2021.12.15 迪拜的债务陷阱

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The Dubai debt trap
Ryan Cornelius has completed a sentence for fraud but he’s lost hope of ever leaving prison

Dec 15th 2021

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By Matthew Valencia

Ryan 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.

Three plain-clothes policemen arrested Cornelius as he left the airport. Even in his shock he was struck by how young they were. The police seized his phone and locked him in a windowless room. Customs officers searched him, saying that they believed he was carrying drugs. They found nothing.


At first he thought the authorities had simply made a mistake. Cornelius became more alarmed later that day when he was taken in an unmarked car, hands bound with zip ties, to Dubai’s police headquarters. No one spoke to him en route. As he entered the building, a compact structure with a façade of dark glass squatting between two steel pillars, a hood was placed over his head. After an hour it was taken off, and officers said he’d soon be released. He wasn’t told why he’d been arrested.

Cornelius was interrogated for hours in a padded, windowless room, without a lawyer present, then thrown into a bare cell. For ten days he was held incommunicado, with no access to his family, embassy officials or legal advisers. He didn’t even have a mattress to sleep on. He later learned that his two British business partners had been arrested around the same time.

A second interrogation was conducted by two police officers. Cornelius found it hard to follow their train of questioning. They had a file with them of what looked like invoices, though they referred to them only generally. The senior officer brandished a letter from a Dubai bank and kept asking whether the invoices were faked.

Most questions were about Dubai Islamic Bank (dib), the emirate’s second-largest lender. Cornelius’s property business had taken out a large loan from a German financial firm, which had itself borrowed money from dib for the purpose. From the officer’s rather confused questioning, Cornelius surmised that he stood accused of fraud. He explained to the officials that, though dib had recently accused him and his partners of misusing the loan, everyone involved had agreed a new plan to repay the debt.


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 it. When 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”. Confused and increasingly panicked, Cornelius signed the statement (he later insisted that it bore little resemblance to the interview). Instead of being released, he was returned to his bare cell.


Dubai lacks the oil wealth of its neighbours. To compensate, it turned itself into a commercial hub

Dubai is the glitziest of the seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates (uae). It’s a tourist playground of beaches, turquoise seas and imposing glass towers that gleam in the year-round sun. Entrepreneurs are attracted to Dubai, too, seeing it as a pristine, modern, rule-bound entrepot in which to invest. But foreigners doing business in Dubai are often unaware that local politicians and businessmen – elite figures are often both – may use the courts to pursue vendettas, settle scores or raid assets they covet. Even the smallest debt can lead to years in jail.

Cornelius is just one of thousands of expats who are either imprisoned in Dubai after falling foul of the emirate’s draconian legal system and the powerful people who manipulate it, or who are theoretically free but unable to leave. The crime he was charged with carried a sentence of three years in the uae. Yet, 13 years on, he remains locked up in a high-security prison in Dubai (one of his business partners is there too). He is now 67 and his sentence has been extended twice. His parents have died since he went to jail and he missed both their funerals. He is due to be freed when he is 85.

Born in South Africa in 1954, Cornelius was the son of a Welsh father and a mother of Australian heritage. He grew up in what was then Northern Rhodesia (it became Zambia in 1964), where his father’s company provided steel equipment to copper mines. Cornelius automatically received British citizenship through his father.

His parents weren’t typical colonialists. His mother befriended Kenneth Kaunda, the young firebrand who went on to become the first president of Zambia (he regularly sought her advice over tea at the state house). Cornelius grew up in a family of rugby fanatics, and his childhood overseas made him both resourceful and competitive. While studying in Britain in his early 20s, he played for Saracens, a north London rugby club. To this day, his accent remains unmistakably southern African.

Cornelius followed his father into engineering and, in 1981 he established a company called Aject, which specialised in precision tunnelling. The business environment in the Middle East was tricky, but Cornelius persisted and grew rich on the back of the oil and construction boom of the 1980s. He sold Aject in 1996.

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”.


Along with some business partners, Cornelius embarked on three new projects, each larger than any that he’d previously attempted: the construction of a marina in Bahrain; a proposal to dismantle a Canadian oil refinery and reassemble it in Pakistan; and the development of a large site in Dubai, branded “The Plantation”, building a 200-room hotel and 110 luxury villas.

This last was potentially the most lucrative. Plans for the Plantation’s equestrian facilities were luxurious even by the standards of a region where the ruling elite has a passion for horses. They included an eventing course, an indoor show-jumping arena, two polo fields and a member’s club with bars and restaurants. It was, Cornelius once quipped, “the equivalent of having Ascot racecourse plonked in Fulham”.

In 2004, the business partners secured a 99-year lease to develop 450 acres of land. At the time, uae was eager for foreign investors to construct the grandiose property developments that would put Dubai on the map. The property market was running hot: new blocks of luxury flats often found purchasers within hours of going on the market. Cash deals were common and few sellers spent much time scrutinising a buyer’s source of funds.

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, cch, 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.

cch was backed by $500m in credit from dib. The chairmen of the two companies were reportedly on good terms – which was useful because Mohammed Kharbash, who headed dib, was also the finance minister of the uae. This gave the project an influential patron, a big advantage when doing business in the Middle East.

Cornelius was “fully implicated” in the creation of fabricated invoices to perpetrate a fraud

By 2007 huge mounds of sand had been excavated at the Plantation site, and much of the ground levelled. The service roads and stables were complete, and the polo fields had been laid. Around 30 plots had already been sold.

Then the financial climate started to deteriorate. The credit crunch was worsening and it was becoming harder to borrow money – a problem that soon exploded into a global financial crisis. Like other lenders, dib started to have second thoughts about its loan books. It had particular misgivings about what the money it had lent cch was being used for. The bank launched an investigation and decided to call in the loan. cch was in no position to repay it straight away, so the two parties negotiated an agreement to pay back the money over the course of three years. The deal, which Cornelius was included in, was signed in August 2007.

dib insisted that Cornelius put up his personal assets, including his family homes, as collateral. Cornelius wasn’t happy about being a personal guarantor, but he believed that his investments were comfortably worth more than the loan. The Plantation alone had recently been valued at around $1bn. In total, Cornelius and his partners provided collateral which they estimated was worth $1.6bn, more than three times the amount that dib had lent them. They reckoned that the new deal would allow them to keep developing the Plantation.

Cornelius and his business partners actually outpaced their repayment schedule to dib (helped, in part, by a further loan from cch). Their first two payments of $25m were on time, and on top of that they repaid an additional $10m. It was shortly after they’d made the second of those payments, in May 2008, that Cornelius was arrested at Dubai airport.

Dubai’s prisons are considerably less luxurious than its hotels. Central prison, where Cornelius is incarcerated, can hold around 4,000 inmates. Each steel-barred cell, which is roughly the size of a shipping container, is supposed to house six inmates, but sometimes two or three more are crammed in and they have to sleep on the floor. Prisoners are issued with thin, rubber mattresses. There is no bed linen, only heavy woollen blankets. Some prisoners don’t even have pillows and instead use empty plastic water bottles taped together.

The temperature in the cells is kept low. The air conditioning runs noisily and ceaselessly; strip lights are left on 24 hours a day. Hanging up anything to dim the brightness is treated as a punishable offence: it might obscure the cameras that monitor the prisoners. Taps drip. One former prisoner wrote that the “constantly running toilets are inhumane and relentless brutal forms of mental torture”. There is no toilet paper, so prisoners have to use a hose. Occasionally, they are allowed to exercise for 45 minutes in a small, concrete yard.

In Dubai, inmates have to buy everything, including soap and detergent for cleaning the cells, as well as newspapers and phone calls. They pay using cards issued to them when they first enter the prison, which can be loaded with spending money if the prisoner is lucky enough to have relatives or friends who can afford to top them up.


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. They used to receive a couple of pieces of fruit at lunchtime and fish once a week. These have now been cut.

A small range of food items can be bought from outside the prison, by placing an order through the police kitchen. Cornelius buys a hamburger twice a week and pizza on Thursdays. He also orders in bran flakes, milk, tea, coffee and biscuits. And he pays for bottled water so he doesn’t have to drink the water from the fountain at the end of the corridor, which is desalinated and tastes metallic.


Martin Lonergan, who spent nine months in the cell next to Cornelius’s in 2019-20 after getting caught up in a separate business dispute, carried out an informal survey among the prisoners. He reckons inmates lucky enough to have money on their cards spend an average of around 150 dirhams a week, or $40. (As a vegan, he spent 500 dirhams.) “Add in all the other items that have to be bought, multiply it by thousands of prisoners, and Dubai’s prison system starts to look like quite a money-making exercise.”

Cornelius undoubtedly committed fraud. The definition of the crime covers a wide spectrum of wrongdoing: at one end it includes schemes to steal billions of dollars, at the other are lesser forms of deceit that result in no personal gain, such as the failure to disclose information. Cornelius has always maintained that he never had any intention of stealing from dib. He did, however, admit that he used money for riskier endeavours than those for which it was lent. The bank provided credit for short-term needs, but it was instead used to fund unauthorised longer-term projects such as the Pakistan refinery and investments relating to the Plantation.

To pull this off, Cornelius’s business forged invoices for items such as furniture and building materials to match the investment capital being funnelled to the Plantation. A later civil case, brought by dib in Britain, concluded that Cornelius was “fully implicated” in the creation of fabricated invoices to perpetrate a fraud. He was also accused of bribery. The judge accepted the bank’s claim that $342m of the $500m lent by dib had been used for unauthorised projects.

Cornelius and his partners have always said that they intended to repay the loans with the proceeds of sales in the Plantation. A person close to Cornelius says he accepts that he “made mistakes”, but that he’d been assured by cch that he could borrow money to invest if he submitted “certain invoices in a certain way”. Though Cornelius never dealt directly with dib, he has said he was led to understand that the bank was “supportive” of this chicanery.

Dubai attracts Westerners looking to build businesses in a place with a frontier mentality

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 the uae was 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.” Despite the misuse of the money they lent, dib continued doing business with Cornelius and his partners.

