AVTUAE

David Haigh

“In 2014, I was the managing director of Leeds United, a leading English football club. Life was good – I saw Dubai as my second home and my consortium was in the process of buying Leeds from its Dubai based owners. I had no idea that what should have been a straightforward business deal would […]

“In 2014, I was the managing director of Leeds United, a leading English football club. Life was good – I saw Dubai as my second home and my consortium was in the process of buying Leeds from its Dubai based owners.

I had no idea that what should have been a straightforward business deal would very quickly destroy my life. The deal that we had been working on turned sour and in the middle of this dispute, I was tricked into going to the UAE. I thought I was going to Dubai to meet the UAE owners and resolve the dispute.

However, within hours of stepping off the plane, I was imprisoned as part of a premediated trap, and I spent the next 22 months detained in Dubai. I now know that the people I was doing business with – people who had direct connections to the UAE government – were complicit in this.

Upon my arrival on 18 May 2014, I was approached by a police officer who immediately transported me to the Bur Dubai Police Station. There, I was questioned about allegations of “bounced cheques” and further allegations of “breach of trust” from my former employer, GFH Capital Limited, before being arrested and placed under Dubai Police custody. I was forced to sign a document which was then used to justify my further detention.

On 19 May I was interrogated by a prosecutor and forced to sign another document in Arabic, a language I do not understand. Between the date of my arrest and June 2015, I was not informed of the charges against me. After 15 months of detention I was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, the release date being set for 16 November 2015. Nine days later I was pardoned by the sheikh, but my detention was extended further as a consequence of a new and fabricated allegation of an offence of “Twitter slander”. The offending tweets were directed at my former employer and had been “sent” while I was in detention and without any means of communication. Consequently, I was again interrogated and subjected to ill-treatment, during which time I was not allowed to consult a lawyer. I was acquitted on 21 March 2016 and released on 24 March 2016.

During my detention, I was denied the opportunity to see the evidence against me both before and during the “trial”. I was not allowed to give evidence myself, nor to cross-examine witnesses or even to speak. I was regularly denied a translator and a lawyer, and often denied pen and paper. Furthermore, I was subjected to torture and ill-treatment. I was held in solitary confinement, in poor conditions of detention, deprived of adequate food, clothing and access to healthcare. I was kept in a freezing room, punched, kicked, assaulted with a Taser, sexually assaulted, subjected to verbal threats of harm and death, and forced to observe and witness the torture of other prisoners.

The abuses I suffered during that time were so serious that I was hospitalised for 7 months. It has taken 22 months in England to start to rebuild my life and mind, as well as my broken body. Today I want to tell the world what happened to me in that very dark Dubai in the hope of exposing the ongoing suffering in UAE jails and to warn others of the terrible injustices that exist within the UAE system. The most basic human rights are denied to detainees and prisoners in the country. In Early 2018 in what can only be describe as a significant twist of fate HRH Sheikha Latifa AL Maktoum, the daughter of the ruler of Dubai appointed me to assist her in her escape from the torture, abuse, arbitrary detention and unfair trials she suffered in Dubai at the hands of her father the Ruler of Dubai.

Given that the abuse goes to the very highest level in the UAE, It is the international community and the United Nations that must now look to bring the UAE out of the darkness and to hold the UAE to account for its flagrant human rights abuses”.

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