How prospective Leeds buyer ended up in Dubai prison over fraud allegations
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Version 0 of 1. Among the myriad scandals that have engulfed Leeds United since the club’s financial collapse in the early 2000s, the current plight of the former managing director David Haigh, who has been held in a Dubai prison cell for eight months, accused but still not charged with a £3m fraud, is perhaps the most toxic. Haigh, an English solicitor, was the most prominent executive in the 2012 takeover of Leeds from Ken Bates by Gulf Finance House, an investment bank in Bahrain. He eventually moved to Leeds from Dubai to run the Championship club. A year later he left GFH and tried to buy Leeds himself, with the businessman Andrew Flowers, before GFH sold a 75% stake to Massimo Cellino, the Italian businessman now banned as a director having been convicted of tax fraud in Italy. On 18 May last year, with Haigh saying he was considering his future options, he went to a meeting at the Dubai office of GFH’s subsidiary, GFH Capital, where he had worked with a handful of staff since January 2008, and was shocked to be arrested by a policeman. Days later, GFH sued Haigh in the Dubai International Financial Centre Court, alleging he had from April 2013 fabricated dozens of invoices in the names of companies with which GFH had done business, causing £3m to be paid into his own bank accounts. GFH Capital’s chief executive, Jinesh Patel, told the Guardian that he uncovered the missing £3m and false invoices, which Haigh denies, soon after he took over in Dubai last February and conducted a review of the finances. Patel said that GFH alerted its financial regulator and police in both Dubai and England after discovering the alleged fraud. Haigh issued a defence to the legal action last month, denying “preparing invoices or signing invoices or bank transfer forms knowing them to be ‘false’,” alleging that GFH owed him £4.8m and that in fact GFH itself had “an ongoing practice of false invoicing”. Patel vehemently rejected that allegation. Haigh also claims that GFH deceived him, luring him to Dubai with the apparently attractive offer of hiring him to run a GFH operation in London. He says he has copies of exchanges on the whatsapp instant-messaging system with the GFH chief executive, Hisham Alrayes, in which Alrayes suggests Haigh just had to pass the formality of an interview with a senior GFH figure, Khalid Al Khazraji, and the London job would be his. Instead, when Haigh arrived at the office, having not been back to Dubai for months, he was arrested and taken to the Bur Dubai police station. He has been locked up there ever since. Currently he shares a cell built for two people with three other inmates, among 60 prisoners in a block designed to accommodate 32. In messages sent from prison to his personal assistant, Haigh says he was initially promised bail but was then challenged by a young police officer to sign a statement in Arabic, which he refused, then, under pressure, signed and wrote: “I do not understand Arabic but am being forced to sign.” Since then, Haigh says nobody has been to see him, or questioned him at all, in relation to any criminal prosecution, yet he has been kept imprisoned for eight months. The only legal processes during that time have been monthly appearances at a court where, at hearings lasting barely a minute, his detention was extended. At first, Haigh says, he did not have access to any medical treatment, despite having had a major stomach operation just before he travelled to Dubai, and suffering from serious bleeding of the stomach. After being told he could have more substantial medical treatment at the Dubai central prison, Haigh asked for a transfer there, but was held in a cell with convicted drug criminals and had his head shaved. His lawyers then insisted he be moved back to the police station. GFH have obtained a freezing order on all Haigh’s assets and money worldwide – which the firm claims shows the strength of the evidence against him – and for months he said he had no access to lawyers or means of paying them until more recently, when he has issued his defence and launched a legal fightback. In October, his lawyers in England issued a high court claim alleging deceit against Patel and Alrayes, claiming it was on the basis of their false promises of a job that he travelled to Dubai on 18 May, when he was arrested. Patel said that he and Alrayes had been advised due to that legal case not to comment on Haigh’s claim that they falsely lured him over with promises of work. He did, however, say that despite having alerted the police, which he said they were duty bound to do, they did not know Haigh was going to be “incarcerated”. Hundreds of foreign people in Dubai accused of crimes are subjected to bans against them travelling out of the country while investigations are ongoing, Patel said, and GFH assumed that was more likely to happen to Haigh. “We didn’t want him to be incarcerated and we didn’t know he was going to be,” Patel said. The Foreign Office “prisoner pack” for British nationals in Dubai advises that people can be held for 48 hours in custody before being seen by a public prosecutor, but that this can be extended for months while preparing a case. “The [public prosecutor] is under no obligation to explain to you or the embassy why he has asked for an extension,” it advises prisoners. “The public prosecutor only needs to satisfy the court that an extension is necessary.” Drewery Dyke, Amnesty International’s researcher for the gulf region, told the Guardian that the administration of justice has not been “in keeping with international standards” in cases Amnesty has dealt with in Dubai. “Unfortunately pre-trial detention can last months, and if people are seen to have ‘crossed the system’ they can fall into a trap,” Dyke said. “You would hope that a place like Dubai would flourish on probity and transparency where financial matters are concerned, rather than shadowy processes.” A Foreign Office spokeswoman said they could not comment beyond stating: “We can confirm the arrest of a British national in Dubai on 18 May 2014. We are providing consular assistance.” A spokeswoman for the United Arab Emirates embassy in London said it could not comment on Haigh’s individual case and needed more time to respond to general questions about the legitimacy of a person being held for eight months with no charge. Meanwhile, GFH remains a 25% owner, with Cellino of Leeds United, with Patel, and Salem Patel, GFH’s head of corporate investment, both directors at Elland Road. They say that together with £20m invested by Cellino in loans and equity, GFH has invested £25m into Leeds. Patel says they have “a very strong case” that Haigh did defraud GFH, pointing to an interim judgment of Justice Sir David Steel in the DIFC in September, who said: “There is no challenge that they have a good prima facie case.” A year ago David Haigh thought he was about to buy a great English football club, and was aspiring to capitalise on his profile to become a Conservative MP. Instead, he is now sweating in a crowded prison cell in Dubai, accused of a huge fraud that he denies, contemplating a terrible open-endedness about his fate. |