The origins of the fraud charges against Cornelius are unclear. The complaint may have come from dib itself, according to official documents that later came to light, though the bank has always denied this, insisting that Dubai’s police force first raised the concern. According to a legal statement made by Cornelius, during one interrogation a police officer “kept on asking me how much I could repay the bank immediately”.

This line of inquiry surprised Cornelius, because the agreement he and his associates signed with dib contained a specific clause whereby the bank waived its right to bring any claims against the other parties, as long as they kept to the repayment schedule. But the bank was now under new management. Kharbash, the chairman who had overseen the deal, owed his job to Dubai’s emir, Maktoum bin Rashid al-Maktoum. When Maktoum died in 2006, he was succeeded by his brother, Mohammed, and a changing of the guard followed. Many senior members of staff were pushed out, including Kharbash. He left dib in early 2008, a few months before Cornelius’s arrest.

The new chairman of dib was Mohammed al-Shaibani – no ordinary financier but one of the new emir’s closest lieutenants. He had previously overseen the ruling family’s commercial interests in Britain. His appointment at dib was the latest stage in a rise that has seen him become arguably the most powerful person in Dubai outside the royal family. He is now director-general of the Ruler’s Court, which controls the executive arm of government.

As Shaibani’s political star has waxed, his business interests have also grown. He is head of Nakheel, one of Dubai’s largest property developers, as well as the Investment Corporation of Dubai, a $300bn sovereign-wealth fund which holds many of the emirate’s highest-profile assets. He is also a director of Dubai World, a state-owned investment company, and of Dubai Aerospace Enterprise, one of the world’s largest aircraft-leasing companies.

Shaibani’s past calls into question Dubai’s claim to be run by the rule of law. He was involved in two of the most notorious episodes in Dubai’s recent history: the kidnappings of the emir’s daughters, Shamsa and Latifa. In August 2000, Shamsa was abducted from the streets of Cambridge, England, not far from the sheikh’s estate in Newmarket. She was drugged and taken to Dubai against her will. During a dispute between the ruler of Dubai and his estranged wife, the English High Court determined in December 2019 that Shaibani was “closely involved” in the “operation to remove” her and, indeed, that he was present when she was seized. She hasn’t been seen in public since.

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 their uae counterparts 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. He forced her, she said, to make false statements to British courts and to the UN, which was investigating her case, denying that she was being held against her will.

When Shaibani was installed as dib chairman, he acted decisively. It was widely believed that Kharbash, the former chairman, had been lining his own pockets. Shaibani’s remit was “to clean the stables”, says a lawyer who worked on cases involving the bank. Kharbash was charged with embezzlement in 2009. The outcome of the case is unclear. He died in 2016.

British newspapers call Dubai “the new Costa del Sol”

Shaibani wanted not merely to remove Kharbash, but to crush those who had profited from their relationships with him, according to several British lawyers who have examined Cornelius’s case, as well as Lord Clement-Jones, a Liberal Democrat peer who has campaigned for Cornelius’s release. In one witness statement Cornelius said he believed that dib “took various calculated steps” to prevent him from fulfilling the restructuring agreement. These were “illegal acts of manifest bad faith” committed by the bank “in order to get its hands” on the Plantation.

After Cornelius was locked up in mid-2008, dib either seized or forced him and his partners to sell the assets that they’d pledged as collateral, even though the bank now referred in court to the restructuring agreement as a corrupt document. Detained without bail, Cornelius watched his assets disappear. In March 2010, almost two years after his arrest, Cornelius was tried on charges of fraud and money-laundering.

Things did not go to plan for his accusers. The money-laundering charge was dropped. In August the case took a dramatic turn, when the judge recused himself, apparently unwilling to continue the trial on the basis of the evidence presented. Nevertheless, Cornelius remained in jail. By October 2010 he had already served more time than the sentence he would have received had he been convicted (the maximum sentence for fraud in Dubai is three years, but there is a 25% reduction for good behaviour).

That month, Cornelius was put on trial again, before a new judge, and facing a fresh charge sheet. This time, he, his ex-partners and managers at dib were accused of colluding to defraud and steal from a governmental body. This required some sleight of hand, since the bank hadn’t previously been regarded as a state entity. Though the state held 28% of its shares, both government and bank officials had long portrayed dib as a vibrant market-oriented institution. Nevertheless, prosecutors alleged that the unpaid balance of the loan was a fraud on the state.


Cornelius has argued that neither the government nor anyone else had been left short-changed. At the time of its confiscation, the seized property had been valued at around three times the disputed loan, according to Cornelius. A letter sent from dib to the uae’s central bank in September 2008 stated that “the bank after the acquisition of Plantation is in an excellent position”, without the need for “other safeguards”. dib’s chief financial officer would later confirm in court that “everything is over-covered” and “there is no loss [to the bank]”.

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 owed dib around $500m from the original fraud, and imposed an additional fine of $500m.

dib tenaciously pursued this debt in Britain and Bahrain, where Cornelius owned other assets. The bank convinced an English court to hand over all three of Cornelius’s properties in London – flats in Pimlico and Tower Bridge, and a house in Maida Vale – which had a combined value of $7m. Cornelius’s defence was hamstrung when the authorities in Dubai refused to let him testify via video link; he was allowed only to submit written statements. The ruling left his wife Heather and their three children without a home. When they appealed to hold on to one of the flats on humanitarian grounds, dib’s lawyers made short work of them.

By May 2016, Cornelius had served the full ten years less the standard 25% reduction for good behaviour, and qualified for possible release. Instead he was kept behind bars with no official explanation for his ongoing imprisonment. He stayed incarcerated for another two years. At that point Cornelius and his business partner were taken without notice or legal representation to a judge’s office, where a lawyer for dib requested an additional 20 years in jail, under the right available to creditors in Dubai to keep a debtor imprisoned for failing to repay the money owed. The judge quickly acceded.

Cornelius later stated that the judge declared that “it was a matter between us and the bank, and that the courts no longer played a part”. In effect, “dib had become our jailer.”

The new sentence was imposed in accordance with Dubai’s Law 37, which was modelled on Britain’s Proceeds of Crime Act, which aims to counter money laundering. Yet Dubai passed this law only two years after Cornelius’s alleged fraud. Retroactivity is proscribed by international law and, says Lord Clement-Jones, “offends every basic principle of the rule of law”. It is also specifically prohibited by the uae’s own constitution.

Cornelius tried to appeal against this new 20-year sentence, but was stonewalled by the prison authorities. He applied five times to appoint a lawyer to file the appeal on his behalf. Each time the prison rejected his request: officials insisted that the law didn’t allow anyone serving a sentence such as his to issue a power of attorney.


With no alternative, Cornelius decided to represent himself and managed to lodge an appeal. But on the day scheduled for the hearing, he was told that his name wasn’t on the passenger manifest for the prison bus. In May 2018 a judge dismissed the appeal because Cornelius had missed the hearing, and denied him permission to lodge another one.

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 dib’s claim against Cornelius. The Bahrain Chamber for Dispute Resolution had dismissed as “groundless” the bank’s claim that Cornelius and his partners still owed it money. The chamber’s judgments are supposed to be final. Four months later, however, this one was overturned. (Shaibani’s representatives were offered the opportunity to comment by 1843 magazine but did not respond.)

Cornelius’s family and supporters believe that Shaibani wanted to wrest back control of the Plantation, a prized jewel of Dubai’s real estate, and that he is trying to prevent Cornelius from seeking recompense through the courts if he ever leaves prison. His relatives reckon that these two objectives have led dib into legal contortions. Perhaps as a way to justify hounding Cornelius, the bank told courts in Dubai and Britain that the Plantation, valued at around $1bn at the time of the arrest, is “essentially worthless and unsaleable”. At different times dib has provided various arguments as to why this is the case: either because of the property crash of 2008, or because the development belonged not to the bank but to the state, since it was classified as the proceeds of crime.

But the picture of itself that dib presented to auditors, regulators and shareholders doesn’t contain a gaping financial hole. A firm of forensic accountants hired by one of Cornelius’s business partners couldn’t find any mention of a loss related to the cch loans in dib’s accounts for 2008 or 2009. Under cross-examination, an official from DIB testified to a court in London that the bank had the right to sell the property.

Cornelius was not once allowed to address the judge during the more than 100 court sessions he attended

dib did not reply on the record to a detailed set of questions regarding Cornelius’s story. But Hugh Lyons of Baker McKenzie, the law firm representing dib in the civil cases against Cornelius, told 1843 magazine that Cornelius is a fraudster, whose conviction has been upheld by both Dubai’s court of appeal and court of cassation, the highest judicial body in the emirate. He also pointed out that courts in Britain and Bahrain ordered Cornelius to pay considerable sums of money, which he has so far failed to deliver. He is, he says, “not aware of any miscarriage of justice”.

Prisoners report that they rarely see the jailers. Every night at 9pm cells are locked and the phone line to the guards is switched off. If an inmate has a problem, there’s no way to get assistance. Sometimes prisoners can be heard screaming for help. Cornelius has told his family he finds it “scary” to be so isolated. The block used to have magnetic fire doors that opened automatically if the fire alarm went off. Several years ago this system was disconnected. These days the doors are padlocked.

Medical care is almost non-existent: a single doctor covers all the inmates. Under the rota system prisoners may be given an appointment six months down the line. Racial discrimination is evident, too. Pakistani inmates are kept waiting longer than white ones, and black inmates longer still.

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. He was sent to a government hospital more than once during that period, but each time was returned to prison without being examined, either because doctors claimed not to know who he was or because the paperwork wasn’t in order.

The pandemic put an end to prisoners’ brief allowance of outdoor recreation. For months, Cornelius was kept indoors all day. His only exercise was an occasional jog up and down the corridor that runs alongside the cells. Previously he’d helped organise games of touch rugby. He told his family that it was the only thing he had to look forward to each week.

