by Lee, M
On 1 December, David Brown told Matt that that the D17 deal was being looked into. On 10 December Matt Joyce transferred AUD7.1 million from his Jersey bank account to Reed’s account. He kept AUD1.25 million, which he later said was his payment for consulting work he had done for Reed in 2005. Because of exchange rates going up, the original sum was now worth considerably more. He told ABC-TV, ‘It was completely transparent, a legitimate transaction. It was part of everyday normal business. Prudentia didn’t have a bank account in Dubai. They needed to hold the money in a trust account until I worked out our tax situation. So that was documented and approved after by lawyers and accountants, approved by Nakheel, all very legitimate.’
On 10 December Matt Joyce also exchanged contracts on a AUD5.82 million Victorian cattle farm. When asked later about this he maintained that the farm was paid for by the sale of two Sydney properties and extra money from family. (The settlement of the 443-hectare farm occurred when he was still behind bars.)
Whatever Reed and Joyce did with the money once it had been paid is one story. But when Sunland paid that AED44 million ‘premium’ to Angus Reed, that was an arrangement both parties had agreed to. It was only later, when the payment came under suspicion from a newly vigilant prosecution process, that Brown and Soheil Abedian changed their story, claiming they had been deceived by Reed and people at Nakheel. Sunland named me as one of those people despite knowing that I had no involvement in their negotiation with Reed. And then they sat back while I suffered the dreadful consequences over the next five years.
Chapter 12
‘RELAX, TAKE A BREAK’
MARCUS
In prison I worked hard to stay strong and keep my mind organised. At some point during that second week I was in the room where I was taken for phone calls and spotted a pen on one of the desks. When the guard stepped out for a moment I acted quickly, grabbing it and hiding it down my pants. To my great relief I wasn’t frisked.
Up till then if I had a question for Julie or a document I wanted her to locate I’d had to rote-learn the question so that I would remember to ask it in the brief, emotionally overwhelming time I had with her on the phone or in person.
Now I could write down a key word to trigger my memory. In a care package from Julie I had received some Ventolin in a box and I made tiny notes inside the box’s lid. If I got to call Julie, I’d take the Ventolin with me and as I was speaking to her I would flick the lid open and closed as if by nervous habit, but really to catch a glimpse of what I’d written. I kept the pen and box hidden between the concrete blocks that formed the base of my bed.
Personal hygiene items, including the toothbrush and razor, had been taken out of the care package but I had a clean pair of jeans, underwear and a T-shirt. As meagre a delivery as it was, it felt like manna from heaven. I quickly shed the prison pyjamas that I’d now had on for more than a week and put on my own fresh clothes. I sat on the bed feeling like I had a new lease on life, even if just for a few moments.
But as my third week in solitary began I was struggling, mentally and physically. There were English-language programs on some of the TV channels, but they were of no comfort or distraction. I was locked in a cell with no sense of whether I would ever again be a free man; every show that was on seemed so trivial and ridiculous in comparison with my situation. I often put the TV on just for the light it shed, but kept the sound down.
I had another visit from Australian consular officials. They didn’t have much more to tell me — no real hope to offer — but from then on I was able to make phone calls three times a week, under strictly controlled conditions. The calls could take place on Saturdays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, after 2 p.m. when the afternoon guards’ shift came on. I was only permitted to ring Julie, no-one else, and the call could last no longer than ten minutes. (Very occasionally I might get an additional call at the whim of the guards.) Alone in my cell time passed so slowly it was torturous. In contrast, the ten minutes of these calls went by so quickly there was barely enough time to say ‘Hello, I love you’ and for Julie to try to pass on vital information to help me begin to understand what was happening.
We knew we were being listened to the entire time. People might think, ‘As long as you’re innocent, what does it matter what they hear?’ But it matters a lot. If Julie or I openly referred to any of the central threads of the police case — David Brown and Sunland’s purchase of plot D17, the name of Angus Reed or Prudentia or details of the payment that had gone into Matt’s Eight Blue account — that would have been seen as evidence that I was part of a conspiracy. Even if I was just asking how they were involved, or expressing outrage.
That might sound paranoid, even unlikely, to anyone who has the luxury of access to the Australian legal system, but in Dubai it is how things work. I tried to get around this in my calls with Julie by talking as quickly as I could and using as much slang as possible: my wife would understand me, but the people who were in the room or listening to the call and monitoring us wouldn’t.
The maximum thirty minutes that those phone calls added up to (they were often cut short by the guards) were the only times all week I communicated with anyone. The other 10,050 minutes went by without any meaningful interaction. I’d always been someone who liked to work through things by talking. Now, when I needed it most, there was no other human interaction. My feelings of desperation and helplessness grew with every passing day. I asked a guard who was leading me back to my cell after one of my phone calls, ‘You see people in here, how do they survive?’
He said carelessly, ‘Just relax, take a break, watch some TV.’
I felt utterly desolate.
