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

by Lee, M

  JULIE

  At the start of December we sold our remaining Queensland investment unit to pay back some of the money we had borrowed to pay for the bail passport. Unfortunately, Nassar, the Emirati whose passport it was, became more and more of a problem. Rishi the fixer was calling again, in tandem with Nassar.

  Marcus and I decided we had to give them more money; the risks were too great otherwise. Marcus had the idea of drawing up a written agreement to secure the passport for as long as it was required. We took out AED51,000 (about AUD14,500) from the money we’d raised by selling the unit, and Karen and I went to meet Rishi and Nassar at Starbucks. We all signed the agreement and it was all very amiable and ‘Thank you very much’. Nassar looked like an excited puppy, waiting for his next treat.

  But it didn’t last long. Soon Nassar was again texting me all hours of the day with requests like ‘I need 4000 dirhams’. It got to the point where the sound alert for an incoming text message would make me jump out of my skin. Karen or I would call or text back saying we had an agreement and there was no more money. We even agreed to meet him again, thinking we might be able to make him understand if we met him in person. That didn’t work. He continued with threats like, ‘Your husband will go back to prison where he belongs’. Mr Ali ended up raising it with the judge in Marcus’s case, who seemed to think it was amusing.

  I got a new mobile and number and left the old one on silent in my bag. Every month or two there would be another flurry of threats. Once at work he called me fourteen times in a row. When Marcus asked about it I told him the texts had stopped, because it was too frightening to tell him the truth. Nassar kept up his threats for nearly two years and it still makes me shake just thinking about it.

  MARCUS

  We hoped and expected 2010 to be the year that would bring us some resolution. We didn’t know it then but Sunland was busy back in Australia, working on Anthony Brearley, the former head of legal for Nakheel. Brearley would later tell Wendy Carlisle from the ABC Radio National program Background Briefing that Sunland had sent him and Reed/Prudentia a letter demanding they repay the AED44 million premium Sunland had paid Reed. He told her, ‘I couldn’t afford to go through legal, I didn’t want to be in the Supreme Court, even if I won it still costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars.’ He added, ‘I knew I was innocent, I just didn’t want . . . I know they’ve got lots of money, a public company, they can sue whoever they like.’ So when Sunland offered him a deal, he took it. He agreed to be bound by a document called a Deed of Release, drawn up by Sunland’s lawyers, Phillips Fox, where Sunland director Ron Eames was still a senior partner.

  In the document Sunland agreed not to sue Brearley if, and only if, he agreed to provide an affidavit for them, and to back this up by appearing as a witness on Sunland’s behalf if asked to do so.

  In exchange for signing, Sunland agreed ‘not to enforce’ any judgement or court order made against Brearley in Dubai or anywhere else. But there was more. Brearley ‘specifically must not disclose this deed or the fact of this deed to any Dubai authorities’. He agreed and signed the deed on 27 January 2010. Sunland then turned around and gave the document to the lead investigator, Mohammed Mustafa, and a report was tabled to the Dubai judge containing extracts from the deed in support of Sunland’s claims.

  (The details of the deal between Brearley and Sunland only became public after Fairfax got wind of it in 2013. Sunland took an injunction against Fairfax to stop the story running. This worked for a while but then, using parliamentary privilege, MP Tim Pallas tabled the document in Victorian state parliament. He introduced it by saying, ‘I regret to inform the house that shocking new evidence has arisen of witness tampering’. In the Background Briefing program, which aired five months after this, Brearley said he was ‘horrified and shocked’ when it became apparent Sunland had lied about the events surrounding D17.)

  Though we knew nothing of the Brearley deal at the time, our Australian lawyer John Sneddon, was keeping up the pressure on Sunland. We needed Sunland and David Brown to send a letter to the Dubai prosecutors withdrawing their allegations towards me and correcting their misstatements.

  JOHN SNEDDON

  I went into that first confidential meeting with Sunland with the objective of seeking their agreement to withdraw the complaint. When the ‘without prejudice’ settlement discussions hit a dead-end, I decided to write to them on an open basis.