Cornelius and other inmates have been double-jabbed with the Sinopharm vaccine. That didn’t stop covid from running rampant through the overcrowded prison. His block is reportedly being used as a dumping ground for anyone who might be infected. In the summer, Cornelius came down with covid symptoms. Medical staff were absent, and prisoners couldn’t even get paracetamol. A prisoner in the cell next to Cornelius died of coronavirus and his body lay there for eight hours before being removed in a plastic bag. Cornelius worries that catching covid again might trigger his tuberculosis to become active.

Doing business in autocracies is fraught with peril. Without an independent legal system, judges arbitrating commercial disputes can feel under pressure from individuals who have political clout. Only the most naive investor would operate in China or Russia without considering the risk of expropriation at the hands of the government or well-connected rivals. Dubai is supposed to be different: a business-friendly oasis with a Western outlook in a region fraught with danger.

Dubai lacks the oil wealth of its neighbours. To compensate, it has turned itself into a commercial hub where service industries such as finance, property and tourism flourish. It promotes itself as a low-tax, free-trading haven to foreign investors. In early 2020, the uae announced that foreign doctors, scientists and inventors would, for the first time, be able to apply for citizenship. It attracts Westerners looking to build businesses in a place with a frontier mentality, as well as “appealing to anyone who’d made it from Karachi, Beirut or wherever and wanted somewhere safer, more middle class”, as one banker puts it.

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.

By and large, Western governments consider Dubai to be a reliable partner and safe place to operate. The latest guidance from Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (fco) on business risks in the uae states that its “society is multicultural, and characterised by greater tolerance and openness than many other countries in the region”.

Yet the emirate has long been a haven for dirty money and shady middlemen. Regulators mostly turned a blind eye to such activity in the heady years before the financial crisis. But the events of 2008-09 left Dubai’s debt exposed and the emirate came close to defaulting – it was saved from this fate only by a bail-out from Abu Dhabi, another emirate. This near-death experience forced Dubai to make a show of cleaning house, especially as the government came under increasing pressure from other countries and global regulators.

“For a foreigner, the only way to get acquitted is to have enough influence to win a pardon”

Nonetheless Dubai remains popular with kleptocrats, arms-smugglers, sanctions-busters and money-launderers. Fugitives, fraudsters and disgraced public figures flock there (British newspapers call Dubai “the new Costa del Sol”, a reference to the stretch of southern Spain where foreign criminals used to lie low). Crime rings and crypto scammers operate within its borders. Dubai’s half-heartedness in combating illicit finance is “a feature, not a bug” of its economy, according to a report last year by the Carnegie Endowment, a think-tank. This offers it a competitive advantage over stricter jurisdictions. But powerful people in Dubai can seize assets under the guise of combating corruption, just as Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman did in Saudi Arabia in 2017 when he arrested numerous royals and businessmen, and drained their bank accounts.


The uae’s legal system is based on civil-law principles and sharia law. Each emirate has its own court, with a supreme court in Abu Dhabi. Dubai is one of only two emirates that do not take part in the uae’s federal court structure. Instead it touts its modern judicial system. The Dubai International Financial Centre, a special economic zone that contains more than 2,000 banks and companies, has its own courts, which operate according to common-law principles and hear cases in English. Applications to this special economic zone are closely scrutinised; those from financial and technology firms are most likely to be successful. But Cornelius’s businesses, like most companies in Dubai, were registered outside this zone and instead fell under the jurisdiction of the national courts, which apply the national law.

In these courts, capital trials can begin and end in a day. It is rare for prosecutors to lose. Indeed, the prosecuting lawyer often sits next to the judge on the bench. Foreigners on trial have observed discussions between prosecutor and judge in which the former appeared to be giving instructions to the latter. Defendants are often blocked from giving evidence. Cornelius has not once been allowed to address the judge during the more than 100 court sessions he attended in over ten years of hearings and appeals since his arrest. He often struggled to understand what was going on because of poor translation. The system is run on patronage. “For a foreigner, the only way to get acquitted is to have enough influence to win a pardon,” said one foreign lawyer.

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. The uae, by contrast, still treats debt as a crime.

Dubai’s courts mete out eye-watering sentences for property crimes. Late payment, even a single bounced cheque, can land you in jail for up to three years. This helps unscrupulous claimants to “exploit the criminal system in matters relating to debt recovery”, says Rhys Davies, a barrister working on Cornelius’s case.

A prison sentence does not clear the debt. If the debtor cannot repay the money when the initial sentence ends, the creditor can ask the court to keep the person incarcerated indefinitely, until the debt is settled. Debtors can be locked in a Catch-22 situation: if they can’t leave prison, how can they ever earn money to pay off the debt? Some Indian labourers have been languishing in jail in the uae for over a decade with debts as small as $1,000.

Companies, banks, public figures and even private individuals work the system to become long-term jailers. A mere accusation can be all that the authorities require to arrest someone and bar them from leaving the country, even in the absence of evidence.

Radha Stirling of Detained in Dubai, a group that provides assistance to foreigners ensnared by the emirate’s legal system, has many clients who are, or have been, “debt hostages”. Even those who aren’t locked up may find their freedom limited. The accused typically loses their job and the local bank will freeze their account. “That can lead to previously written cheques bouncing, compounding their problems,” says Stirling. “They can’t get another job to pay off the debt as no one with a police case against them is entitled to a work visa. And a travel ban ensures they can never leave Dubai until the impossible debt is paid.”


Relatives of debtors aren’t safe either. Albert Douglas has been in prison in Dubai for two years since cheques issued by his son’s flooring business bounced: his son had left Dubai, so the creditors went after Douglas because he was a signatory on the company’s accounts. Fully aware of the emirate’s ruthless treatment of debtors, Douglas tried to escape to Oman. He was caught climbing a border fence. Now, at 60 years old, he fears he will die in prison.

Even those who do get out of the country may encounter the uae’s abuse of the Interpol “red notice” system. Though chasing debts isn’t part of Interpol’s mandate, the uae sometimes circumvents this by redesignating debt as “fraud”: Interpol doesn’t verify charges listed by national crime bureaus on their databases. The target of the notice then risks detention abroad and possible extradition to the uae. Even a frivolous case may take up to nine months to be struck out, says Stirling.

A report earlier this year, written by Sir David Calvert-Smith, former director of public prosecutions in Britain, flagged uae’s abuse of red notices and its “undue influence” over Interpol. In late November, Major-general Ahmed Naser al-Raisi, inspector-general of the Emirati interior ministry, was elected as the organisation’s next president. Foreigners who had previously been locked up in Dubai campaigned to stop him getting the job, arguing that he had overseen arbitrary arrests and torture in his previous role.

The uae’s misuse of red notices ranges from petty extortion to attacks “for political gain against those seen as a threat to the regime”, according to Calvert-Smith’s report. One British woman was surrounded at a restaurant in Rome and taken into custody over an alleged credit-card debt of a few thousand dollars.

Some Indian labourers have been in jail in the UAE for over a decade with debts as small as $1,000

Stirling of Detained in Dubai says that “Dubai’s financial firms have used Interpol as their own personal debt collectors.” She reckons that sometimes the alleged debts don’t even exist. “The uae has essentially perfected the debt shakedown,” she says. “In some cases they get people who owe nothing listed to extort from them. When the target is arrested overseas, the sheikh, bank or whoever else is behind the case will say ‘give me assets or money to drop it, or I’ll make more accusations’.”

The uae also uses more violent means. Zack Shahin is a former executive at PepsiCo who went on to run the property arm of dib. In 2008 he was accused of stealing $30m – though no money could be traced to him – and held for four years in prison. He was freed on a bail of $1.4m in 2012 after the American authorities expressed concern about his health. Immediately he fled to Yemen, where the American embassy arranged for him to fly home. According to some accounts, at the last minute the Yemeni government agreed to send him back to the uae. Campaigners for Shahin’s release say he was picked up at the airport by security agents from Dubai, who appeared to operate with free rein in Yemen. With a gun pressed to his back, he was marched onto a plane back to Dubai. He is still in jail there.

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 gdp. That doesn’t include borrowings by major state-owned groups, however. Add these in and the ratio was a heady 150%, according to s&p, a credit-rating agency. Since flirting with default in 2008-09, Dubai has relied on the willingness of international banks to restructure loans. “It’s an economy largely propped up by Western banks and dependent on their forgiving nature,” says a former banker who was involved in the bail-out negotiations. “To treat its own debtors so cruelly is monumental hypocrisy.”

The conditions in which Cornelius has been kept over the years have improved in certain small respects. As a long-serving inmate, he is entitled to one of the coveted lower bunks (he happens to share his cell with one of the dib bankers who ran his account). Most prisoners aren’t allowed anything in their cells beyond their mattress and blanket – even family photos are prohibited. Cornelius has been given a couple of round tubs to hold books and case files, a few items of clothing, cutlery, crockery and a small radio that can pick up local stations. He listens to the business news on Dubai Eye and another station that plays songs from the Eighties and Nineties. “The playlist is limited. He jokes that he can usually predict which song is coming next,” says Pagett, his brother-in-law.

A combination of covid and penury mean that no family member has visited Cornelius since February 2019. Between covid lockdowns, Cornelius was offered a rare Skype call with his wife, Heather: when he returned to his cell, he curled up on his mattress and wept for several hours. Heather’s voice cracks when she speaks about her conversations with her husband; she seems constantly to be on the verge of tears. She used to find the visits incredibly stressful, she says, because the authorities would sometimes make excuses at the last minute and postpone the meeting. Now she can’t even afford to make the trip from Britain.

Heather worries that her daughter, who was a young adult when Cornelius was arrested, has “internalised” her father’s absence more than their two sons, who were 17 and six. “[The boys] find it easier to share the emotional difficulties of dealing with it.”

The couple speak by phone most days. “I can hear when he’s close to giving up, but he’s always trying to protect me from having to worry about him. He focuses on me and the kids. He puts in a huge effort. In the early days we would speak about the case, about lawyers. Not any more.” She gets extremely anxious if he doesn’t call at the allotted time, worrying that he may have collapsed during the night, when he can’t reach the guards.

“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.”