JULIE
Within days of arriving back in Dubai I’d started sending group emails, updates for those people I could trust, our core supporters. These initially went to my family: Mum, my brother Ross, my sister Melinda (nicknamed Min) and brother-in-law Mark, my brother Allan and his wife Mandy, friends like Rosemary Adams, Justin and Jackie Crooks, Tony and Ali Perrin and a few work colleagues of Marcus and mine. As soon as Marcus’s family knew, I added them too, and then other people I could trust including those who had been helping me in Dubai: Jane, Karen and Rod.
There was no question we were under surveillance; I became aware I was being followed when I went out in the car on my first or second day back, and I’d since seen a man out in the street outside our villa making notes. I knew that our calls and emails were almost certainly being monitored too, so I was very careful with the language I used in these group updates and made sure everyone I was sending them to was equally careful not to use offensive language or to criticise Dubai, its justice system or its government.
The emails were vital for keeping everyone back home informed, but they also became an important ritual for me, at the end of every day. Even if it was past midnight before I got the chance to sit down and do it, I would send off an update telling people what had happened that day, what we were expecting to happen next . . . and letting them know we were still alive.
I kept the emails as light as possible partly because I knew Carol, Marcus’s mother, was reading them. I was reluctant to let her know how bad Marcus’s situation really was as she already had so much to worry about with Allan and with her ill mother. But also, we didn’t want people back home — with all good intentions — to go to the media. At that point any publicity was likely to hinder Marcus’ chances.
In 2008 an American businessman called Zach Shahin, the CEO of a property company in Dubai, was arrested and accused of corruption. He was initially held in solitary confinement in the same State Security centre Marcus was in and he was still under State Security control at the time of Marcus’s arrest. His experience had awful parallels with Marcus’s — to quote from the Free Zach Shahin website, ‘Shahin’s March 2008 arrest was nothing more than a glorified kidnapping. Under the pretence of a meeting with government auditors, Shahin was abducted and held incommunicado from his family, legal counsel, and the U.S. Consulate
for over two weeks, in violation of Dubai and international law. Without a warrant, Shahin’s home was ransacked and his personal safebox searched, with the security forces taking his personal papers and credit cards. He was forced by threats against the safety of his wife and children to sign documents in Arabic that he could not read.’
The widespread feeling among the people I spoke to was that the decision by Shahin’s supporters to get early publicity for his case had backfired. Dubai’s officials countered the claims of unlawful detention by referring to Guantanamo Bay. We didn’t want to risk a similar backlash.
I was careful not to mention the Shahin case to Marcus. The thought that he might still be languishing in prison without charge in a year’s time would have utterly devastated him. As it was he was struggling. On 8 February, at the start of his third week in solitary confinement, I emailed Gail Miller at the Australian consulate after speaking to Marcus by phone. I wrote:
• His mind is doing funny things.
• He is kept alone, isolated.
• He has not been outside for the entire two weeks.
• He has not breathed fresh air for the entire time.
• He is losing weight fast.
• He is not able to eat the food.
• He wants to make a formal complaint about one of the guards when he is released.
• He needs to get out.
I added, ‘I am really worried about his state of mind. Really, really worried.’
It had become clear that my initial aim to get Marcus freed within a couple of weeks wasn’t going to happen. It was around then that Indrani planted what became known as our ‘tree of hope’, taken from a frangipani cutting. When she planted it at the front of our place it was nothing more than a dead-looking stick. Nothing grows in the desert without constant care, but Indrani nurtured that plant. She watered it and looked after it as a sign of how much she cared.
I was still spending a lot of time with Matt Joyce’s wife, Ange, at this point. We are very different types of people — among other things, she’s tall and elegant with a patrician manner that people pay attention to. We seemed to be handling what was happening quite differently too. It’s an understatement to say I cried a lot. I was in tears at least once every day, often more. Perhaps she thought I was a crying idiot. For my part I didn’t quite know what to make of it when she said in a spirited tone, ‘Oh, this reminds me of when I used to work in TV and we’d be always running around trying to get things done for the TV shows.’
It was at this point we found Marcus a separate lawyer. Our Melbourne lawyer Martin Amad asked around and heard that Ali Abdullah Al Shamsi was the man to see and Gail Miller confirmed that he had a very good reputation. (He was Zach Shahin’s lawyer at the time. Rather than see this as a negative because Shahin hadn’t been freed, I felt that he would know better than us what we were up against.) The idea was that Ange, Martin and I would go in and see him and explain how things stood.
It wasn’t like in Australia where you simply hire a lawyer. We had to persuade Mr Ali, as we came to call him, to take us on as clients. But I had a good feeling about Mr Ali from the start, and that feeling only grew over the years. I am certain that if not for him, Marcus would not be safely home in Australia now.
The four of us — Martin, Mr Ali, Ange and me — met to run through the details. Mr Ali took notes as Martin ran through the case from the very beginning: ‘Marcus prepared a report, Sunland bought the land from Nakheel, they paid a premium to Angus Reed, money was transferred to Matt Joyce’s account . . .’ When he’d finished Mr Ali went back through every stage and asked, ‘And Marcus, where is he in this?’, ‘Where’s Marcus in this part?’ It felt great to have someone interested in Marcus as a separate entity.
