Jailed Leeds chief’s agony
EX-LEEDS CHIEF HAIGH HAS BEEN IN DUBAI JAIL FOR A YEAR ... AND STILL NO TRIAL
DAVID HAIGH has borrowed a device off a prison guard to make the call on Skype. He has no idea if he will get five minutes or 40 to tell his extraordinary story.
But the former managing director of Leeds United starts from the beginning; from the day he was arrested and thrown inside a Dubai jail cell, to the darkest moments that have had him contemplating suicide.
Haigh has been incarcerated in Dubai since May 18 last year, 346 days and counting. In that time he has not even been interviewed by the Dubai authorities, never mind charged with a crime. But there he remains, held under Sharia law and accused by his former employers and part owners of Leeds, the Bahrain-based bank GFH Capital, of falsifying £3million of invoices; of committing fraud, embezzlement and money laundering.
It is a complex case, and Haigh does not deny that he did indeed pay the money in question into his account. But he insists it was owed to him in the form of salary, commissions and expenses, including those he says were due for overseeing the sale of 75 per cent of the club from GFH to Massimo Cellino.
Indeed he claims he has contracts, emails and text messages to prove it. But he says he is being prevented from presenting this evidence in his defence because of a freezing order obtained by GFH in the Dubai courts that denies him access to the funds he needs to pay the legal fees.
‘I’m trapped in an awful Catch 22 situation,’ says the 37-year-old, whose Cornwall-based family have written to Prime Minister David Cameron and their local MP to highlight his case.
His time at Leeds was eventful to say the least and began when he led the negotiations to purchase the club from Ken Bates in December 2012 as a corporate lawyer working out of GFH’s subsidiary office in Dubai. Working closely with the then chief executive, Shaun Harvey, Haigh oversaw both the departure of Neil Warnock and the appointment of Brian McDermott as the new manager.
Haigh recalls a 6-0 defeat at Sheffield Wednesday in January 2014 when Hisham Al-Rayes, the GFH chief executive, called him and ordered him to sack McDermott during half-time. ‘It was insane,’ he says. ‘I just had to say “No, you can’t do that”.’ He also recalls them spending more on private detectives to avoid paying off employees than the pay-off itself would have cost.
Right now we cannot know whether such recollections are true. But, interestingly, Haigh believes Cellino will have a positive impact at Leeds in the long term, despite the chaos att Elland Road in the absence of f the Italian, whose suspension n finally ends at the weekend. ‘I think Massimo knows how to run a football club,’ says Haigh.h.
More than 4,000 miles away inn a Dubai jail Haigh’s own battle e continues. So far only thee charity, Prisoners Abroad, havee come to his aid, ensuring that at he gets the special diet that at allows both for his strictct vegetarianism and what has as been a serious medical issueue with his stomach. He essentiallyly lives on packet soups, instantant mashed potato and vitamin min supplements; a regime that has seen him drop more than seven ven stones in weight, making him evenven thinner than he appears in photootographs taken when he was in hospital last year.
‘I was seriously overweight priorrior to my arrest,’ he admits. ‘But you wouldn’t recognise me now.’
On the phone he sounds more ore buoyant than you might expect, ect, news of a setback for GFH’s legal egal team giving him cause for encourouragement. But there have beeneen difficult moments. Moments whenhen he almost lost all sense of hope and considered using a ‘strong piece of material’ he acquired to hang himself from his cell door.
Moments when he so missed his family — his parents, his elder sister Alison and his partner — that it seemed easier to end it all there. ‘There have been some challenging times,’ he says. ‘You could say I’ve been through the wars a bit. The first few weeks were the darkest time of my life.’
He has forbidden visits from loved ones for fear of what the Dubai authorities might do to them. Part of him also has no desire to let his family see the conditions in which he is living. He talks about ‘the awful smell’ in the cells.
As a gay man he certainly worries about the treatment his partner could receive when Sharia law deems certain homosexual acts illegal. He talks to them only on the telephone; a situation that is as distressing for them as it is for him.
‘We feel so utterly helpless,’ said an emotional Alison this week. ‘I saw him the day before he flew to Dubai and I had this bad feeling about the trip. I look back now and only wish I’d taken his passport off him.’
But he boarded an Emirates flight to Dubai on May 18 last year oblivious to what he now believes to be the real reasons why he had been invited. He thought he was going to discuss a new business proposition as well as the resolution of matters relating to outstanding monies he says he was owed. He even used frequent flyer points to upgrade himself to first class. Little did he know it would be his last taste of luxury for quite some time.
‘I spent six years working in Dubai and still have a home there,’ says Haigh. ‘So I went to my place, freshened up and then jumped in the car to drive into the office.
‘On the way I actually called Peter Gray and arranged to have lunch. The same Peter Gray now heading up the GFH legal case against me. I got into the office and no sooner had I arrived than I was being led away and taken to the police station.’
