Dubai strives to cultivate an image abroad of an attractive and safe place to do business. But the smallest debt can land you in jail for years
yan Cornelius hadn’t even intended to set foot outside Dubai airport. When he boarded a flight from Karachi on May 21st 2008, he planned only on changing planes to travel on to his home in Bahrain. At the last moment, the 54-year-old British businessman decided to stop over in Dubai to meet his business partner.A daily newsletter with the best of our journalismThree plain-clothes policemen arrested Cornelius as he left the airport. Even in his shock he was struck by how young they were.
Eventually, after grilling him for hours, the officers told Cornelius to make a statement laying out his version of events. Around 30 minutes after he did so, an officer reappeared with a typed document in Arabic, a language that Cornelius neither speaks nor reads. The man said he could leave for Bahrain once he’d signed itWhen Cornelius asked for a lawyer, he was told that there wouldn’t be one available for days – by then, the officers ominously asserted, it would be “too late”.
Though he was only in his early 40s, Cornelius was wealthy enough to retire. But the quiet life didn’t interest him. According to Chris Pagett, his brother-in-law, he “was still driven by the same colonial-boy compulsion to show these posh-boy poms that you can make it into the big league”. Even so, entrepreneurs found it hard to raise enough for big projects like the Plantation unless they were backed by a major corporate developer. Some specialist lenders, however, made money by taking on riskier borrowers. Cornelius turned to one such firm,, which provided capital at a higher rate of interest than a typical bank loan. He hoped that this would help get the project off the ground and convince a mainstream bank to give him and his partners cheaper longer-term financing..
Food is one of the biggest expenditures. The menu is bleak for prisoners who can’t afford to buy their own: black tea and a bowl of daal for breakfast; for lunch or dinner, a chicken drumstick and a dollop of rice in yellow gravy which has the consistency of gruel; occasionally a couple of tinned frankfurters with stewed onions. Long-term inmates report that over the past ten years the quality of the meals has steadily declined.
All the parties knew about the irregularities when they agreed to restructure the loan in 2007. According to an international banker who worked in the Middle East at the time, there was plenty of money washing around and the economy of thewas booming: “As long as this continued, no one seemed overly worried about what the borrower did with the money, as long as he could be trusted. It’s how business was done back then.
Latifa, Shamsa’s younger sister, was 32 when she attempted to flee Dubai in a yacht in 2018. The boat was intercepted off the coast of Goa by Indian special forces, with theircounterparts in tow. Shaibani’s name crops up repeatedly in messages and audio recordings that Latifa provided to the Free Latifa Campaign. She claims Shaibani was involved in her kidnapping and threatened to have her certified as insane and detained indefinitely.
None of this helped Cornelius. In Dubai, the maximum sentence for defrauding the state is ten years. The new judge convicted Cornelius and his co-defendants in 2012, sentencing them to the full ten-year term. The trial was in Arabic so Cornelius couldn’t understand it. His lawyer didn’t speak English. He was told through an interpreter that the judge insisted that Cornelius and his partners still owedtenaciously pursued this debt in Britain and Bahrain, where Cornelius owned other assets.
It still isn’t clear why Cornelius has been harried so tenaciously for his debt and held in prison indefinitely. Lord Clement-Jones said in the House of Lords that he believes this to be a consequence of Shaibani’s “personal determination”. He alleged that Shaibani had “intervened personally” with the authorities in Bahrain to reverse the dismissal of’s claim against Cornelius.
Since his imprisonment, Cornelius has suffered from high blood pressure and raised cholesterol. In late 2019 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis after a prisoner in an adjacent cell collapsed with the disease. Despite regular pleas, he waited 18 months to receive treatment and medication. Mercifully, his tuberculosis is latent.
Hotels with large conference centres have helped to turn the emirate into the Middle East’s undisputed hub for corporate events. It markets itself as a luxury destination for suits and shoppers alike. And it has shrewdly encouraged social-media influencers to move there – and post pictures of their glamorous lifestyles – to draw younger visitors, too.
As Cornelius has discovered to his cost, the law can be particularly cruel in disputes over money. In most Western countries, debt is considered a civil matter. Charles Dickens’s father was sent to a debtors’ prison and Dickens’s depictions of these prisons’ horrific conditions in his novels bolstered a campaign that led to their eventual abolition in Britain in 1869. TheDubai’s courts mete out eye-watering sentences for property crimes.
Dubai’s approach to debtors seems at odds with its own economic model. Some of its biggest industries, from property to tourism, have been fuelled by debt. In 2020 Dubai’s gross government debt was a manageable 77% of. That doesn’t include borrowings by major state-owned groups, however. Add these in and the ratio was a heady 150%, according to, a credit-rating agency. Since flirting with default in 2008-09, Dubai has relied on the willingness of international banks to restructure loans.
“Every morning I wake up and think ‘Oh God he’s still in jail. How are we going to keep going?’ But I’ll cling onto any hope. It’s how I’ve survived the past 13 years. Ryan still has hope too, I know it, despite everything.”he British government has offered Cornelius minimal assistance since he was arrested and imprisoned. After numerous pleas by the family, a consular assistant – a Dubai national – eventually helped him to see a doctor for his tuberculosis.
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