by Lee, M
Mark was an Englishman in the neighbouring bunk to mine. (Our beds were butted up against one another, with books and other small personal things used to separate the two spaces.) He had been accused of killing his South African girlfriend. He maintained he had nothing to do with her disappearance but the police insisted he was guilty. There was no body and no murder weapon, not even any motive, but he had been arrested and charged with murder and was facing a life sentence.
For a long time Mark attempted to fight the conspiracy that he claimed the police had woven around him, but when I met him he had almost reached the point of just giving up. He often took to his bed and slept for twenty hours or more a day. It was, I suppose, clinical depression. I completely understood. The news about my bail seemed to knock the fight right out of me.
JULIE
I was numb. The Galaxy chocolate bars I consumed continuously didn’t seem to have any calming effect and I didn’t have the head to go to work anymore. Karen was great, she kept trying to distract Wayne and me with her usual funny craziness, but it didn’t really work for me. Wayne and I continued to meet with Mr Ali each week. He could tell us nothing more.
Every phone call with Marcus was difficult, trying to maintain an even tone in my voice and say the right words so that he could get some comfort. Sometimes I would watch the time on a call, thankful that it would end soon. It was breaking my heart to listen to his sadness.
MARCUS
The next few weeks passed in a blur. It was July, and I was approaching six months’ incarceration without charge. Mr Ali had said the best thing now was for the matter to be taken out of the prosecutor’s hands and tested in court.
It was time for another Tamdeed hearing. Mr Ali advised us that while we were in the court building both Matt and I would be taken to the prosecutor’s office and questioned again before charges could be laid. If the prosecutor was determined to stitch me up to save his reputation there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
After several hours in the subterranean holding cells we were led up to the office. Matt went in first, accompanied by his lawyer, Salem Sha’ali. I was hoping Mr Ali would arrive in time to go in with me. I knew Wayne and Julie had tried to ensure he would, but he was in such high demand you just never quite knew. Matt’s session took hours and at the end of it the guards said the prosecutor did not have enough time left to see me; I would have to come back on Sunday, alone.
Matt and I were not speaking to each other much at all by now — he had closed in on himself and I was angry that there were things he knew but had kept from me early on — but I was used to us being moved as a pair. It made me feel very vulnerable to know I would be facing the next step by myself.
On the ride back to Central Prison, Matt did open up enough to tell me that after being questioned he had been informed what the charges against him would be. They were:
1. Using his position to gain an advantage.
2. Making profits for himself and or others and thereby harming his employer, Nakheel.
3. Making profits for himself and or others, therefore harming Sunland.
5. Giving away company secrets to Prudentia.
Matt said that Salem Sha’ali had told him this was a better outcome than being charged with receiving a ‘bribe’. My mind racing, I tried to think what I might be charged with.
Sunday came and I was taken into the court building again. Julie was there and the guard, one of the kindest from the prison, allowed us to briefly hold hands before he took me up to the prosecutor’s office. Mr Ali was there, as Julie had assured me he would be.
Through an interpreter, whose English was very difficult to understand, the prosecutor began asking me questions, many of them multi-part: ‘Did you tell Brown that he had to purchase plot, and you gave planning change and did planning, and organised through Reed . . .’ and on and on it went. Trying to make sense of it, I turned to Mr Ali and said in desperation, ‘He’s ignoring the planning letters that were given by others. I don’t do planning. I don’t have any approval authority.’
‘Marcus, face this way, answer question,’ the prosecutor snapped. I saw that it didn’t matter what I said: he asked more of these multi-part questions and before I could start my reply, he answered them himself, dictating my supposed response to his assistant who was typing it all up in Arabic.
After about an hour of this the prosecutor printed out a document and gave it to Mr Ali, who told me I was to answer to the same charges as Matt.
I said, ‘I don’t understand, Mr Ali, I never received any money and I don’t even know Angus Reed or Prudentia, I wasn’t even involved in Sunland’s deal or negotiations with Prudentia but I’m being held responsible. How is this possible? How can this all be so unfair?’
