by Lee, M
They said, ‘We did not start this, this is not our investigation,’ and I believed them. But if it wasn’t them, who was responsible?
As we were leaving, Ange got a call from one of the local lawyers she had been speaking to. He told her if we put together a bag of things for each of our husbands we would be able to get the bags to them. We raced to my place first. I ran in, grabbed a backpack, threw in some of Marcus’s underwear, razors, deodorant, a jacket, jeans and T-shirts and raced back out, forgetting to lock the door behind me. Ange had arranged for a friend to go to her place and pack a bag for Matt. After we got her bag we took off down to the address we’d been given, which was the location of the State Security compound in some distant spot on the other side of the city (it turned out to be part of the same compound Marcus had gone to for the first meeting with the police). We were both so excited, thinking we would be able to see Marcus and Matt.
The lawyer Ange had spoken to was already there. But then we waited for what must have been two hours while nothing happened.
I said, ‘There’s a razor in there and some deodorant and a toothbrush and toothpaste, will that get in?’
The lawyer said, ‘Oh, it’s a five star.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘It’s a five-star place, they will have already given him all this.’
Finally, at no signal discernible to me he told us to give him the bags and go. We realised we wouldn’t be seeing our husbands after all.
When I got home, Indrani was there feeling completely hysterical at having come home to an unlocked house, with my luggage but no sign of me. When I walked in she grabbed me and we hugged each other fiercely. She sobbed and sobbed, with a mixture of relief that I was OK and worry for Marcus.
That night when I went up to bed I took my print-out of the contacts I had compiled, plus my phones, their chargers, my notebook and pen, my passport and my wallet — my lifelines. As exhausted as I was, the only way I could fall asleep was with them in arm’s reach in bed beside me.
The next day, Friday, I went out with Jackie and Justin and bought a computer. As Justin had lost his job in the Nakheel retrenchments, they were flying out in a few days’ time. They were really worried about leaving me and Marcus with all this going on, and I was devastated at the thought of not having them there, but they didn’t have a choice — their furniture had been shipped out and all the arrangements had been made ages before.
They said to me, ‘You know our friend Karen, do you think you could tell her about this?’ In this way they handed me over to Karen Kendall’s care. I’d only met her a couple of times before that but she became one of my great supports.
Back in Australia I’d called everyone to ask them about Marcus, but now in Dubai I felt very cautious about talking to people who weren’t unquestionably on our side. Knowing the way the expat community worked, I was sure the gossip would be flying around and I didn’t want to feed it.
When I got my next call from Marcus in solitary, he didn’t say all that much about what he was having to deal with, but I could hear that he wasn’t in a good way. I felt like I was going crazy not knowing how I could help him deal with the fear and the threats I knew he was enduring. I needed someone to guide and help me and I suddenly thought of Rosemary Adams.
Rosemary is a psychologist but, just as importantly, she’s been a close friend of Marcus’s since our Gold Coast days. I called Rosemary in Australia and told her what was happening. After that we would speak at least once a day. She was just fantastic, though she was clearly worried about Marcus. She came up with strategies I could use during his brief phone calls to help him cope, and strategies to help me cope with the constant fear I felt.
She said there were two important things to get through to him at that point: that I loved him, and that he needed to stay strong. That sounds very simple and obvious now, but I was petrified of everything that was happening and in such an unimaginably chaotic state that it helped to focus my mind on those two simple messages, which I would repeat multiple times whenever he called me. I reinforced them so that in his long hours alone he would have something to cut through the static in his brain, something to hold on to and use like a mantra.
MARCUS
Time inched past. Nights were the worst, but even during the day when I was able to roughly measure the time using the early morning and midday prayer calls I found my mind played tricks — sometimes it seemed so long since the last prayer call I would think they had turned the speaker system off, or I would be waiting for the final call and realise I had lost count and it had been and gone. I was locked in 24 hours a day with no chance to walk or to get any other exercise, no fresh air, no warmth and no human contact. Not being allowed to go to the toilet became a major obsession.
I had to ask over and over again either because the cruellest guards thought it was funny to torture people this way and the vague ones just didn’t care and forgot. Sometimes, though, I learned it was because another detainee was out of their cell. The detainees were not allowed to see one another. In fact we were not permitted to even make eye contact with anyone other than the guards. This even included the cleaners who I could hear every now and then going over the corridors and the offices.
A week into this ordeal I was driven, alone this time, just a couple of hundred metres to another building in the complex. No explanation was given but after a long time I was led into another room where a man and woman wearing western clothes were waiting. I thought this was going to be another interrogation, but they introduced themselves as James and Gail, representatives of the Australian consulate. I shook their hands. It was such a relief to be treated decently, to hear an Australian voice, to know someone was looking out for me.
They told me they had just seen Matt (I hadn’t done so since the night at the prosecutor’s office many days earlier) and that they were in contact with Julie. I told them how little I understood about what was happening or even where I was being held. James said they didn’t know much more about the place other than ‘it was like Dubai’s version of the CIA, a place for their biggest criminals’.
