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

by Lee, M

  After another 30 minutes or so another man came in. He asked me to empty my pockets, which I did, putting my keys, Blackberry and wallet on the table. He asked me to take off my watch, which I did. He collected all these things plus my diary/ notebook and went out, locking the door again behind him.

  Time dragged on for another hour or so, until the two first Emiratis came back, bringing with them another three men. The small room became very crowded as they sat and stood closely around me. The senior one started questioning me again.

  ‘What do you know about commissions being paid?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about commissions,’ I said.

  He grew angrier. ‘You’re lying. David Brown has paid you commissions.’

  ‘I haven’t received any commissions,’ I said. ‘I don’t know about any commissions.’

  At this point, becoming increasingly worried about what was happening, I asked for a lawyer.

  ‘Not needed,’ was the response.

  The police swept out. I guessed it was 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. by now. With my watch gone and no window to the outside world it was impossible to be sure. I was increasingly anxious to help them clear things up and get on my way.

  More time passed. A man came in — the one who had taken my personal belongings. He had a cardboard takeaway box containing flatbread and some kind of hummus. He said only, ‘Eat,’ then left. They clearly expected me to be here for a while. I wasn’t really hungry, but I ate some of the bread, paced around the room, sat, paced, sat.

  Finally the five men returned, again crowding around me. They asked me more questions.

  ‘What do you know about plot D17 at Dubai Waterfront, bought by Sunland in 2007?’ I repeated what I had told Mohammed earlier, that I had prepared a business case report for it which was then approved by the board and signed off by Chris O’Donnell and Manal Shaheen, all following normal procedure.

  ‘Who is Chris O’Donnell?’ asked the main man. ‘And who is this Manal?’

  I was so surprised at this I blurted out, ‘You haven’t heard of Manal?’

  I thought it was impossible to live in Dubai and not be aware of Manal Shaheen, who made sure she featured prominently in all things Nakheel. She always seemed to be in the local and international newspapers, pictured with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones at a hotel opening or with Donald Trump at a launch. Even people with no connection to Nakheel knew her name, but apparently not these police.

  The officer doing all the talking asked if I had phone numbers for Chris and Manal. I said I probably had both in my Blackberry. More questions followed and now the main officer started to type into a computer, apparently taking down my answers. I asked again for a lawyer or to be able to contact the Australian consulate, to no avail.

  The questioning officer began asking about the amounts that Sunland had paid for the land. I said that I believed Sunland had bought D17 from Nakheel but had also paid a premium to another company, Prudentia.

  ‘Sunland paid a commission,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I answered, ‘as I understand it, it was a premium because the other group had some kind of option or right to the plot’.

  I explained that I didn’t know any more about it because I wasn’t involved in the transaction. And any other arrangements Sunland made were their private affair.

  Becoming more aggressive the officer started again with accusations of lying. He claimed Angus Reed was my best friend. He wanted to know how much money David Brown had given me.

  ‘Where is the money now?’ he demanded.

  ‘What money?’ I asked. ‘He’s not my best friend, I don’t even know him.’

  Ignoring this they threw other unfamiliar names at me, including Michael Lunjevic and Derek Cheah, neither of whom I knew. (I would later learn than Lunjevic was a lawyer working for Sunland and Cheah worked with Angus Reed.)

  I felt it might help to show them the files I had on the sale of D17 so they could see how straightforward the transaction had been. I offered to go and get these, and come back in the morning. Silence greeted this suggestion, broken only by the tapping of the computer keyboard. A younger officer then asked about the price Sunland had paid for the land — how it had been determined. I explained that this was all part of the approval process.

  ‘ What approval?’

  ‘The pre-sale business case report that the board approved.’

  ‘What report?’

  ‘The signed board report.’ It was increasingly hard to keep the frustration out of my voice: clearly they didn’t understand even the simplest elements of the process they were asking me about.

  One then said, ‘Why did you sell the plot for lower than market price?’

  I replied, ‘It wasn’t lower than market price.’

  Another said, ‘But Sunland bought plot D5B for AED185 per square foot, and D17 cost AED120 per square foot.’

  I tried to explain to them that the first plot was set on absolute beach frontage, whereas D17 was more than 500 metres back from the beach, separated from it not just by another row of plots, but by a major arterial road. Hence the lower price.

  ‘No, this doesn’t matter’ was the response. My alarm was rising — clearly they really didn’t understand or I just couldn’t get through to them. Then they left the room.

  After an hour, three more men in kanduras came in. I hadn’t been to the toilet since I’d arrived, or had a drink since the coffee, hours earlier. I asked to do both. Someone brought in some small cups of water — the foil-topped kind you get on the plane — but said I’d have to wait until later to use the toilet.

  The interrogators came back with some printed pages, all in Arabic. They said the papers were a record of the interview and told me to sign them. I knew a tiny bit of spoken Arabic, but I couldn’t read the written language at all. I thought of all those movie and TV scenes where people were forced to sign documents they couldn’t read, which turned out to be confessions to some terrible crime.

  I said to the officers, ‘I can’t sign this, I don’t know what it says.’