The 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. But the family reports that the assistant is often hard to reach: calls go straight to voicemail and her mailbox is sometimes full. “Typically, British consular staff just provide people with a list of local lawyers, visit inmates with inconsistent frequency and help relay communication with their families,” says Stirling.

The diplomatic service has shown little interest in the case. After many requests, an official from the Foreign Office visited him two years ago, and Cornelius talked him through documents relating to Dubai’s unlawful retrospective use of Law 37 to keep him in prison. The official said he would look into it, but the family has heard nothing since.

“Every morning I wake up and think ‘Oh God he’s still in jail. How are we going to keep going?’”

British ministers have refused to condemn Cornelius’s treatment publicly, or ask for clemency. Government ministers do “very little” in such cases, says Davies, the barrister. He describes a “comedic process” in case after case, where “the Foreign Office says, ‘Abide by the local legal processes and we’ll deal with it later.’ But then after you’ve been found guilty they say, ‘Ah, but you’re a convicted criminal.’ ” Lord Clement-Jones reckons that the Foreign Office will support a plea for a pardon only if a local lawyer files a claim for miscarriage of justice. In a place like Dubai, such an act would be “career suicide, and possibly worse”. He called the government’s response “spineless”. The Foreign Office did not respond to a request for comment.

The Foreign Office has intervened in legal cases in Dubai in the past. Matthew Hedges, a British phD student, was falsely accused of spying in May 2018 when he was on a research trip to the uae, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He received a pardon later that year after belated lobbying by the British government as public outrage grew. Even the head of mI6, who rarely speaks out, criticised the detention. Hedges has since lambasted the Foreign Office for not acting more decisively on his behalf.

Other countries take firmer action. America, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy and Nigeria have all done far more to help citizens with legal troubles in Dubai. Lonergan, the former prisoner, says Irish diplomats played a crucial role in ensuring he was released after nine months: his contact at the Irish embassy gave him her mobile number and was available round the clock. The Irish government kept up pressure on officials in Dubai until he was freed.

Why would Britain turn a blind eye to such legal abuses? The answer may partly lie in its economic and security ties to the uae. The country is Britain’s largest trading partner in the Middle East and its 12th-largest export market globally. It is also an important security partner in a hostile region – the two countries share much intelligence. Yet America and France enjoy similar links with the uae and still help their citizens far more extensively when they encounter legal difficulties there.

Britain’s departure from the eu has done little to change matters. The government had said it would toughen its stance on human-rights abuses abroad. Instead, it has sought to strengthen commercial and military relationships with a host of non-eu partners in order to show that it can thrive outside the bloc.

Dubai’s elite is also deeply enmeshed within Britain’s economy and society. Sheikh Maktoum was once a guest in the Queen’s carriage at Royal Ascot. An analysis by the Guardian in April concluded that the ruler of Dubai is one of Britain’s biggest landowners, with more than 40,000 hectares (the exact scale is hard to determine because some properties linked to him are held by offshore companies with opaque ownership). Maktoum’s property empire includes mansions in Belgravia, Kensington and Knightsbridge, a country house in Surrey and an estate in the Scottish Highlands. His stables at Newmarket are part of Godolphin, the Maktoum family’s global thoroughbred horse-racing business, which also has operations in Dubai and Australia. Godolphin’s British arm runs the country’s largest flat-racing stable and has strong links to the Jockey Club, which owns some of Britain’s best-known racecourses, including Epsom Downs and Cheltenham.

The British government could use these ties as leverage. Britain is one of a number of countries that have added Magnitsky laws to their arsenal of sanctions in recent years. Named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in a Russian prison after attempting to expose tax fraud by public officials, these laws empower governments to impose travel bans and freeze assets belonging to people responsible for severe human-rights violations. Cornelius’s barristers will soon submit requests to the British government, as well as America, Canada and eu countries, to impose Magnitsky sanctions on Shaibani and the two judges who imprisoned Cornelius. In light of the British government’s indifference, however, it’s hard to imagine it taking action against a powerful figure from a country with which Britain seeks to maintain close ties.

The very least Britain should do, says Stirling, is warn people more forcefully about the dangers of doing business in Dubai. The Foreign Office still advises that the uae is safe so long as you respect the laws and culture, she says. “It does not warn citizens that the legal system there is systemically rigged against foreigners, that there is no evidentiary standard for prosecution, no due process, no respect for human rights.”

Cornelius’s best hope is embarrassing the Dubai government into freeing him. “The uae is not like Russia. It is very pr-conscious. It really hates this sort of publicity,” says one lawyer involved. Dubai is particularly sensitive to criticism during the delayed Expo 2020, which began on October 1st and runs until March 2022. This is the first world fair exhibiting innovations since the one held in Milan in 2015. The emirate’s government sees it as a golden opportunity to promote Dubai as an investment and tourism destination. (The opening week of the expo was marred by revelations of state-sponsored skulduggery: a British court ruled that agents working on behalf of Sheikh Maktoum had probably hacked the phone of his estranged wife, Princess Haya.)



Cornelius’s family say he is naturally positive and has never lost hope of being freed. He is kept going by the thought that “someday someone just wants to be rid of Cornelius & Co” and will let him out. British courts have begun to look more sceptically on dib’s claims in a civil case brought by Cornelius’s business partner. But Cornelius appears to have given up hope of winning the legal argument in Dubai.

In 2014, a new rule in the uae outlawed imprisoning debt defaulters over the age of 70. Cornelius will reach that landmark in April 2024. Given his protracted suffering within Dubai’s legal system, he isn’t confident of being let out even then. A pardon remains unlikely without concerted international pressure on the emirate. “Ryan was born with entrepreneurial genes, and even today doesn’t regret dreaming all that time ago that the Plantation could be a good bet,” says his wife, Heather. “But he bitterly regrets believing that Dubai was a safe place to do business.”■

Matthew Valencia is the deputy business-affairs editor of The Economist



迪拜的债务陷阱
瑞安-科尼利厄斯已经完成了欺诈罪的判决，但他已经失去了离开监狱的希望。

2021年12月15日


马修-瓦伦西亚报道

莱恩-科尼利厄斯甚至没有打算踏出迪拜机场。2008年5月21日，当他从卡拉奇登机时，他只打算换乘飞机前往他在巴林的家。在最后一刻，这位54岁的英国商人决定在迪拜停留，与他的商业伙伴会面。

三名便衣警察在科内利斯离开机场时逮捕了他。即使在震惊中，他也被他们的年轻所震惊。警察没收了他的手机，把他锁在一个没有窗户的房间里。海关人员对他进行了搜查，说他们认为他携带了毒品。他们什么也没找到。


起初他认为当局只是犯了一个错误。当天晚些时候，当他被带上一辆没有标志的汽车，双手被拉链绑住，被带到迪拜的警察总部时，科尼利厄斯变得更加惊慌。途中没有人跟他说话。当他进入大楼时，一个紧凑的结构，其外墙是蹲在两根钢柱之间的深色玻璃，他的头上被戴上了一个头罩。一小时后，头罩被取下，警官说他很快就会被释放。没有人告诉他为什么他被逮捕。

科尼利厄斯在一个没有窗户的软垫房间里被审讯了几个小时，没有律师在场，然后被扔进一个光秃秃的牢房。他被单独关押了十天，无法与家人、使馆官员或法律顾问接触。他甚至没有一个床垫可以睡。他后来得知，他的两个英国商业伙伴也在同一时间被逮捕。

第二次审讯是由两名警察进行的。科尼利厄斯发现很难跟上他们的问话思路。他们带着一份看起来像发票的文件，尽管他们只是笼统地提到了这些发票。高级警官挥舞着一封来自迪拜银行的信，不停地问这些发票是否是伪造的。

大多数问题是关于迪拜伊斯兰银行（Dib）的，该酋长国的第二大贷款机构。科尼利厄斯的房地产业务从一家德国金融公司获得了大笔贷款，该公司本身也为此向dib借了钱。从官员相当混乱的问话中，科尼利厄斯猜测他被指控为欺诈。他向官员们解释说，尽管Dib最近指控他和他的合伙人滥用贷款，但每个人都同意一个新的还债计划。


最后，在对他进行了几个小时的拷问后，官员们让科尼利厄斯做一份声明，说明他对事件的看法。在他做完陈述后约30分钟，一名官员带着一份阿拉伯文的打字文件再次出现，而科尼利厄斯既不会说也不会读这种语言。这名男子说，一旦他签署了这份文件，他就可以去巴林了。当科尼利厄斯要求找律师时，他被告知几天内都不会有律师--到那时，警官不祥地断言，就 "太晚了"。科尼利厄斯感到困惑和越来越恐慌，他在声明上签了字（后来他坚持认为声明与采访时的内容几乎没有什么区别）。他没有被释放，而是被送回了他那光秃秃的牢房。


迪拜缺乏其邻国的石油财富。为了弥补这一点，它把自己变成了一个商业中心。

迪拜是阿拉伯联合酋长国（UAE）七个酋长国中最耀眼的一个。它是一个由海滩、绿松石海和在全年阳光下熠熠生辉的宏伟玻璃塔组成的旅游游乐场。企业家们也被吸引到迪拜，认为它是一个可以投资的原始、现代、有规则的转口港。但是，在迪拜做生意的外国人往往不知道，当地的政客和商人--精英人物往往两者兼而有之--可能会利用法院来追求仇杀，解决恩怨或掠夺他们觊觎的资产。即使是最小的债务也可能导致多年的监禁。

科尼利厄斯只是数以千计的外籍人士中的一员，他们要么因为触犯了迪拜严厉的法律制度和操纵它的权贵而被监禁，要么理论上是自由的，但无法离开。他被指控的罪行在阿拉伯联合酋长国可被判处三年监禁。然而，13年过去了，他仍然被关在迪拜的一所高度戒备的监狱里（他的一个商业伙伴也在那里）。他现在已经67岁，他的刑期已经延长了两次。自他入狱以来，他的父母已经去世，他错过了他们的葬礼。他将在85岁时获释。

