold to Sunland in 2007 and that I had prepared a business case that had then been approved by the Nakheel board. He asked me to email these reports to him along with any other information pertaining to that plot.
I took my leave and went to my office to gather the relevant information: the approved board reports, feasibilities, plans and comparable price schedules, all of which I sent through to Mohammed. It was now noon, so I grabbed a quick bite at my desk and set about working through my to-do list for the afternoon. I still needed to speak to Matt about a few things, but he wasn’t in his office and his assistant said he hadn’t come back yet. I tried calling him on the mobile, but the call rang out. So did my subsequent calls over the next hour or so. I sent a text asking him to call me but an hour later had still received no reply.
About 2 p.m. I got a phone call from a man who identified himself as Sergeant Bada from Dubai Police. He asked if I could come into the station to see him. I explained that I was flat out for the afternoon and asked if we could make it first thing in the morning. He suggested 9 a.m., I agreed and he gave me the address in a part of town I wasn’t familiar with.
Fifteen minutes later he called back and said, ‘It’s really important you come this afternoon as I’m busy in the morning.’ I thought perhaps this was something to do with Matt and they needed me to validate or vouch for something so I agreed.
Because the location Bada had given me was unfamiliar, I arranged for one of Nakheel’s staff drivers to drop me there. I told both my assistant, Rola, and Matt’s assistant, Mirna, about the call I’d received and where I was going; both said ‘It will be nothing’.
I also called Julie in Australia. I told her what was happening and where I was going and said if I hadn’t called her back within four hours, which would be 7 p.m. my time, something might be wrong. I still thought it was all some mundane administrative problem that had to be sorted out, but I was very aware of the fact that I was living in a place where you encountered uncomfortable and confronting situations on almost a daily basis, whether it was dead bodies by the roadside after one of the all too often horrific road accidents, guards with machine-guns at the border crossings, people routinely screaming at and threatening shop assistants, people with lions in their sheds or armed ‘businessmen’. I’m a safe driver, but I still wear a seatbelt. In the same way, while I thought this was just some minor inconvenience, I also knew that in Dubai nothing was simple or straightforward, so I thought it was prudent to let Julie know what was happening.
I gave the driver the address and said, ‘Apparently there’s a police station on this road.’ He said, ‘Yes, I know about it.’ Of course he did: it was Dubai’s main police headquarters. We pulled up at a large gated compound, where I could see a number of armed guards in dark army green military-style uniforms, nothing unusual in this part of the world. One of the guards directed the driver to drive through the gates, park and wait. Minutes later, a four-wheel drive with blacked-out windows pulled up and its driver indicated I should get in. He drove me further in, through more heavy-duty gates into a compound within the compound, pulling up outside what looked like an office building.
Inside an Emirati man led me into a small, sparsely furnished office. He left, locking the door behind him. In Australia by this point I would have been unsettled: called in by police, in the hands of people who hadn’t identified themselves, not told what was going on, and locked in. But after two years in Dubai, I was accustomed to a lack of clear communication about official processes. The door-locking was also a common cultural practice. I’d once been to the house of a Muslim colleague for a breakfast meeting and he had locked us into the room where we sat and ate — it was an automatic gesture, made so that no-one accidentally caught sight of his wife or other women in the house without their headdress.
I sat at the desk, used my Blackberry to take care of some business emails and made some work notes in the diary/notepad I always carried. I couldn’t hear anyone — the padded walls were clearly soundproof. There was no clue what was going on or how long it might take, so I just utilised the time as best I could. At some point a ‘coffee boy’ came in and brought me a drink.
I said, ‘What’s happening here? Where is everyone?’
He just said, ‘Insha’Allah it will
be a few minutes.’ I knew better than to take that literally.
Finally two new Emiratis in national dress entered the room. One was fairly young, in his early twenties. The other, clearly the more senior-ranked, was in his late thirties. They didn’t identify themselves, but pulled two chairs up close next to mine and sat down. I said ‘Hello’, to which the older one said in a very stern voice, ‘Do you know where you are?’
When I said ‘No,’ he said, ‘You’re at Police Headquarters. Do you know why you are here?’
When I again answered ‘No,’ he shot his partner a look that made it clear he thought I was lying.
He continued, ‘Do you know David Brown?’
I said, ‘Yes, his company purchased some land from Dubai Waterfront, where I work’.
He said, ‘Do you know Angus Reed?’
I said, ‘No, I don’t,’ but before I’d even finished speaking he snapped, ‘You’re lying. You do know Angus Reed.’
I had heard both Matt Joyce and Anthony Brearley mention Angus Reed on a couple of occasions, and David Brown from Sunland had done the same, but I had never met him or even spoken to him.
I said, ‘I’ve heard of him but no, I don’t know him.’
Raising his voice, he said, ‘You’re lying, you do know him, don’t you?’
I said again, ‘No, I don’t,’ adding, ‘Why am I here?’
He said, ‘Your name has been mentioned a lot.’
What on earth did that mean?
‘By whom?’ I asked, but neither he nor the silent younger man replied. Instead, they left the office, locking the door behind them.
I tried to make sense of this. Had they mistaken me for someone else? Hang on, that couldn’t be right because they’d known my name and they’d called me at work. But if it wasn’t that, what was going on? I was a little unsettled, but nothing more at this point. Clearly there was some kind of mix-up. The only question was how long it would take to sort out.