  I was careful to never reveal any details from the confidential correspondence in those open letters. I would just set out a factual scenario. And I would try to cajole them into doing the right thing. I would say things like, ‘Yours is a highly respected company listed on the Australian stock exchange. I am sure your board would not want there to be any suggestion that you didn’t do everything in your power to help an Australian citizen in his time of need’.

  What it meant was we had two lines of communications going at once — one confidential and one open. They seemed to dislike the open communications intensely. Perhaps they were concerned that what was in the open channel, on the record, could end up in the court of public opinion, which raised the spectre of bad publicity for them.

  In 2010 I went over to Dubai again. I went to get to know Marcus and Julie a bit better, accompany them to see Ali, go to court with them, and try to have a meeting with Soheil Abedian from Sunland to discuss how I could get my client out of there.

  When I was there I met Ali Al Shamsi. He struck me as a very smart lawyer. I’m a big one for sizing someone up and getting that initial gut feeling and my initial gut feeling was confidence. I think his greatest skill was his ability to sort the wheat from the chaff, to get rid of the irrelevant questions.

  When I first saw Marcus it was four days before his next court hearing. We went out to dinner, and he seemed relaxed. The next day he came to the hotel, and we had a beer and talked strategy. He was decidedly tense. The day after that I went with him to see Ali and he was really, really uptight and stressed. I gained a real appreciation of what Marcus and Julie were going through on a daily basis. When the day of the court case arrived he and Julie picked me up at the hotel, and he was careening through the streets of Dubai in his car at high speed, in a state of great agitation. I thought we were going to have an accident. I remember he was obsessed with getting their ‘lucky carpark’ outside the court building. When we arrived at court and the spot was free, his relief was palpable.

  Outside the court there were people milling around everywhere. It was impossible not to feel a sense of rising tension. There were all these pillars outside the courtroom and Marcus went and stood behind one, out of sight. Julie and her good friend Karen were there. Matthew Joyce and his wife, Ange, arrived. Julie introduced me to Karen and the Joyces and we were talking. Then I heard this voice yelling, ‘John, John’. I turned around and saw Soheil Abedian walking straight towards us through the crowd, smiling like we were long-lost friends. Matt and Ange looked at me like I was some kind of traitor, and disappeared immediately.

  Soheil started engaging in conversation with me in the lobby of the court. For some reason I felt incredibly self-conscious. He is a very tactile person and would emphasise a point by touching me on the shoulder. He was impeccably dressed and I remember he was surrounded by all these attractive young women — one’s an interpreter, one’s a lawyer and so on — all dressed in designer clothes, standing out amid all the women wearing the traditional black robes from head to toe.

  One of the purposes of my trip to Dubai was to try to get Sunland to write to the Dubai prosecutor and withdraw the allegations Brown had made against Marcus and discontinue their claim for damages against him. Unfortunately, I left Dubai empty-handed.

  I often was very pessimistic about my ability to get Marcus out of Dubai. But I just kept at it. There is no point holding back when you are involved in litigation. You’ve got to take your chances because you miss 100 per cent of the shots you don’t take. I also believe there is great power in momentum. If yo
u write a letter and they say, ‘Go away, and don’t write again,’ you must ignore that and write another. What are they going to do? They can’t ignore you forever. That’s how I approached the case.

  I did have to be careful in what I said to Marcus. As a lawyer I must never deceive my client. And I never did. But there were times when I would think, ‘I’m never going to get him home.’ I never told him that.

  MARCUS

  We maintained some contact with Matt, on the advice of Mr Ali, who felt we needed to know what the Joyces were doing. He warned us to be very careful as Matt was almost certainly still being followed and his phone tapped. I felt I couldn’t believe anything Matt said to me so I kept any meetings we had brief. When I did see him, at court for instance, he seemed intent on shoring up my support in terms of making sure our lawyers moved in lock-step. But I had realised that I was far, far better off distancing myself from him and everyone else involved in the case at every turn.