科内利斯1954年出生于南非，父亲是威尔士人，母亲是澳大利亚人。他在当时的北罗得西亚（1964年成为赞比亚）长大，他父亲的公司向铜矿提供钢铁设备。科内利斯通过他的父亲自动获得了英国公民身份。

他的父母并不是典型的殖民主义者。他的母亲结识了肯尼思-卡翁达，这位年轻的火爆人物后来成为赞比亚的第一任总统（他经常在国宾馆喝茶时征求她的意见）。科内利斯在一个橄榄球狂热者的家庭中长大，他在海外的童年使他既机智又好胜。20岁出头在英国学习时，他为伦敦北部的一个橄榄球俱乐部萨拉森队效力。时至今日，他的口音仍然是明确无误的南部非洲口音。

科尼利厄斯跟随他的父亲进入工程领域，1981年他成立了一家名为Aject的公司，专门从事精密隧道工程。中东的商业环境很棘手，但科尼利厄斯坚持了下来，并在20世纪80年代的石油和建筑业繁荣的背景下发了财。他在1996年出售了Aject。

虽然他只有40出头，但科尼利厄斯已经富得可以退休了。但他对这种平静的生活并不感兴趣。据他的姐夫克里斯-帕吉特（Chris Pagett）说，他 "仍然被那种殖民地男孩的强迫症所驱使，要向这些华裔男孩证明你可以进入大联盟"。


与一些商业伙伴一起，科尼利厄斯开始了三个新项目，每个项目都比他以前尝试的任何项目都要大：在巴林建造一个码头；提议拆除加拿大的一个炼油厂，并在巴基斯坦重新组装；以及在迪拜开发一个大型场地，命名为 "种植园"，建造一个有200间客房的酒店和110栋豪华别墅。

这最后一项可能是最有利可图的。种植园的马术设施计划即使以一个统治精英热衷于马匹的地区的标准来看也是非常豪华的。它们包括一个马术赛场、一个室内障碍赛场、两个马球场和一个带有酒吧和餐馆的会员俱乐部。科尼利厄斯曾打趣说，"这相当于把阿斯科特赛马场塞进了富勒姆"。

2004年，这对商业伙伴获得了一份为期99年的租约，开发450英亩的土地。当时，阿拉伯联合酋长国渴望外国投资者建造宏伟的房地产开发项目，以使迪拜在地图上出现。房地产市场很火爆：新的豪华住宅区往往在上市后几小时内就能找到买主。现金交易很普遍，很少有卖家花很多时间来审查买家的资金来源。

即便如此，企业家们发现很难为种植园这样的大项目筹集到足够的资金，除非他们有大型企业开发商的支持。然而，一些专业贷款人通过接受风险较高的借款人来赚钱。科尼利厄斯求助于一家这样的公司--Cch，该公司提供的资金利率高于一般银行贷款。他希望这将有助于项目的启动，并说服主流银行为他和他的合作伙伴提供更便宜的长期融资。

CCH得到了DIB的5亿美元信贷支持。据报道，两家公司的主席关系良好--这很有用，因为领导Dib的Mohammed Kharbash也是阿拉伯联合酋长国的财政部长。这使该项目有了一个有影响力的赞助人，这是在中东做生意的一大优势。

科尼利厄斯 "完全牵涉到 "制造假发票以实施欺诈行为

到2007年，种植园现场已经挖出了巨大的沙堆，大部分地面也已平整。服务道路和马厩已经完工，马球场也已铺设完毕。大约30块土地已经售出。

然后，金融环境开始恶化。信贷紧缩正在恶化，借钱越来越难--这个问题很快就爆发为全球金融危机。像其他贷款人一样，Dib开始对其贷款簿进行重新思考。它特别怀疑它借给Cch的钱被用来做什么了。银行展开了调查，并决定收回贷款。Cch没有能力立即偿还贷款，因此双方协商达成了在三年内还款的协议。科尼利厄斯也在其中，该协议于2007年8月签署。

迪布坚持要求科尼利厄斯拿出他的个人资产，包括他的家庭住宅，作为抵押。科尼利厄斯对成为个人担保人并不高兴，但他认为他的投资很可能比贷款的价值高。最近，仅种植园的价值就达到了10亿美元左右。科尼利厄斯和他的合伙人提供的抵押品总价值为16亿美元，是Dib借给他们的金额的三倍多。他们估计，新的交易将使他们能够继续开发种植园。

科尼利厄斯和他的商业伙伴实际上超过了他们对Dib的还款计划（部分是在Cch的进一步贷款帮助下）。他们的前两笔2500万美元的付款是按时进行的，除此之外，他们还额外偿还了1000万美元。就在他们支付第二笔款项后不久，2008年5月，科内利斯在迪拜机场被捕。

迪拜的监狱比其酒店的豪华程度要低得多。科尼利厄斯被关押的中央监狱可以容纳约4000名囚犯。每间有钢筋的牢房大约有一个集装箱那么大，应该可以容纳6名囚犯，但有时会有两三个人挤在一起，他们不得不睡在地板上。囚犯们发的是薄薄的橡胶床垫。没有床单，只有厚厚的毛毯。有些囚犯甚至没有枕头，而是用空的塑料水瓶粘在一起。

牢房里的温度很低。空调噪音很大，不停地运转；条形灯一天24小时都开着。挂上任何东西以降低亮度都被视为应受惩罚的罪行：它可能会遮挡监视囚犯的摄像头。水龙头滴水。一名前囚犯写道，"不断运转的马桶是不人道的，是无情的残酷的精神折磨"。没有卫生纸，所以囚犯不得不使用水管。偶尔，他们会被允许在一个小的混凝土院子里锻炼45分钟。

在迪拜，囚犯们必须购买一切东西，包括清洁牢房的肥皂和洗涤剂，以及报纸和电话。他们用刚进监狱时发给他们的卡付款，如果囚犯足够幸运，有亲戚或朋友能给他们充值，就可以把卡里的钱花光。


食品是最大的开支之一。对于没有能力自己购买食物的囚犯来说，菜单是黯淡无光的：早餐是红茶和一碗豆浆；午餐或晚餐是一只鸡腿和一勺黄色肉汁的米饭，肉汁的浓度与稀饭差不多；偶尔会有几个罐装的法兰克福面包和炖洋葱。长期囚犯报告说，在过去十年中，膳食的质量不断下降。他们曾经在午餐时间收到几块水果，每周有一次鱼。现在这些已经被削减。

通过警察厨房下订单，可以从监狱外购买少量的食品。科尼利厄斯每周买两次汉堡包，周四买披萨。他还订购麦片、牛奶、茶、咖啡和饼干。他还花钱买瓶装水，这样他就不用喝走廊尽头的喷泉水了，那些水是脱盐的，喝起来有金属味。


马丁-洛纳根（Martin Lonergan）在2019-20年因卷入一场单独的商业纠纷而在科内利斯隔壁的牢房里待了9个月，他在囚犯中进行了一次非正式调查。他估计，有幸在卡上有钱的囚犯每周平均花费约150迪拉姆，或40美元。（作为一个素食者，他花了500迪拉姆。"加上所有其他必须购买的物品，乘以成千上万的囚犯，迪拜的监狱系统开始看起来相当赚钱。"

科内利斯无疑犯了欺诈罪。该罪行的定义涵盖了广泛的不法行为：一端包括偷窃数十亿美元的计划，另一端是不造成个人利益的较小形式的欺骗，如未披露信息等。科尼利厄斯一直坚持认为，他从来没有偷窃Dib的意图。然而，他确实承认，他把钱用于比借给他的钱更有风险的工作。银行为短期需求提供信贷，但它却被用于资助未经授权的长期项目，如巴基斯坦炼油厂和与种植园有关的投资。

为了做到这一点，科尼利厄斯的企业伪造了家具和建筑材料等项目的发票，以配合被输送到种植园的投资资金。后来由英国的Dib提起的民事案件得出结论，科尼利厄斯 "完全牵涉到 "制造假发票以实施欺诈。他还被指控犯有贿赂罪。法官接受了银行的说法，即dib贷出的5亿美元中，有3.42亿美元被用于未经授权的项目。

科尼利厄斯和他的合伙人一直说，他们打算用种植园的销售收入来偿还贷款。一位接近科尼利厄斯的人说，他承认自己 "犯了错误"，但中央银行向他保证，如果他 "以某种方式提交某些发票"，他就可以借钱投资。虽然科尼利厄斯从未与Dib直接打过交道，但他说他被告知该银行对这种欺骗行为是 "支持的"。

迪拜吸引了希望在这个具有边疆心态的地方建立企业的西方人。

所有各方在2007年同意重组贷款时都知道这些违规行为。据一位当时在中东工作的国际银行家说，当时有大量的资金在流动，而且阿拉伯联合酋长国的经济正在蓬勃发展。"只要这种情况继续下去，似乎没有人过分担心借款人用钱做什么，只要他可以信任。那时的生意就是这样做的。" 尽管他们借出的钱被滥用，但迪布继续与科尼利厄斯和他的合伙人做生意。

对科尼利厄斯的欺诈指控的起源尚不清楚。根据后来曝光的官方文件，投诉可能来自dib本身，尽管该银行一直否认这一点，坚持认为是迪拜的警察部队首先提出了这个问题。根据科尼利厄斯的一份法律声明，在一次审讯中，一名警察 "一直在问我能立即偿还银行多少钱"。

这一询问让科尼利厄斯感到惊讶，因为他和他的合伙人与Dib签署的协议中包含一个具体条款，即只要他们遵守还款时间表，银行就放弃对其他各方提出任何索赔的权利。但该银行现在处于新的管理之下。监督该交易的董事长卡尔巴什的工作是由迪拜埃米尔马克图姆-本-拉希德-马克图姆负责的。2006年马克图姆去世后，他的弟弟穆罕默德接替了他的职位，随之而来的是一场换帅风波。许多高级工作人员被赶走，包括卡尔巴什。2008年初，在科内利斯被捕的几个月前，他离开了国防部。