  They said, ‘You must,’ becoming increasingly agitated.

  I saw that one of them was holding another document and I could see Matt’s signature on it. Worried that their hostility might turn physical. I said I would sign it only if I could note on it that I was doing so despite not understanding what it said.

  I wrote, ‘I cannot read or write Arabic, I am told this is what I said’ on the document, then signed my name.

  One of the men now handed me my Blackberry and demanded that I give them Chris and Manal’s contact details. This seemed my only chance to let anyone know what was going on. Making it look like I was searching through my contacts, I quickly typed a text to Julie: ‘better get here’ was as much as I felt I could risk. It would be the early hours of the morning, Sydney time. I hoped that after not having heard from me earlier, she would understand that something was wrong.

  The device didn’t make a noise when it transmitted outgoing messages and I checked that it was still in ‘silent’ mode, which I’d activated when I’d first arrived at the station. As I was reading out Chris’s phone number a reply came from Julie: ‘what me to DXB’.

  I had only enough time to type ‘Y’ and hit ‘Send’. One of the Emiratis yelled, ‘Hurry, where Manal number?’ I didn’t have the number in my contacts, but I told them Nakheel could supply it. They took the Blackberry off me and left the room.

  I guessed the time to be somewhere between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. I had been there for many hours. I was tired and in growing discomfort, having still not been allowed to use the toilet. My head swam: what the hell was going on? Why were they so interested in D17? What were the ‘secret commissions’ David Brown was supposed to have paid me?

  JULIE

  Mum’s birthday is on Australia Day, 26 January. She had been thrilled when I arrived, but she still had no clue about the surprise party that had been planned; I was looking forward to what was going to be a great
day. About 8 p.m. Sydney time on the 25th Marcus called me to say he’d been contacted by the police and was going down to the station where Matt was.

  I said, ‘Oh well, maybe you can help him with whatever the issue is.’

  He said he’d call me when he was done and asked me to call Indrani and arrange for her to feed Dudley, just in case he didn’t get back in time, so I did that.

  After midnight when I still hadn’t heard back from Marcus I rang him; the call went to voicemail. I left a message letting him know Dudley had been fed and asked him if he’d got whatever it was sorted out with the police. Not too long after that I got a text message from him saying ‘better get here’. It wasn’t like him to write that way — no greeting, no sign-off — just those cryptic few words. I thought maybe he was having difficulties texting for some reason. I sent back a brief clarifying message using the DXB airport code for Dubai ‘what me to DXB’ and I got back just the letter Y which meant ‘Yes’. Again, this was not a normal way for Marcus to text.

  I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ and sent him another text. There was no reply. I was more puzzled than worried at this point so I thought, OK, just work through it logically. Marcus said Matt went down there about 10 a.m. and then he had to go there about 3 p.m. Dubai time. That was a long time ago — what could be happening? I paced around for a while and tried Marcus’s phone several more times without any luck. I couldn’t come up with any good explanations. I thought, I’ve got to call somebody, but who? I tried Tony Perrin first. He didn’t answer so I sent him a text message. I called Marcus’s assistant but she didn’t answer either, so I sent her a text. Now I was starting to get concerned: where was Marcus and why couldn’t he return my calls?

  Tony Perrin called me back. I figured since Matt had also been called in by the police, whatever it was must be work-related, so I told Tony what little I knew and asked, ‘Do you know what’s going on? Do you know what Marcus was working on?’ He didn’t, and it turned out he was back in Perth for a visit. Ali, his wife, was still in Dubai and he offered to call her and ask her to see what she might be able to find out. Eventually Ali called me. She’d spoken to Matt’s wife, Ange, who said to her, ‘Oh, I thought Matt was just working late tonight.’ Ange couldn’t reach Matt and Marcus still wasn’t answering my calls or texts. It was becoming clear something was going on, and it wasn’t good.

  Ali and Tony each kept trying to find out more, while I looked up the numbers of every single person I thought might be able to help me. The day I’d arrived in Sydney I’d bought an Australian SIM card to use while I was there. I’d brought an old phone of Marcus’s to put it in, so I had two phones, one for local Australian calls and one for calls to Dubai numbers. I knew that Anthony Brearley was back in Australia — his sudden departure had been the talk of the expat community. I thought perhaps since it was something to do with the police and he used to run the legal department for Dubai Waterfront, he might know something. I got hold of his number and when I spoke to him he said he didn’t know what was going on, but would try to contact someone in Dubai.

  I just kept calling different people, increasingly desperate for information. I said to Tony, ‘Please get somebody from Nakheel to find out what’s going on and ring me.’ At some point during the night someone did and I remember yelling at this guy I’d never met, ‘What the hell is going on? You need to find Marcus, you need to tell me where he is.’

  I was in the spare room at my mum’s house, trying not to wake her up. The phones were on silent and I was lying there freaking out because no-one could tell me anything and I was so far away and on my own. The phones would just flash one after the other as texts and calls came through all night, but still no-one had any real information. I still get upset thinking about it now — it was just the start of the nightmare.