Mr Ali told me much later he had thought it would take six months until all charges against Marcus were dropped, because he could see that Marcus had had nothing to do with the side deal and should never have been arrested. But none of us, including Mr Ali, knew then what Sunland was up to behind the scenes.
We had the money to pay Mr Ali from our salaries and bonuses stored in our mortgage offset account but as we were withdrawing money from accounts and the Australian dollar-to-dirham exchange rate had taken a dive, we lost money. Before this was over we’d lose all our assets too. It wouldn’t have changed anything though; we had to get Marcus out at all costs.
MARCUS
When Martin Amad came to see me while I was in solitary, he said, ‘I’d be really dirty about this if I was you. You should never have been included in this’, and I felt so grateful to him. But still I was glad when we got a lawyer who would be focusing just on me.
As well as our three phone calls, the prison authorities began letting Julie come for a weekly twenty-minute visit. This was wonderful because it gave her a chance to tell me things she couldn’t say over the phone. She told me Mr Ali would not come and visit me as long as I was in the State Security centre because anything that was said there could be twisted and used against me.
The visits and phone calls were the only times, other than using the bathroom, that I was allowed out of my cell. It was so claustrophobic in that tiny space, the walls seemed to get closer the longer I was in there. From time to time I would hear screaming echoing down the corridor. I never knew if it was the anguish of people who were being driven mad by solitary confinement or if they were being beaten or tortured.
I am guessing that being a white westerner conveyed some level of protection other prisoners like the Indian or Pakistani ones didn’t have. The Australian consulate would have raised an outcry if they saw me with bruises. I was never beaten or directly physically threatened, although many guards acted in a menacing, intimidating way. One of their favourite tricks was to bang on cell doors in the middle of the night, making wild accusations or threats.
They would say things like, ‘You’ve been telling your wife lies about us beating you, haven’t you? You’ve been telling the consulate lies, haven’t you? Do you want to be sent to Central Prison with the rapists and murderers? That’s what will happen to you.’
I was so vulnerable by this point that the threat of being thrown to the wolves in prison was completely terrifying, even worse than solitary. I suppose it’s a version of the Stockholm syndrome that makes kidnap victims not want to leave their captors.
They would also threaten to cut off the phone calls and the weekly visits. That sent stabs of fear through me: Julie was my lifeline. One particularly nasty guard had a favourite taunt: I had better tell them everything I knew, he said, because if I stayed in here my wife would leave me. I worried about how Julie was coping but I knew she would stand by me. I told the guard he obviously knew Julie better than me, but the sarcasm went straight over his head.
Eventually the guards allowed me to take books from a central bookcase back to my cell. I’d never been much of a reader but these books, which included another puzzle book and a Bill Bryson travel book, helped pass the time. I could briefly escape, sometimes for just a moment, sometimes for whole minutes.
Julie was able to bring me some things including clean clothes swapped for my dirty ones each week and a couple more books, including Lance Armstrong’s autobiography It’s Not About the Bike (in 2009 we all still thought he was a hero) and Arabic and French phrasebooks. Learning a bit of Arabic was a survival tool and the French was to give me hope. February was passing rapidly and it was clear we wouldn’t be celebrating my birthday in Paris as we had planned. Learning French was a way of saying to myself (and to Julie) that I would get out of here and we would go to France when this was all over.
I tried to build a routine. During the day I would read until what I thought was mid- to late afternoon. Then I would switch to language lessons until the dinner box was brought in, after which I would switch back to reading. Julie had also been allowed to bring in a photo of us, happy together, and one of Dudley. Lying on my bed, I would look at these and say a simple, quiet prayer to be back home
with them soon. I’d never been one for praying, but they say there are no atheists in foxholes and that’s true of prison, too. When the light was turned off I would gaze sightlessly at the flickering TV screen, trying hard to hold on to hope.
On 17 February Matt and I were taken to court again. This was another Tamdeed hearing, and an opportunity for our lawyers to apply for bail. Julie had passed on to me in one of our calls that Ali felt bail would be refused, as it was. Even though I tried to brace myself, it was a blow. But this time Ali and Julie were at the court building to meet me. I shook hands with Ali; it was such a relief to see a friendly Emirati and one I knew was on my side. I also got to hug Julie, which was a high I relived for days afterwards, trying to ward off the low of being locked back into that hated cell.
February 21 — my fortieth birthday — approached, and with it the end of a whole month I had been in here. I dreamt that I’d been allowed to go home on a 24-hour leave pass for the day as long as I promised to return. Waking from these dreams and realising I wouldn’t be going anywhere hurt every time.
Julie knew how much I was struggling and on one visit she brought in a booklet from the Australia consulate. The guards always checked the things she gave me to make sure no papers were hidden inside, but as she handed it to me she said in a meaningful tone, ‘You’d better read this. Make sure you read it.’
To my relief the guard who took me back to my cell let me keep it. I opened it to see a handwritten poem from her inside. It read:
When the darkness comes look for the light,
The light, life and love is with you
Find the light
When you feel alone know that you are not