  One afternoon he sent me an email that left me shaking with anger. Apparently he’d been told about an expats’ dinner party at which there had been a lot of discussion about the case, including his receipt of the Prudentia money. In a very nasty way, he accused me of starting rumours about this. Julie and I were so careful with what we said that we didn’t even discuss the ins and outs of the case with Karen, who was one of our great supporters and came to every court hearing. When I’d been released on bail I’d been contacted by people clearly fishing for inside gossip and I’d cut them dead. The email from Matt was the last straw. We’d never had any genuine support from them and now they were on the attack. From then our only contact with the Joyces was a terse nod on court days.

  JULIE

  When we’d come to Dubai, our dream had been to buy a house in the Balmain area of Sydney. When we managed that it seemed to secure our future, but now interest rates were rising and it was going to cost us AUD40,000 a year on top of rental income to maintain the mortgage — more if rates kept rising. That was money we just didn’t have anymore.

  It was horribly sad realising we were going to have to sell it. It hurt to think back to our wonderful day in Monterosso when we’d bought the street number and other little bits and pieces with which to decorate our dream house. That was less than two years ago and since then we’d already lost so much, now this.

  Joe Scarf, who had supported us from afar ever since Marcus’s arrest, helped us put the house up for sale. Two months later it was sold with more than three-quarters of the money going to pay the remaining mortgage and the line of credit we had been drawing on to survive. We had AUD150,000 left, which would have to last us who knew how long. That dream was over.

  MARCUS

  John Sneddon was working for us pro bono, but it was pretty clear that Mr Ali would have to bill us again at some point. We’d already gone a long way past the original time estimate on which he’d based the first bill and there was no end in sight. At the beginning of 2010 our annual rent in Dubai had fallen due. We had no way of paying it so we started to accrue debts there, too — the rent itself plus 9 per cent per annum interest. It was sheer good luck we were in a Nakheel-owned property; that made it a little less likely we would be evicted, but that possibility was always there as an undercurrent of anxiety.

  The court hearings were no less a joke than the Tamdeed hearings had been, just in a different way. Mohammed Mustafa, the chief investigator who hadn’t shown at the first hearings, also didn’t bother coming to the next three. These were monthly hearings, so it was February 2010 before he showed up. When he did, he answered some questions, provided the judges with a new police report about the movements of money and was directed to appear at the following month’s hearing. He failed to do so for the next four hearings — four long months. Then there was the summer/Ramadan break. He finally made another appearance in August 2010, but the main judge was away on leave so Mr Ali had no option other than to request a delay until he returned. Mustafa failed to appear the following month as well.

  Finally, after DFAT put pressure on their UAE counterparts, Mustafa showed up for the October 2010 court hearing and Mr Ali got to ask his very first question in the case — one year after our first court date. Mr Ali asked, ‘Is it true that Marcus Lee received no money from any deal?’ to which Mustafa answered, ‘Na’am’, yes, that was correct.

  Back at home, there were other worries. Allan, who had brought me up from the age of six, did see one more Father’s Day but he was dreadfully ill. At the end of September he went into a hospice not far from the spot on Kogarah Bay where he had met Mum. Soon after he was admitted, while he could still talk a little, I called to speak to him for what we both knew would be the last time ever. He was so worried about me and Julie. Wayne and my mother, Carol, are certain that the immense stress of having to watch from afar as we went through this ordeal worsened Allan’s illness and hastened his death. I have no doubt they are right.

  He couldn’t talk much, struggling with each breath. But I spoke of how when I was very young he used to take me out in a boat on the very bay he could see from his hospice window. He was surprised I remembered. It was such a sad goodbye. In our final few words I tried to give him some reassurance that Julie and I would be OK. He died five days later, on 3 October.

  Sunland’s David Brown was ordered to appear at the following hearing, in December. Brown and Soheil Abedian had attended every hearing up till then, sometimes bringing their wives and children. At the first hearing after I had been released on bail, in November 2009, Brown even approached Julie, reaching out to shake her hand. She snapped, yelling, ‘Get away, this is because of you’ and then collapsed weeping on one of the seats.