He is in a facility designed to accommodate 32 prisoners but he has known there to be almost double that amount. He rises at
“He has soups or mash and has lost over seven stone”
5am5 every day, reads, works throughth the legal paperwork he hash in preparation for the limitedli access he has to his lawyersla — at times just a few minutes in a corridor — and writes notes for what he hopes will be a fascinating book when he finally gets out.
‘I started by scribbling things down on the torn-out pages of a copy of The Lord of the Rings,’ he says. ‘But they allow me to have pens and paper now. In fa fairness to the guards, they’ve b been very good to me.’
The guards will let Haigh and his fellow prisoners watch the occasional football match, albeit w with the commentary in Arabic. ‘W ‘We’ve even had the occasional L Leeds match,’ he says. And, for pure escapism, they are also in the process of enjoying every Bond movie in the order in which they were released. He says they are up to The Living Daylights.
But the case dominates his thoughts, with Haigh now enlisting the help of a leading humanrights lawyer, who argues that his client is essentially a victim of human trafficking because of the way he was allegedly lured, under false pretences, to Dubai.
Only this month Alun Jones QC presented Haigh’s case to a judge sitting at Hammersmith Magistrates Court, with a private prosecution brought against AlRayes and Jinesh Patel, another GFH director who still sits on the board at Elland Road, as well as the aforementioned Gray. The request presentedsented to the judge on Haigh’s behalf sought to ha havee s summonseso ses issued for the arrest of the three.
The case was adjourned until a date in May or June this year. In the meantime it is understood that Haigh’s legal team will seek to refer the matter to the police so that they may pursue the prosecution.
Haigh takes encouragement from a High Court case that has uncanny echoes with his own situation and also concerns Gray, who is a partner with leading law firm Gibson Dunn and Crutcher.
Gibson Dunn have suspended Gray after he was accused by a High Court judge of misleading the court in a case concerning Abdourahman Boreh, a Djiboutian citizen against whom Gray secured a £65m freezing order in September 2013 2013. Earlier this month it was reported that Gray was denied permission to appeal against the ruling that he deliberately misled the High Court, with Mr Justice Flaux taking just 15 minutes to reach his decision. Gibson Dunn has so far been ordered to pay around £1m to Boreh for the firm’s role in obtaining the freezing order against him, with further costs awards expected against the firm.
Haigh insists he has the evidence to prove he has not stolen money from GFH. ‘I have three agreements, signed, as well as text messages and emails,’ he says. ‘And if I was trying to pinch that kind of money, do you honestly think I’d pay it into the same account I used for the rest of my salary? And, if I had stolen that sort of money, why would I voluntarily have flown to Dubai? The whole thing is completely bonkers.’
If Haigh is innocent, what could GFH’s motive possibly be? Haigh has told his lawyers he believes he is being made the scapegoat for what he says are failed business ventures.
But why is there this apparent desire to stop him even defending himself? It was in June last year that Gibson Dunn obtained a worldwide freezing order on Haigh’s bank accounts in the Dubai courts, thus denying him access to the funds he requires to pay his legal team. Last month a judge in the Dubai International Financial Centre Court rejected an application made by Haigh to vary the freezing order. And in the judgment it was revealed that Haigh’s lawyers at Stephenson Harwood are already owed more than £1m in fees.
Now Haigh has responded with another application to lift the freezing order, with the very real possibility that his lawyers will soon be unable to continue representing him if he proves unsuccessful.
‘I’m told the longest they can hold someone is 21 months but I’ve also been warned I could be here indefinitely,’ says Haigh. ‘Even though I’ve not been interviewed by anyone or charged.
‘At one stage they did question the expense involved in providing me with my special diet. I was branded a liar with regard to my vegetarianism because I’d had chicken noodles given to me. They’re called chicken noodles but there is no chicken in n them. So much so they are actually approved by the vegetarian society. The cost of my food actually amounts to an extra 50 pence per day but, even so, they tried to stop it.’
Haigh says he will emerge ‘ a st stronger, better person’ for the w whole experience but he credits Prisoners Abroad with saving his life, and when he spoke to them a couple of months ago he clearly felt more vulnerable.
‘I remember a huge metal door being slammed shut when I was first taken to the prison,’ he told them. ‘The noise terrified me. I was completely isolated and alone. I was in a foreign prison, thousands of miles from home. I had no money, no-one to talk to, and I began to lose hope.
‘For the first three weeks I was also unable to eat, virtually starved and in terrible pain (because of his stomach problem). I was a frightened, bewildered and distressed mess. I was beyond desperate. I was suicidal.’
If he is successful in having that freezing order lifted, the courts can then decide if Haigh is guilty. And people, in Leeds and beyond, can judge for themselves. All Haigh wants at this moment, after almost a year in jail, is the basic human right of a fair hearing.
‘And I’d love to go back to Leeds to see a game,’ he says. ‘Massimo has told me I’ll always be welcome.’
“The first few weeks were the darkest time of my life”