Dubai bank is behind British businessman’s 30-year jail sentence, family claims

A Dubai bank is instrumental in the long-running detention of the 71-year-old British businessman Ryan Cornelius who is serving a 30-year sentence that will keep him in jail until he is 84, his brother-in-law claims. Recent accounts show the Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB), which claims to be the trailblazer in championing Islamic values in banking, is on course to make more than $2bn in profit this year. Cornelius was detained in 2008, and convicted with three others of defrauding the bank in 2011. He has already served 17 years but his sentence in 2018 was extended at the request of the bank for a further 20 years, according to information given to a UN working party on arbitrary detention, meaning he will not be released until 2038 when he will be 84 years old. He was accused of failing to keep up payments to the bank over a loan to fund a business deal, a charge he denies, and was required by a Dubai court to pay $432m. DIB brought proceedings to recover the loan using a law which extends prison sentences for convicts who fail to return proceeds of fraud. Cornelius’s wife, Heather, is in effect homeless and he has no means of raising the sums required to secure his release. The bank has seized all his assets including a property development called the Plantation land, now renamed the Acres, that would be worth more than $3bn on the basis of advertised villa prices. That valuation after the land has been developed is more than double the amount of his outstanding restructured loan from the bank. Cornelius was arrested apparently at DIB’s request while travelling through Dubai in May 2008 on his way back from Karachi, Pakistan, to his home in Bahrain. At the time he and his partners were $10m ahead of the agreed repayment schedule, his brother-in-law Chris Pagett claims. The allegations come as the United Arab Emirates has undertaken to consider a letter sent by 146 British parliamentarians urging Dubai to show clemency. Khalid Saud Al Qasimi, the UAE deputy ambassador in London last week met Tim Roca, the Labour MP and vice-chair of the inter parliamentary group on arbitrary detention, and said he would ensure the letter was passed to the relevant authorities in Dubai. Other parliamentarians, including the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith and the liberal democrat peer Tim Clement-Jones, went to the UAE embassy in London to hand over the letter last week, but it was decided only one MP should meet Emirati diplomats. The MPs are hoping that the UAE’s national day on 2 December – often a moment in which the UAE leaders issue pardons – could be an occasion for the UAE to end Cornelius’s ordeal. A similar appeal last year brought no response from the UAE, as have other Foreign Office-backed family appeals. In 2022, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention decided Cornelius was being arbitrarily detained, noting information that the extension of his initial 10-year sentence by a further 20 years in 2018 was decided by a judge at a closed-doors, one-day hearing that bore little resemblance to an ordinary trial. The UAE did not respond to a UN request to submit evidence. The letter by the parliamentarians, couched in the most respectful terms, points out that Cornelius will have spent 30 years in jail by 2038. The chair of the DIB, Mohammed Al Shaibani is also the director general of the Dubai Ruler’s Court. There is no suggestion that he has used his status to influence the court. The bank claims to be the first to have incorporated Islamic principles into its practices. It states: “As champions of morality, equality and transparency, our establishment reflects the modernity, diversity and growth of the city whose name we share.” The bank, which says it has 5 million customers, made a pre-tax profit of £2.01bn in the first 10 months of this year with assets reaching £82bn. It has said the sentences are the responsibility of an independent judicial system. Cornelius was originally detained and placed in solitary confinement for six weeks, and according to information supplied to the UN working party, DIB commenced seizure of his personal assets and businesses, eventually including his London home. In 2010, he was put on trial for fraud. The case was initially dismissed for lack of evidence, but he was not released. After a retrial, in 2011 Cornelius and three other expatriates were charged with theft from a public body, in effect redefining his outstanding loan to the bank as theft from the state. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was ordered to repay the outstanding balance and handed a $500m fine. Roca said: “There are two aspects to this. There clearly is a dispute about fraud and money that is denied. But he is a 71-year-old man in prison, bankrupt, and the prospect of him paying back what is owed is more than unlikely. This is a respectful cross-party request from the UK parliament for the Emir to exercise his prerogative and grant a pardon. There is an incredibly important relationship between the UAE and the UK.” Pagett said: “The clemency appeal signed by 146 British parliamentarians may at least prompt the Ruler of Dubai to begin to reassess whether whatever he believes he gains by persisting in this display of implacable cruelty is worth the long-term reputational damage which he will incur. “As to Sharia banking law, it could not be clearer in setting out procedures for foreclosure. A bank should take whatever has been put up as security for the loan, establish its real value by selling it within a stipulated time frame, and net that off to establish whatever remains to be repaid by the debtor. None of that appears to have happened in Ryan’s case”.