There was no reasonable answer to that, so Mr Ali simply shrugged. He then asked again that I be granted bail, and was flatly refused. The meeting was over.
Back at the jail, after being processed, searched and taken back to my wing, I could finally call Julie. She couldn’t shed any more light on what happened. I thought I couldn’t feel any lower than I had done when bail was refused, but I was wrong.
Anthony Brearley and Angus Reed were also charged; Brearley faced the same charges as Matt and I, and Reed with conspiring with us to commit fraud. Brearley and Reed, both safely back in Australia, were described as ‘fugitives’ on the charge sheet and would be therefore tried in absentia. (In Dubai someone can be accused of a crime, tried, convicted and sentenced in absentia. If they were ever to return, including transiting through the airport, they would be arrested and imprisoned.)
The one advantage of being charged was that we could finally get hold of the prosecutor’s file and read what their case against me was based on. There were more than 400 pages, which had to be translated from Arabic to English by a translator Julie hired. When I got the English translation I read for the first time David Brown’s 21 January statement to the police — the one accusing me and the others of having tricked Sunland into paying us money.
I was dumbfounded. Not only was what he claimed completely untrue, Sunland and Brown in particular had said over and over how happy they were with the excellent client service they got from me and others at Nakheel. I’d become so used to thinking that the Emiratis and Dubai were the ones victimising me, to know that Australians had betrayed me was a body blow.
Also in the files were comments, reports and statements from the Dubai Rulers Court ‘experts’, led by Mohammed Mustafa, and the Dubai Prosecutions department’s Technical Office. The statements said things like, ‘The third defendant [Marcus] did the board report which was approved [by the Nakheel board] therefore he must have been doing something wrong’, ‘The third defendant advised the price that Sunland would have to pay for the plot therefore there must have been something occurring under the table’ and, most breathtaking of all, ‘There is no evidence that the third defendant received any money but he must have’. These assertions, suspicions at best, had been accepted as evidence.
From here on, I lost any ability to keep an even emotional keel. With ‘evidence’ like this, with Sunland’s false allegations towards me, I was now fighting an unwinnable battle.
WAYNE McKINLEY
We’d really felt like we were making headway with the prosecutor before Marcus was charged. We’d got to the point of thinking he would be out in a week or two, so it was very hard knowing what to say to him. Everything had worn thin. You couldn’t tell him anything positive because he’d been hearing it all since February.
Marcus loves Dudley and when he was feeling calm he’d ask, ‘How’s Dudley? What’s he up to, is he OK?’ But now when he rang Julie from prison, sometimes after lining up for hours, he might hear Dudley bark and it would interrupt his train of thought and set him off. He’d say, ‘Prison is loud enough as it is. I can’t hear. Shut the dog up.’ I’d have to grab Dudley and run into another room, closing the doors behind me. Marcus was constantly on edge.
Julie
was pretty shattered by that stage too. Her nerves were shot because she was running at 180 beats per minute. There were good phone calls and bad phone calls with Marcus. After a terrible one we’d talk it through and Julie would sit and cuddle Dudley and try to hit the reset button. It got to the point where we’d spend an hour or two just strategising about how to deal with Marcus.
JULIE
The phone calls with Marcus were just so difficult. He would stand in the queue, call me and say, ‘I need this, I need this, I need this, I need this.’ He’d hang up, go straight to the back of the queue and then twenty minutes later he’d be back on the line, saying, ‘Have you done it yet? Have you done it yet?’
I couldn’t say, ‘But I need to go and have a shower’ because he was so desperate any little thing could set him off, even just the sound of my voice.
He’d say, ‘How dare you, this is just so wrong, you’re just — this is so bad’ and he’d hang up.
He needed me so badly. He was drowning under the fear and stress and I was being dragged under with him. I had to constantly lean on my supporters, Wayne and Rosemary, my friends at Showtime and the few people back in Australia who believed in us.