‘Why would I be held in that kind of place?’ I asked, shocked. They said they were trying to find out, but warned me that under Dubai laws I could be held indefinitely without charge.
Gail then handed me her phone to call Julie. There were tears on both sides as Julie tried to reassure and comfort me. As we finished the meeting James and Gail gave me two Australian government booklets about being detained in a foreign country, but these were taken from me before I was returned to my cell.
The next day I was taken out again, this time to meet two lawyers, an Emirati called Salem and an Australian called Martin. We only had five minutes — no time for them to even tell me how they’d come to be involved. At their direction I signed a document written in Arabic which they said was a power of attorney allowing them to act for me.
I was led out of here and into another small room where I waited, not knowing what would happen. Eventually the door opened again and this time it was Julie! I grabbed her and held her, both of us sobbing. It had only been two weeks since we had last seen each other, but it might as well have been a lifetime. We sat there holding hands as she explained that the lawyers that I had met were helping Matt and me.
I gathered myself and talked to her quickly about my bewilderment at what was happening, my confinement in the cell and what I understood of the D17 transaction with Sunland. We both felt certain that we were being watched by a camera positioned behind the shaded glass doors of the cabinet in the room. I asked her how long I would be here for and reluctantly she said she didn’t know. Soon, after maybe only a few minutes had passed, she was whisked away from me.
JULIE
The day after the consular visit Ange and I were told that we could visit our husbands and we went back to this State Security place together. This time we were allowed into the compound but no-one could tell us how long we would have when we fina
lly saw them — five minutes? Twenty minutes? An hour? We had no idea. It was a relief to be with Marcus in person but at the same time it was horrible seeing him trapped in there like that. He looked washed out and anxious. He was saying, ‘This is extreme, what they’re doing, it’s extreme.’
I would have completely understood if he’d wept the whole time, as Ange said Matt did, but he was amazingly strong. Despite the enormous stress he was under, he remained logical, trying to tell me about any information which could be useful. He talked about sign-off sheets, a waiver letter and sale-and-purchase agreements that I’d need to track down. He didn’t have a pen or pencil at that stage, so everything was coming out of his head and the level of detail was incredible.
During our conversation I said to him, ‘Remember, Marcus, you’re an ironman. You have incredible strength and endurance. You can do it.’ That would become something I would remind him of time and time again in the coming months and something I would use to comfort myself as I tried to believe he would be able to survive this torture.
When the guard came to tell us the visit was over I had an awful feeling I might not see Marcus again. He was clearly very upset but we held hands as we said goodbye and he was reassuring me at the same time I was reassuring him: ‘We can do this, we can get through this.’
After the visit someone from back in Australia told me the story had been mentioned in the media. No names had been included yet, but I couldn’t risk Marcus’s family reading about it in the paper before they heard from me. I called Rosemary to work out how we could do this with minimal trauma. We organised it all so that Carol and Allan would be home at a certain time. Mum, 80 years old, drove herself to their house, and Rosemary and I formulated a strategy — what to say and how to answer their questions.
We hooked up a conference call, Rosemary in Queensland and me in Dubai, and rang them in Sydney. They put the call on speaker-phone and Mum held Carol’s hand as she listened.
I began by saying, ‘Marcus is not injured, he’s fine. He’s not sick, he’s healthy. He’s alive.’ I then spoke for about twenty minutes, giving them the overview in the calmest voice I could manage. Then I rang off and Rosemary and Mum talked them through it further. Rosemary would continue to call Carol and Allen daily for the next two years.
Ange and I were spending a lot of time together and I began hearing things that made me uneasy. I realised there was more to all this than Marcus knew. I was often present when Ange spoke to the lawyers: Martin Amad, who had flown in from Melbourne and the local lawyer she had hired, Salem Al Sha’ali. At one meeting, Martin started to go through a list of events, saying, ‘Marcus prepared this business case report, then this happened and that happened . . .’ detailing things to do with Sunland and Prudentia’s joint-venture negotiations and subsequent dealings. Then he said, ‘and the money was transferred to Matt’s company, Eight Blue . . .’
This was the first hint I got of what might have caught the investigators’ interest in Matt. Ange and Martin also spoke about David Brown. I knew Marcus had been questioned about Sunland’s purchase of D17. I knew who David Brown was — I’d met him once at a work dinner I’d attended with Marcus. When Ange and Martin spoke about him they said the authorities had targeted him because he was ‘weak’.
Martin had, I was told, acted for some pretty unsavoury characters in Melbourne, but I suppose that’s what criminal defence lawyers do. I found him a genuinely nice guy who seemed to care about what happened to Marcus. But a little way into the process, I realised that every conversation with the lawyers — who initially said they were acting for both Marcus and Matt — revolved around Matt and what had happened to various sums of money connected to him. At that point I said to Martin, ‘I think I need to find a separate lawyer for Marcus.’
He said to me kindly, ‘I think that’s a very good idea.’