  Chapter 9

  DROPPED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH

  MARCUS

  After what felt like an eternity locked in that small room in Police Headquarters, two of the officers reappeared. They let me use the toilet then led me outside where a vehicle was waiting — another large four-wheel drive with all the windows blacked out. They pushed me into the back seat and a man got in on either side of me, with a darkened screen separating us from the two others in the front. I asked where we were going.

  ‘No need to know,’ one grunted.

  I was very frightened now. I knew I had done nothing wrong, but these police seemed convinced otherwise. The only people who knew I was at the police station were two PAs from work and Julie, who was 12,000 kilometres away. And no-one at all knew where I was being taken.

  Never had the gap seemed wider between Dubai’s tourist-friendly image and the reality of life in this out-of-control place. As recently as 1998, UAE courts had ordered hand- and foot-amputations as punishment for theft, and that was just the cases that made it to court. For all the malls and hotel bars and superhighways, Dubai was surrounded by desert. Who knows how many people had been taken out into that hostile landscape on one pretext or another and never seen again? I’d started the day as a regular businessman just going about my work. Now I was at the mercy of men who showed no understanding of due legal process.

  The car pulled up on the side of a road out in the middle of nowhere. We sat in silence and waited. My mind ran wild thinking of what might happen to me. I tried to focus on my breathing and after a while a strange fatalistic calm came over me. I thought, ‘Well, whatever happens now, it’s out of my control.’

  After about 30 minutes the car started again, drove forward just 100 metres or so and the rear doors were opened from the outside. We were at the Dubai Waterfront offices at Jebel Ali. Relief washed over me. Perhaps everything would be all right after all. It was now very late at night, and of course all the employees had gone home. The only vehicles in the carpark were the one I had been brought in and five or six others just like it, with their headlights on and men in kanduras milling about.

  One of them approached and said ‘I am from Dubai Prosecutions and we are going to search the offices.’

  I said, ‘Fine.’ I had nothing to hide and believed a search would make them realise their mistake. I led the fifteen- or twenty-strong group of what I assumed were a mix of police and prosecution investigators to my office.

  One of the men said, ‘Where are the files?’ Standing near the doorway I pointed to a small cabinet that held lever-arch folders, one labelled Sunland, and said, ‘All the approvals are in there.’ Another man came over, noticeably different from the others in his manner and his dress — although clearly an Arab, he wore western clothes. He was fat with a large head and had an aura about him, a bad aura. The others appeared to be listening to him and following his direction. He didn’t introduce himself but I would later learn he was Mohammed Mustafa, head of the Dubai Financial Audit Department, a division of the Dubai Ruler’s Court. He was Dubai’s leading auditor, who was known to be tireless in his pursuit of cases, and had been given the job of clamping down on government corruption.

  As several of the others looked on he flicked through the file, then withdrew a letter, saying, ‘What’s this?’

  It was the letter from Sunland about their intention to be the sole purchaser of plot D17. He pointed to the first paragraph, the one that read ‘Sunland will pay a ‘Consultant Fee’ to Prudentia of AED20,000,000, plus an additional Fee of AED24,105,780 which is equal to the difference between AED135/Ft2 (AED216,952,020) and the Land Price of AED120/Ft2 based on a Built up Area of 1,607,052Ft2. The total Fee is therefore AED44,105,780.’

  I told him that I had received the letter in my capacity as Commercial Manager, and that I’d followed the usual process of passing it along to my boss, Matt Joyce, and the legal department, as I would with any letters like this. I wasn’t sure why David Brown sent it to me because, despite my senior title, I did not have authority to approve land sales. But the large Egyptian man in the suit didn’t seem to be listening.

  Suddenly he pointed to a paragraph
further down the letter, and, gleefully turning to his colleagues, said, ‘This is it!’

  I could see he was indicating the section that read, ‘The Land Price will be AED120/Ft2 . . .’ and went on to detail the proposed payment terms and the other standard details that were part of all formal offers.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

  He didn’t answer.

  Another of the men started again about the ‘secret commissions’ I was supposed to have received. Hang on, I thought, they really do think I have some of this money.

  The man in the suit then told me to write an explanation of Sunland’s offer letter. Glad for the chance to use my own words, I sat down and wrote out all the information I had just given verbally.

  But still they didn’t let me go, telling me that they were now going to search my home. I thought of our dog, Dudley, waiting to eagerly greet whomever walked through the door after so many hours alone. In my experience many Arabs didn’t like dogs and there was no telling what might happen if he started barking and getting underfoot.

  Thinking quickly, I told them we had dogs at home and that they would be fierce if unknown people tried to get in. If I could call my wife, I told the senior officer, I could ask her to take care of the dogs before we got there. Reluctantly, he agreed. I went into my small office, squeezing past the five men who were in there going through different files, and used my office phone to call Julie. When she answered I carefully said something about how I was ‘assisting some gentlemen at my offices’. I knew Julie would hear that something was wrong. I told her that the men I was with were going to take me to our villa and asked her to get ‘the dogs’. And then I had to hang up.