Karen was always there for me, and I absolutely couldn’t have got through it without her. She had a key to the front balcony doors and she’d climb over the railing, and let herself in. I’d be on the phone to Marcus and she’d just come up to me, give me a hug, and then she’d let herself out and go off to work. Small moments of kindness kept me going.
We had a new sign-off for the daily emails: GMO, for Get Marcus Out. The only way to GMO was by focusing on the allegations in the case file. I threw myself into it.
MARCUS
When I was able to calm myself down I knew how hard I was pushing. I was desperate, helpless, and those calls were the only tiny bit of control I had over any part of my life, my only contact with the outside world. Sometimes I would even sneak to the phones in the early hours of the morning, driven to ask Julie a question I’d just thought of for Mr Ali or just to hear her speak. I was plagued by nightmares, eaten up by the knowledge that someone had acted so badly against me.
Looking back at a journal I kept throughout my time in prison, I see comments like, ‘It was so good to see Wayne and Julie today. They do a great job putting up with my moods, which I know are because of lack of food, sleep, frustration and general sadness and confusion of what has occurred.’ Or, ‘I couldn’t wish to be with a more loyal and loving wife. She basically busts herself trying to deal with anything and everything. She’s always there for me no matter what time I call, even at 4 a.m. some mornings when I’m a ball of stress and anguish.’
But even though I knew this with one part of my brain, when I was in that phone queue I just wanted everyone, especially Julie, to work harder. I’d call her at 6 a.m. saying, ‘Don’t tell me you’re tired, I only had four hours’ sleep last night. Wake up, we need to get to work.’
The fight for my life made me demanding and selfish and abrupt with anyone who wasn’t completely focused on the cause. I rang Rosemary one day and she said, ‘Look, I’m just counselling at the moment, would you be able to ring back in five minutes?’
I snapped back, ‘Rosemary, in case you haven’t read the paper I’m in jail, so no, I can’t. Tell your person there who’s having an issue with work to hang on for five minutes.’
After the charges were laid there was a lot of media attention on our case back in Australia. Julie read one story to me over the phone. Written by Royce Millar and Rick Feneley of Fairfax Media, it mentioned that Sunland were seeking ‘civil remedies’ for the alleged fraud and cooperating fully with the Dubai authorities in their investigation. Sunland ‘denied being behind the police action’ against us.
The story described Angus Reed as being ‘well-known in property circles, including as adviser to the Nauru government in the 1990s when it lost a fortune on the Melbourne property market’. But the bit that I had Julie read over again was the part that described Matt Joyce and Angus Reed as classmates at Geelong Grammar. This, after Matt had repeatedly told me he hardly knew Angus Reed. It took me a day to calm down enough to ask Matt if it was true.
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘they have it wrong, it was Brearley who went to school with him, not me.’ (In fact, I never found any evidence that Brearley had gone to school with Reed.)
Other media reports were less accurate, describing me as a 44-year-old (I was 40) from Melbourne who had been ‘Nakheel’s Chief Financial Officer’. In the context that sounded a lot more important, and more sinister, than my actual job of Commercial Manager of one division in Nakheel. It was clear that we needed someone to correct the record and speak for us in Australia. And as Sunland planned to launch court action in Australia, we needed an Australian lawyer.
Thanks to the wonderful support Showtime had given Julie she was still making some money, enough for food, petrol and utilities. And fortunately, because of having to pay a year in advance, our rent was covered until the end of December. But I hadn’t been paid since January. The money we had left in our mortgage offset account would have to last us who knows how long. Finding a lawyer looked daunting. Rosemary, who was already helping out — speaking almost every day to my parents, helping them cope with Allan’s cancer battles as well as what was happening to me, and keeping Julie going — would still say, ‘I wish I knew how to help you more’ to me.
One day I rang her and said, ‘You want to help me? Get me a bloody lawyer, an Australian lawyer who’s going to work his arse off for us. You’ve got 48 hours, bye.’
Out of that came the incredible blessing of John Sneddon.