Dib的新主席是穆罕默德-沙巴尼（Mohammed al-Shaibani），他不是普通的金融家，而是新埃米尔最亲密的副手之一。他以前曾负责监督统治家族在英国的商业利益。他在迪拜的任命是他崛起的最新阶段，他可以说是迪拜王室之外最有权力的人。他现在是统治者法庭的总干事，该法庭控制着政府的行政部门。

随着Shaibani政治明星的崛起，他的商业利益也在增长。他是迪拜最大的房地产开发商之一Nakheel的负责人，也是迪拜投资公司的负责人，该公司是一个价值3000亿美元的主权财富基金，持有迪拜酋长国许多最引人注目的资产。他还是国有投资公司迪拜世界(Dubai World)和世界最大的飞机租赁公司之一迪拜航空企业(Dubai Aerospace Enterprise)的董事。

谢巴尼的过去让人对迪拜声称的法治化管理产生了怀疑。他参与了迪拜近期历史上最臭名昭著的两起事件：埃米尔的女儿沙姆萨和拉蒂法被绑架。2000年8月，沙姆萨在英国剑桥的街头被绑架，离酋长在纽马克的庄园不远。她被下了药，并在违背自己意愿的情况下被带到了迪拜。在迪拜统治者和他分居的妻子之间的纠纷中，英国高等法院于2019年12月裁定，沙伊巴尼 "密切参与 "了 "带走她的行动"，事实上，她被抓走时他也在场。此后，她再也没有出现在公众面前。

沙姆萨的妹妹拉蒂法（Latifa）在2018年试图乘坐游艇逃离迪拜，当时她32岁。这艘船在果阿海岸被印度特种部队拦截，他们还拖着阿拉伯国家的同行。在拉蒂法提供给自由拉蒂法运动的信息和录音中，Shaibani的名字反复出现。她声称谢巴尼参与了对她的绑架，并威胁说要将她认证为精神病并无限期地拘留。她说，他强迫她向英国法院和正在调查她的案件的联合国作出虚假陈述，否认她被强迫关押。

当沙巴尼被任命为Dib主席时，他采取了果断的行动。人们普遍认为，前主席哈尔巴什一直在为自己谋取私利。一位曾参与该银行案件的律师说，沙伊巴尼的职责是 "清理马厩"。哈尔巴什于2009年被指控挪用公款。该案的结果尚不清楚。他于2016年去世。

英国报纸称迪拜是 "新的太阳海岸"

据几位审查过科内利斯案件的英国律师以及为科内利斯获释奔走呼号的自由民主党议员克莱门特-琼斯勋爵称，沙伊巴尼不仅想除掉卡尔巴什，还想打垮那些从与他的关系中获利的人。在一份证人陈述中，科尼利厄斯说，他认为迪布 "采取了各种精心策划的步骤 "来阻止他履行重组协议。这些都是银行 "为了得到 "种植园而采取的 "明显的恶意的非法行为"。

科尼利厄斯在2008年年中被关起来后，Dib要么扣押要么强迫他和他的合伙人出售他们作为抵押品的资产，尽管银行现在在法庭上提到重组协议是一份腐败的文件。在没有保释的情况下被拘留，科内利斯看着他的资产消失。2010年3月，在他被捕近两年后，科尼利厄斯被指控欺诈和洗钱而受到审判。

对他的指控者来说，事情并没有按计划进行。洗钱的指控被撤销。8月，案件发生了戏剧性的变化，法官回避，显然不愿意根据所提供的证据继续审判。然而，科尼利厄斯仍然在监狱里。到2010年10月，他的服刑时间已经超过了他被定罪后的刑期（在迪拜，欺诈罪的最高刑期是三年，但如果表现良好，可以减刑25%）。

当月，科尼利厄斯再次受审，面对新的法官，并面临新的指控。这一次，他和他的前合伙人以及Dib的经理们被指控串通诈骗和盗窃政府机构。这需要一些技巧，因为该银行以前并没有被视为一个国家实体。虽然国家持有其28%的股份，但政府和银行官员长期以来一直将Dib描述为一个充满活力的市场导向机构。然而，检察官声称，未支付的贷款余额是对国家的欺诈。


科尼利厄斯认为，政府和其他任何人都没有被亏待。据科尼利厄斯说，在没收财产时，被扣押的财产的价值约为有争议的贷款的三倍。2008年9月，Dib给阿拉伯联合酋长国中央银行的一封信中说，"在收购种植园后，银行的状况非常好"，不需要 "其他保障措施"。Dib的首席财务官后来在法庭上证实，"一切都有保障"，"[银行]没有损失"。

这些都没有帮助科内利斯。在迪拜，诈骗国家的最高刑期是十年。新法官于2012年判定科尼利厄斯和他的共同被告人有罪，判处他们十年的全部刑期。审判是用阿拉伯语进行的，所以科内利斯听不懂。他的律师不会说英语。他通过翻译被告知，法官坚持认为科尼利厄斯和他的合伙人在最初的欺诈中仍欠Dib约5亿美元，并施加了5亿美元的额外罚款。

dib在英国和巴林顽强地追讨这笔债务，科内利斯在那里拥有其他资产。银行说服英国法院交出科尼利厄斯在伦敦的所有三处房产--位于Pimlico和Tower Bridge的公寓以及位于Maida Vale的一栋房子--其总价值为700万美元。当迪拜当局拒绝让他通过视频连接作证时，科尼利厄斯的辩护受到了阻碍；他只被允许提交书面声明。这一裁决使他的妻子希瑟和他们的三个孩子没有了家。当他们上诉要求以人道主义理由保留其中一套公寓时，迪布的律师很快就把他们打发了。

到2016年5月，科尼利厄斯已经服满了10年的刑期，减去了因表现良好而减少的25%的标准刑期，并有资格获得释放。相反，他却被关在监狱里，对他的持续监禁没有任何官方解释。他又被囚禁了两年。这时，科尼利厄斯和他的商业伙伴在没有通知或法律代表的情况下被带到法官办公室，在那里，迪布的律师要求增加20年的监禁，根据迪拜债权人的权利，可以将未能偿还欠款的债务人关在监狱里。法官很快就同意了。

科尼利厄斯后来说，法官宣布 "这是我们和银行之间的事，法院不再起作用"。实际上，"Dib已经成为我们的狱卒"。

新的判决是根据迪拜的第37号法律作出的，该法律仿照英国的《犯罪所得法》，旨在打击洗钱活动。然而，迪拜在科尼利厄斯被指控的欺诈行为两年后才通过这项法律。克莱门特-琼斯勋爵说，国际法禁止追溯行为，"违反了法治的每一项基本原则"。阿联酋自己的宪法也明确禁止这种做法。

科尼利厄斯试图对这个20年的新判决提出上诉，但被监狱当局拒之门外。他五次申请指定一名律师代表他提出上诉。每次监狱都拒绝了他的请求：官员们坚持认为，法律不允许像他这样的服刑者签发委托书。


在别无选择的情况下，科内利斯决定代表自己，并设法提出上诉。但在预定的听证会当天，他被告知，他的名字不在监狱巴士的乘客名单上。2018年5月，一名法官驳回了上诉，因为科内利斯错过了听证会，并拒绝允许他提出另一个上诉。

仍然不清楚为什么科尼利厄斯被如此顽强地骚扰他的债务并被无限期地关押在监狱里。克莱门特-琼斯勋爵在上议院说，他认为这是谢巴尼 "个人决心 "的结果。他指称，Shaibani "亲自干预 "巴林当局，以扭转dib对Cornelius的索赔被驳回的局面。巴林争端解决厅将银行关于科尼利厄斯和他的合伙人仍欠其钱的说法视为 "毫无根据 "而驳回。该法庭的判决应该是最终的。然而，四个月后，这个判决被推翻了。(1843年杂志向Shaibani的代表提供了发表评论的机会，但没有回应)。

科尼利厄斯的家人和支持者认为，谢巴尼想夺回种植园的控制权，这是迪拜房地产的一颗珍贵的宝石，而且他试图阻止科尼利厄斯在离开监狱后通过法院寻求赔偿。他的亲属估计，这两个目标使迪布陷入了法律上的纠结。也许是为了证明追捕科尼利厄斯的合理性，该银行告诉迪拜和英国的法院，在逮捕时价值约10亿美元的种植园 "基本上没有价值，无法出售"。在不同的时候，迪布提供了各种论据来说明为什么会这样：要么是因为2008年的房地产崩溃，要么是因为该项目不属于银行，而是属于国家，因为它被列为犯罪所得。

但是，Dib向审计师、监管机构和股东展示的自身情况并不包含一个巨大的财务漏洞。科尼利厄斯的一个商业伙伴聘请的法证会计师事务所在Dib的2008年或2009年的账目中找不到任何与CCH贷款有关的损失的说法。在盘问下，DIB的一名官员在伦敦的法庭上作证说，银行有权出售该房产。

科尼利厄斯在他参加的100多次庭审中，没有一次被允许向法官讲话。

DIB没有对有关科尼利厄斯的故事的一组详细问题作出正式答复。但是，在针对科尼利厄斯的民事案件中代表迪拜的贝克-麦肯锡律师事务所的休-里昂告诉《1843》杂志，科尼利厄斯是个骗子，迪拜的上诉法院和最高司法机构--最高上诉法院都维持了对他的定罪。他还指出，英国和巴林的法院命令科尼利厄斯支付相当大的一笔钱，但他至今没有兑现。他说，他 "不知道有任何司法不公的情况"。

囚犯们报告说，他们很少见到狱卒。每天晚上9点，牢房被锁上，与狱警的电话线被切断。如果囚犯有问题，就没有办法获得援助。有时可以听到囚犯的呼救声。科尼利厄斯告诉他的家人，他觉得被如此隔离是 "可怕的"。该监区过去有磁性防火门，如果火警警报响起就会自动打开。几年前，这个系统被切断了。这些天，门被挂上了锁。

医疗服务几乎不存在：一名医生负责所有的囚犯。在轮值制度下，囚犯可能会在6个月后才得到预约。种族歧视也很明显。巴基斯坦囚犯的等待时间比白人囚犯长，黑人囚犯的等待时间更长。