  Brown and other Sunland representatives were always there, but they failed to show up when Brown was called as a witness. Their lawyer told the court that Brown was out of Dubai. He did show for the January hearing, repeating his now completely discredited version of events but adding Jeff Austin’s name to the list of people who had advised him that Angus Reed ‘had control’ of plot D17.

  Court sessions and hearing dates went on like this. Once a month, sick with tension, we would go to court. The hearings started about 9.30 a.m., and if the witness didn’t turn up they would often last just a couple of minutes. There was a fine for not turning up when called — AED100 (about AUD30) — but no other legal provision to compel witnesses to attend.

  In June 2011, I received yet more bad news — my maternal grandmother, Joyce Costley, had died, followed by my birth father, Ray, just a couple of weeks later. It was devastating not being able to be there to pay my respects.

  In September 2011, when we were supposed to have our defences lodged and the summing up by the various parties’ lawyers, Sunland’s lawyer, Essa Bin Haider, stood up, yelling at the judge, asking that all of the defendants (including me) be ‘convicted quickly’ and punished with highest possible penalties. Julie and I were shattered when Mr Ali translated. How could Sunland act in such a callous and immoral way?

  The following month’s hearing didn’t happen because the judge was ill. In December Sunland lawyers involved in the transaction, including Michael Lunjevich, were directed to attend the following hearing, which would be January 2012. Lunjevich failed to attend the January hearing and when he did show up in February he said he had forgotten his ID so the case was delayed for yet another month. In the meantime one of the judges was replaced, with his replacement coming into the case completely cold.

  JOHN SNEDDON

  I was never able to say this during the case for fear of upsetting the Emiratis but it’s an absolute farce to have witnesses not showing up; it’s an outrage. And the system just meanders along. If the judges were genuinely investigating the case under this inquisitorial system for the month between hearings, that would be all well and good. But the court takes no active role in the process whatsoever. Having the trial convene for at most an hour every month or two with nothing taking place in the intervening period serves no purpose, clo
gs up the system, and it’s outrageously unfair on the accused.

  We never criticised the process. We always worked within the confines of the Dubai legal system and we respected it. And I still do. But I don’t think it’s disrespectful to say that I just find it completely counterproductive and counterintuitive, to have different judges deciding a case than the ones who heard the evidence. The judges who heard evidence in 2009 had all finished their contracts and gone back to Egypt and two or three different panels of judges were working on the case in the intervening period. So the court that finally determined the case was an entirely different court to the one that heard the witnesses in the first place. How can that be called a justice system? There is no justice in that process at all.

  MARCUS

  It’s so easy to write the few words needed to cover that passage of time, and so quick to read them: a day went by. A month went by. A year went by. But when you have to live it, under the constant stress and strain of not knowing if your bail will be revoked and you’ll be sent back to jail, if you’ll be evicted from your property, if you’ll be found guilty and become another victim of injustice rotting away behind bars, then it is unbearable. There are moments where you smile, people you’re pleased to see, but you can feel yourself falling to pieces week by week.

  Chapter 19

  THE SPIDER-WEB OF DUBAI

  JOHN SNEDDON

  My attempts to cajole Sunland into withdrawing the allegations against Marcus amounted to nothing. It was now January 2012, and we’d had three Christmases where I’d rung Marcus and Julie saying, ‘Merry Christmas. Don’t worry, I feel optimistic about the year ahead.’ We were sick of it. We decided it was time for a different approach. So on 9 January, I emailed a blistering letter to Sunland’s new law firm, Thomsons (Ron Eames had left Phillips Fox for Thomsons, and the Sunland account had gone with him). It was an open letter expressed in formal legal terms, but I said, in essence, ‘David Brown and Sunland need to correct the misinformation they have given to the Dubai police and prosecutors or we’re going to go you — we’re going to go you in Australia, we’re going you in Dubai. All hell’s going to rain down on you.’