ROSEMARY ADAMS
I rang a large number of the big law firms but couldn’t find anyone who would help me. My elder daughter, Paula, has a law degree and one of her friends recommended I call John Sneddon, a partner at a Brisbane firm called Shand Taylor. After all the knockbacks I had had and lawyers who wouldn’t speak to me, I was determined to get this guy to at least hear me out.
Just listening to John’s calm, gentle voice was wonderful. He was happy to keep talking to me and showed interest immediately. I knew after talking to John that he was ‘the one’ but I had to convince a very frightened Julie in Dubai of this.
JOHN SNEDDON
When I was young, I saw a lot of the world; I went backpacking for four-and-a-half years through 60 countries. I’ve always been interested in cases involving Australians overseas and I’d read a few newspaper articles about the case in Dubai in mid-2009. Then in July or August I got a call from Rosemary Adams. She said, ‘I’ve been given your name because I hear you take on unusual cases and I’ve got a friend in Dubai named Marcus Lee who needs your help.’ ‘Dubai’ and ‘Marcus Lee’ clicked in my brain and I immediately knew what she was talking about.
I said to her, ‘I’m happy to look into it because I have an interest in these sorts of cases but you need to understand, I’m not a criminal lawyer. I’m a commercial litigator, and an industrial relations lawyer. And I know nothing about the law in Dubai.’
She said, ‘That’s OK, he’s got a criminal lawyer in Dubai. We need someone who can conduct the negotiations here in Australia with other parties and keep the media at bay.’
I used to be a journalist, so I was comfortable with how the media operates. I sent a client agreement to Julie, and I think I put an initial fee estimate of AUD5000 or something like that.
Within a day or two, I realised that the sort of work that was required and their capacity to pay and the potential length of the file meant that the client agreement was useless.
I said, ‘Don’t worry, let’s just take it one step at a time.’ Once I’d familiarised myself with all the material Rosemary sent I said, ‘We can only focus on those things we have control over. We can’t control the process in Dubai. We do, however, have some control over the complainant, Sunland. We have some control over how the matter is being reported in the Australian media. And we have cont
rol to a limited extent over the way the DFAT is engaging with the Emirati authorities. So let me focus on all that.’ And that’s how it started.
I spoke to Julie once or twice on the telephone and then she said to me, ‘Look, this is costing me a fortune. Do you use Skype?’ At that point five years ago I didn’t, but I downloaded Skype and went and bought one of those headsets. Then I Skyped Julie. When you’ve got those headsets on, the voice on the phone is not coming from a tiny receiver, it surrounds you in stereo sound, and she just had this sad, sad voice. It sounded like she was right there inside my head.
I said to her, ‘Julie, you sound like the voice of my conscience.’ I think she thought I was crazy.
She seemed to be doing a very good job of handling a difficult situation. She had a grasp of the facts, and the documents. I told her, ‘I need to have a meeting with Sunland. I have to introduce myself, and see whether I can get them to adjust the charges.’ It just seemed such a simple thing.
Once I’d read everything I had no doubt that Marcus was innocent. It was just so obvious. And it quickly became clear that a lot of the key players both in Australia and Dubai also believed Marcus was innocent. I sensed that the people who could help Marcus, like Sunland and the Dubai prosecutor, weren’t doing so for reasons best known unto themselves. The only way for me to get them to assist was by dragging them there by the scruff of the neck.
I’d been involved in the case for about a month when my wife, Vanessa, and I had our first night away from the kids since my daughter was born — she was almost seven at the time. We went up to this beautiful, indulgent resort. We were meant to be having a romantic weekend and I spent lunch babbling about this fascinating new case I had. I was moving the salt and pepper shakers around on the table, trying to explain it to Vanessa, and I said, ‘Marcus Lee is an innocent man, caught up in a dispute between some Gold Coast property developers and some Victorian property developers.’ I remember thinking, ‘That’s it, that’s all this is. It’s not as complicated as you think.’ But because the dispute was being played out in the Dubai criminal system the potential consequences for Marcus were very serious.