自入狱以来，科内利斯患有高血压和胆固醇升高。2019年底，他被诊断出患有肺结核，因为相邻牢房的一名囚犯得病倒下了。尽管经常恳求，他等了18个月才得到治疗和药物。庆幸的是，他的结核病是潜伏的。在此期间，他不止一次被送到政府医院，但每次都没有经过检查就被送回监狱，原因是医生声称不知道他是谁，或者是因为文书工作不符合要求。

大流行病结束了囚犯短暂的户外娱乐的许可。几个月来，科尼利厄斯整天都被关在室内。他唯一的运动是偶尔在牢房旁边的走廊上慢跑。此前，他曾帮助组织过触摸式橄榄球比赛。他告诉他的家人，这是他每周唯一值得期待的事情。

科尼利厄斯和其他囚犯被双重注射了国药集团的疫苗。但这并没有阻止科维德在这个拥挤的监狱里横行霸道。据报道，他所在的监区被用作任何可能被感染者的垃圾场。在夏天，科尼利厄斯出现了柯维德症状。医务人员不在，囚犯甚至无法得到扑热息痛。科尼利厄斯隔壁牢房的一名囚犯死于冠状病毒，他的尸体在那里躺了8个小时，然后被装在一个塑料袋里运走。科尼利厄斯担心再次感染冠状病毒可能会引发他的结核病变得活跃。

在专制国家做生意是充满危险的。由于没有独立的法律体系，仲裁商业纠纷的法官会感到来自有政治影响力的个人的压力。只有最天真的投资者才会在中国或俄罗斯做生意，而不考虑被政府或关系良好的竞争对手征用的风险。迪拜应该是不同的：在一个充满危险的地区，一个具有西方视野的商业友好绿洲。

迪拜缺乏其邻国的石油财富。为了弥补这一点，它已经把自己变成了一个商业中心，金融、房地产和旅游业等服务行业在这里蓬勃发展。它向外国投资者宣传自己是一个低税率、自由贸易的天堂。2020年初，阿拉伯联合酋长国宣布，外国医生、科学家和发明家将首次能够申请公民身份。它吸引了希望在一个具有前沿思想的地方建立企业的西方人，以及 "吸引任何从卡拉奇、贝鲁特或其他地方来的人，希望有一个更安全、更中产阶级的地方"，一位银行家如是说。

拥有大型会议中心的酒店帮助该酋长国成为中东无可争议的企业活动中心。它将自己推销为西装革履和购物者的豪华目的地。它还精明地鼓励社交媒体的影响者搬到那里--并发布他们迷人的生活方式的照片--以吸引年轻游客。

总的来说，西方政府认为迪拜是一个可靠的合作伙伴和安全的经营场所。英国外交和联邦事务部(Fco)关于阿拉伯联合酋长国商业风险的最新指南指出，其 "社会是多元文化的，其特点是比该地区的许多其他国家更加宽容和开放"。

然而，该酋长国长期以来一直是黑钱和黑心中间商的天堂。监管机构在金融危机前的辉煌岁月中对此类活动大多视而不见。但2008-09年的事件使迪拜的债务暴露无遗，该酋长国几乎要违约--它只是在另一个酋长国阿布扎比的救助下才摆脱了这一命运。这种濒临死亡的经历迫使迪拜展示出清理门户的决心，特别是在政府面临来自其他国家和全球监管机构越来越大的压力时。

"对于一个外国人来说，获得无罪释放的唯一途径是拥有足够的影响力来赢得赦免"

尽管如此，迪拜仍然受到贪污犯、武器走私犯、制裁破坏者和洗钱者的欢迎。逃犯、诈骗犯和失宠的公众人物蜂拥而至（英国报纸称迪拜为 "新的太阳海岸"，指的是西班牙南部外国罪犯曾经躲藏的地方）。犯罪团伙和加密货币诈骗者在其境内活动。根据智库卡内基基金会(Carnegie Endowment)去年的一份报告，迪拜在打击非法金融方面的半心半意是其经济的 "一个特点，而不是一个毛病"。这为它提供了相对于更严格的司法管辖区的竞争优势。但是，迪拜的有权势的人可以在打击腐败的幌子下扣押资产，就像2017年王储穆罕默德-本-萨勒曼在沙特阿拉伯所做的那样，他逮捕了许多王室成员和商人，并榨干了他们的银行账户。


阿联酋的法律体系以民法原则和伊斯兰教法为基础。每个酋长国都有自己的法院，在阿布扎比有一个最高法院。迪拜是仅有的两个不参加阿拉伯联合酋长国的联邦法院结构的酋长国之一。相反，它吹嘘其现代司法系统。迪拜国际金融中心是一个包含2000多家银行和公司的经济特区，它有自己的法院，根据普通法原则运作，用英语审理案件。向这个经济特区提出的申请受到严格审查；来自金融和技术公司的申请最有可能获得成功。但是，像迪拜的大多数公司一样，科尼利厄斯的企业是在这个区域之外注册的，而是属于国家法院的管辖范围，这些法院适用国家法律。

在这些法院，死刑审判可以在一天内开始和结束。检察官败诉的情况很少。事实上，公诉律师经常坐在法官的旁边坐着。受审的外国人看到检察官和法官之间的讨论，前者似乎在向后者发出指示。被告人经常被阻止提供证据。科尼利厄斯在被捕后的十多年里参加了100多次庭审和上诉，但没有一次被允许向法官讲话。由于翻译不到位，他常常难以理解所发生的一切。这个系统是靠人情来运作的。"一位外国律师说："对于一个外国人来说，获得无罪释放的唯一途径是拥有足够的影响力来赢得赦免。

正如科尼利厄斯所发现的那样，在金钱纠纷中，法律可能特别残酷。在大多数西方国家，债务被认为是一个民事问题。查尔斯-狄更斯的父亲曾被送入债务人监狱，狄更斯在其小说中对这些监狱的可怕条件的描述支持了一场运动，导致英国在1869年最终废除了这些监狱。相比之下，阿拉伯联合酋长国仍然将债务视为一种犯罪。

迪拜的法院对财产犯罪判处了令人瞠目结舌的刑罚。逾期付款，甚至是一张退票，都可以让你在监狱里待上三年。负责科尼利厄斯案件的大律师里斯-戴维斯（Rhys Davies）说，这有助于肆无忌惮的索赔者 "在与债务追讨有关的问题上利用刑事系统"。

监狱判决并不能清除债务。如果债务人在最初的刑期结束时无法偿还钱款，债权人可以要求法院将其无限期监禁，直到债务得到解决。债务人可能被锁定在一个 "Catch-22 "的情况下：如果他们不能离开监狱，他们怎么可能挣钱来偿还债务？一些印度劳工因小到1000美元的债务而在阿拉伯联合酋长国的监狱中煎熬了十多年。

公司、银行、公众人物、甚至私人都在这个系统中工作，成为长期的狱卒。仅仅是一个指控，当局就可以逮捕某人并禁止他们离开该国，即使没有证据。

迪拜拘留所的拉达-斯特林（Radha Stirling）是一个为被迪拜的法律制度束缚的外国人提供帮助的团体，他有许多客户是或曾经是 "债务人质"。即使那些没有被关起来的人也可能发现他们的自由受到限制。被告通常会失去工作，当地银行会冻结他们的账户。"斯特林说："这可能会导致以前开出的支票跳票，使他们的问题更加复杂。"他们无法找到另一份工作来偿还债务，因为任何被警方起诉的人都无权获得工作签证。旅行禁令确保他们永远不能离开迪拜，直到偿还了不可能偿还的债务"。


债务人的亲属也并不安全。阿尔伯特-道格拉斯（Albert Douglas）在迪拜被关了两年，因为他儿子的地板生意开出的支票被退回了：他儿子已经离开了迪拜，所以债权人就找道格拉斯，因为他是公司账户的签字人。道格拉斯充分认识到迪拜对债务人的无情对待，试图逃到阿曼。他在攀爬边境围栏时被抓。现在，60岁的他担心自己会死在监狱里。

即使是那些逃出国境的人，也可能会遇到阿拉伯联合酋长国滥用国际刑警组织的 "红色通报 "制度。虽然追讨债务不是国际刑警组织的任务之一，但是阿拉伯联合酋长国有时会通过将债务重新指定为 "欺诈 "来规避这一点。国际刑警组织并不核实国家犯罪局在其数据库中列出的指控。然后，通知的对象有可能被拘留在国外，并可能被引渡到科威特。斯特林说，即使是一个无意义的案件也可能需要长达9个月的时间才能被剔除。

今年早些时候，由英国前检察院院长大卫-卡尔弗特-史密斯爵士撰写的一份报告指出了阿拉伯联合酋长国对红色通知的滥用以及对国际刑警组织的 "不当影响"。11月底，阿联酋内政部监察长艾哈迈德-纳赛尔-拉伊西少将当选为该组织的下任主席。之前被关在迪拜的外国人发起运动，阻止他获得这个职位，认为他在之前的工作中监督了任意逮捕和酷刑。

根据卡尔弗特-史密斯的报告，阿拉伯联合酋长国滥用红色通缉令的范围从小规模敲诈到 "为政治利益而攻击被视为对政权构成威胁的人"。一名英国妇女在罗马的一家餐馆被包围，并因所谓的几千美元的信用卡债务而被拘留。

一些印度劳工在阿联酋被关了十多年，他们的债务小到1000美元。

Detained in Dubai的Stirling说，"迪拜的金融公司把国际刑警组织当作他们自己的私人收债人"。她估计，有时所谓的债务甚至不存在。她说："阿拉伯联合酋长国基本上已经完善了债务敲诈，"她说。"在某些情况下，他们让那些不欠债的人列出来向他们勒索。当目标人物在海外被逮捕时，酋长、银行或其他支持此案的人就会说'给我资产或钱让我放弃，否则我会提出更多指控'。"