MARCUS
Once when I asked to go to the bathroom, the regular toilets were having maintenance work done so instead I was taken to what I learned was a ‘VIP room’. It was a lot nicer than my cell and even had a private shower and a toilet. The occupant appeared to have left in a hurry, discarding various small items in his wake. I spotted an English-language book of puzzles and grabbed it while no-one was looking, putting it down the front of my pants. Even without a pen I could occupy myself by doing some of the puzzles in my head.
Locked back in my cell I opened the book and found a neat handwritten message: ‘No one stays in here forever. It’s only a matter of time’. It was signed, ‘Somebody’. This went straight to my heart. I kept the book hidden under my mattress and each night before lights out, or at any other time I needed reassurance, I would read these words and cling to them.
On 3 February, the ninth day of my incarceration in solitary confinement, Matt and I were loaded into a four-wheel drive and told only ‘Court’. We weren’t allowed to talk in the car. For the first time we entered a building that would come to be a source of so much anguish over the next five years. We were taken via the basement through a maze of crowded corridors into a waiting area filled with Emirati civilians, uniformed police and lawyers in black gowns. There was no sign of Salem or Martin. Matt and I begged our guards to be allowed to call our wives so they could contact our lawyers but our pleas fell flat.
We were thrust into a courtroom dock to the right of a judge. Barely glancing at the thin manila folder he had been handed, he uttered three or four words in Arabic.
An interpreter translated: ‘Guilty: Yes/No?’
Though we hadn’t been charged with anything both of us said ‘No.’ And that was it. In the car heading back to the cells we were stunned. How could we hope to get a fair hearing if this was how the ‘justice’ system worked?
On the way back Matt told me that Ange had arranged for the lawyers to work on the case and had put AUD500,000 into their trust account for the fees. This gave me a jolt: until this moment I hadn’t even thought about how I would pay lawyers. Julie and I didn’t have anything remotely like that much money lying around.
Then Matt tried to explain more about the money he had received from Prudentia. He said he didn’t really know the people behind the company and only helped them establish an escrow account because they didn’t have any banking facilities in Dubai. I asked how much money was involved. He said about AED20 million — more than AUD6 million. My heart skipped another beat at this news. So much money.
That afternoon I was led into a room, given a mobile phone and allowed to call Julie again. She explained what had happened at court — it was part of the process of keeping me detained without charge. It was called Tamdeed and it exists, I believe now, purely to satisfy international observers that people are being treated fairly: where someone is being held without charge a judge ‘independently’ reviews the case at regular (or in practice, irregular) intervals of every seven, fourteen, 21 or 30 days to decide if the detention should continue.
As I would learn, these Tamdeed hearings were a box-ticking exercise where the judge often didn’t even make a pretence of opening the case folder. They never lasted more than one minute. We never knew when the hearings would happen; we only found out when we were being taken there — and then we were never allowed to make contact with our wives to inform them. More often than not we didn’t have a lawyer present.
Julie and I then spoke briefly about the case. I asked her if Matt had received any money and she said ‘Yes’ but didn’t elaborate, knowing our conversation was being listened to. I also asked Julie if what was happening was to do with Sunland’s purchase of plot D17 and their negotiations and joint venture with the other Australian company, to which she also said ‘Yes’. She told me that she was in close contact with Ange, and they were trying to gather everything they could on the Sunland transaction. The guard then signalled the end of the call.
I felt as though my mind was doing non-stop mini-marathons, replaying everything I knew about the transaction, trying to figure out why it was suddenly an issue now
, more than two years later, even though in the intervening period Sunland representatives often said to us how happy they were with Nakheel and particularly with the Dubai Waterfront staff. It didn’t make sense. And it wouldn’t until much later when I learned about the missing bit in the puzzle: David Brown.
JULIE
I was supposed to go back to work at Showtime a few days after I flew back in, but that seemed impossible. I called a friend from work, a Scot called Jane Gibson, a great character. We got on famously in the office, but she’d never been over to my place. I phoned her and said, ‘Jane, I’d just like to . . . Can I talk to you? I really need to talk to somebody.’ She came over to my place, thinking I must be upset over something like Marcus having left me. She was shocked to learn the truth, of course, but she was there for me straightaway — she became another part of my inner support team. With her help I contacted my boss and asked for two weeks’ emergency leave; I didn’t specify the problem, just ‘family reasons’. I honestly thought two weeks would be enough — that it would all be sorted out by then.
Chapter 11
SECRETS AND LIES
MARCUS
There is much more to tell about my prison hell, some of it so sickening it’s still hard to put into words, but first it’s important to understand what was really happening behind the scenes.
Much of what follows only became clear to me, Julie and my lawyers in July 2009, seven months after I’d been arrested, when charges were finally laid. It would take three more years — until 2012 — when other crucial aspects of the case were tested in an Australian court, that we learned the full extent of the lies and secret deals that led to me, an innocent man, being locked up like a criminal. Unbelievably, even after all that, the agony was far from over.