阿联酋还使用更多的暴力手段。扎克-沙欣（Zack Shahin）是百事公司的前高管，后来经营Dib的财产部门。2008年，他被指控偷窃3000万美元--尽管无法查到他的钱--并在监狱中被关押了四年。在美国当局对他的健康表示担忧后，他于2012年以140万美元的保释金获释。他立即逃到也门，在那里美国大使馆安排他飞回家。根据一些说法，在最后一刻，也门政府同意将他送回阿拉伯联合酋长国。争取释放沙欣的运动者说，他在机场被来自迪拜的安全人员带走，这些人似乎在也门可以自由行动。他被人用枪顶住后背，被押上了返回迪拜的飞机。他现在仍在那里的监狱里。

迪拜对债务人的做法似乎与它自己的经济模式相抵触。其最大的一些产业，从房地产到旅游业，都是由债务推动的。2020年，迪拜的政府债务总额占国内生产总值的77%，这是可以控制的。然而，这还不包括主要国有集团的借款。根据信用评级机构S&P的数据，加上这些，该比率达到了惊人的150%。自从2008-09年濒临违约以来，迪拜一直依靠国际银行重组贷款的意愿。"一位参与救助谈判的前银行家说："这是一个主要由西方银行支持的经济体，并依赖于它们的宽容性。"如此残酷地对待自己的债务人是不折不扣的虚伪。"

多年来，科尼利厄斯被关押的条件在某些小方面有所改善。作为一名长期服刑的囚犯，他有权获得一个令人羡慕的低层床铺（他恰好与管理他的账户的一名二等银行家共用他的牢房）。大多数囚犯的牢房里除了床垫和毯子外不允许有任何东西--甚至连家庭照片都被禁止。科尼利厄斯得到了几个圆盆，用来装书和案件文件，还有几件衣服、餐具、陶器和一个可以接收当地电台的小收音机。他听的是迪拜之眼的商业新闻和另一个播放八十年代和九十年代歌曲的电台。"播放列表是有限的。他开玩笑说，他通常可以预测下一首歌曲的到来，"他的姐夫帕吉特说。

covid和贫穷的结合意味着，自2019年2月以来，没有任何家庭成员访问过科内利斯。在covid禁闭的间隙，科尼利厄斯得到了与妻子希瑟进行罕见的Skype通话的机会：当他回到牢房时，他蜷缩在床垫上，哭了几个小时。谈到她与丈夫的谈话时，希瑟的声音有些颤抖；她似乎一直处于泪水的边缘。她说，她曾经觉得探视的压力非常大，因为当局有时会在最后一分钟找借口，推迟会面。现在，她甚至无力从英国赶来。

希瑟担心，科尼利厄斯被捕时，她的女儿是一个年轻的成年人，比他们的两个儿子（17岁和6岁）更 "内化 "了她父亲的缺席。"[男孩们]发现更容易分担处理情感上的困难。"

这对夫妇大多数时间都通过电话交谈。"我能听到他接近放弃的时候，但他总是试图保护我，让我不必为他担心。他专注于我和孩子们。他付出了巨大的努力。在早期，我们会谈论案件，谈论律师。现在不会了。" 如果他没有在规定的时间内打电话，她就会变得非常焦虑，担心他可能在夜里昏倒了，因为他无法联系到警卫人员。

"每天早上我醒来都会想'哦，上帝，他还在监狱里。我们要怎么继续下去呢？但我会紧紧抓住任何希望。这是我过去13年来的生存方式。瑞安也仍然有希望，我知道，尽管发生了一切。"

自科尼利厄斯被捕入狱以来，英国政府为他提供了最低限度的援助。在家人的多次恳求下，一名领事助理--一名迪拜人--最终帮助他看病治疗肺结核。但家人报告说，这位助理经常很难联系上：电话直接转到语音信箱，她的邮箱有时也是满的。"斯特林说："通常情况下，英国领事人员只是向人们提供一份当地律师的名单，以不一致的频率探访囚犯，并帮助转达与家人的沟通。

外交部门对此案兴趣不大。经过多次请求，两年前外交部的一位官员来探望他，科尼利厄斯跟他谈了关于迪拜非法追溯使用第37号法律将他关在监狱的文件。这位官员说他会调查此事，但此后家人没有任何消息。

"每天早上我醒来都会想'哦，上帝，他还在监狱里。我们要怎么继续下去呢？""

英国部长们拒绝公开谴责科内利斯的待遇，或要求宽恕。大律师戴维斯说，在这种情况下，政府部长们做得 "非常少"。他描述了一个又一个案件的 "滑稽过程"，"外交部说，'遵守当地的法律程序，我们以后会处理。但在你被认定有罪后，他们又说：'啊，但你是一个被定罪的罪犯。"克莱门特-琼斯勋爵估计，只有在当地律师提出司法不公的情况下，外交部才会支持赦免的请求。在迪拜这样的地方，这种行为将是 "职业自杀，甚至可能更糟"。他称政府的回应 "没有骨气"。外交部没有对评论请求作出回应。

外交部过去曾对迪拜的法律案件进行过干预。英国博士生马修-赫奇斯(Matthew Hedges)在2018年5月前往阿拉伯联合酋长国进行研究时被诬陷为间谍，并被判处终身监禁。当年晚些时候，随着公众愤怒的增加，在英国政府迟来的游说下，他获得了赦免。即使是很少发表意见的MI6负责人也批评了这次拘留。此后，赫奇斯抨击外交部没有为他采取更果断的行动。

其他国家采取了更坚定的行动。美国、澳大利亚、加拿大、爱尔兰、意大利和尼日利亚都采取了更多措施，帮助在迪拜遇到法律问题的公民。前囚犯Lonergan说，爱尔兰外交官在确保他在9个月后被释放方面发挥了关键作用：他在爱尔兰大使馆的联系人给了他她的手机号码，并24小时提供服务。爱尔兰政府一直对迪拜的官员施加压力，直到他被释放。

为什么英国会对这种法律滥用行为视而不见？答案可能部分在于它与阿拉伯联合酋长国的经济和安全关系。该国是英国在中东地区最大的贸易伙伴，也是其全球第12大出口市场。它也是一个敌对地区的重要安全伙伴--两国共享许多情报。然而，美国和法国与阿拉伯联合酋长国有着类似的联系，当他们的公民在那里遇到法律上的困难时，他们仍然给予更广泛的帮助。

英国脱离欧盟对改变现状作用不大。政府曾表示，它将加强对海外侵犯人权行为的立场。相反，它试图加强与许多非欧盟伙伴的商业和军事关系，以表明它可以在集团外蓬勃发展。

迪拜的精英阶层也深深卷入了英国的经济和社会中。谢赫-马克图姆（Sheikh Maktoum）曾经是女王在皇家阿斯科特赛马场的马车上的客人。卫报》4月份的一项分析认为，迪拜的统治者是英国最大的土地所有者之一，拥有超过4万公顷的土地（确切的规模很难确定，因为与他有关的一些财产是由所有权不透明的离岸公司持有的）。马克图姆的财产帝国包括在贝尔格莱维亚、肯辛顿和骑士桥的豪宅，在萨里的乡村别墅和在苏格兰高地的庄园。他在纽马特的马厩是戈多芬的一部分，戈多芬是马克图姆家族的全球纯种赛马业务，在迪拜和澳大利亚也有业务。戈多芬的英国分公司经营着该国最大的平地赛马场，并与拥有英国一些最知名的赛马场，包括埃普森唐斯和切尔滕纳姆的骑师俱乐部有着紧密的联系。

英国政府可以利用这些关系作为筹码。英国是近年来将马格尼茨基法加入其制裁武器库的众多国家之一。这些法律以谢尔盖-马格尼茨基（Sergei Magnitsky）命名，他是一名律师，因试图揭露政府官员的税务欺诈而死于俄罗斯监狱，这些法律授权政府对严重侵犯人权的人实施旅行禁令和冻结其资产。科尼利厄斯的大律师很快将向英国政府以及美国、加拿大和欧盟国家提交请求，对沙伊巴尼和监禁科尼利厄斯的两名法官实施马格尼茨基制裁。然而，鉴于英国政府的冷漠态度，很难想象它会对一个来自英国寻求保持密切联系的国家的权势人物采取行动。

斯特林说，英国至少应该更有力地警告人们在迪拜做生意的危险性。她说，外交部仍然建议，只要你尊重法律和文化，迪拜是安全的。"它没有警告公民，那里的法律体系对外国人是系统性的操纵，没有起诉的证据标准，没有正当程序，不尊重人权。"

科尼利厄斯的最大希望是让迪拜政府尴尬地释放他。"阿拉伯联合酋长国不像俄罗斯。它是非常注重隐私的。它真的很讨厌这种宣传，"一位参与的律师说。在推迟的2020年世博会期间，迪拜对批评特别敏感，世博会于10月1日开始，一直持续到2022年3月。这是自2015年在米兰举行的世博会以来，第一次展出创新成果的世界博览会。该酋长国的政府将其视为宣传迪拜作为投资和旅游目的地的黄金机会。(博览会开幕的一周被国家支持的诡计所破坏：英国法院裁定，代表马克图姆酋长工作的特工可能入侵了他分居的妻子哈亚公主的电话）。



科尼利厄斯的家人说，他天生积极向上，从未失去过获释的希望。他一直认为 "有一天有人只是想摆脱科尼利厄斯和公司"，会让他出来。在科尼利厄斯的商业伙伴提起的民事案件中，英国法院已经开始对迪布的主张持更加怀疑的态度。但科尼利厄斯似乎已经放弃了在迪拜赢得法律辩论的希望。

2014年，阿拉伯联合酋长国的一项新规定将监禁70岁以上的债务拖欠者列为非法。科尼利厄斯将在2024年4月达到这一里程碑。鉴于他在迪拜的法律体系中长期受苦，即使到那时他也没有信心被释放。如果不对酋长国施加一致的国际压力，赦免是不可能的。"他的妻子希瑟说："瑞安生来就有企业家的基因，即使在今天，他也不后悔在很久以前就梦想着种植园可能是一个好的赌注。"但他苦于相信迪拜是一个安全的做生意的地方。"■。

马修-瓦伦西亚是《经济学人》的商业事务副编辑。