Briton pardoned over ‘theft’ from sheikh gets 10 MORE years
Businessman’s release is cancelled after Dubai tries case three times
A BRITISH businessman who was due to be freed from a Dubai prison two months ago has had another ten years added to his sentence – after being tried three times for the same alleged crime. Michael Smith, 51, was first arrested on charges of stealing from a property firm owned by the emirate’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, in 2009 and was tried two years later. Last year, the authorities in Dubai told Smith that his latest possible release date was October 23, 2017. But in April this year he heard that he would serve the extra ten years, despite being ‘pardoned’ by Sheikh Mohammed in 2014.
‘By the time I get out – if I get out, that is – I will have spent 18 years behind bars for supposedly embezzling £550,000,’ Smith said last week in a phone call from his cell after his seventh Christmas in prison.
‘That’s longer than most murderers. I had been counting the days to my freedom. To have that snatched away and face a term longer than the time I’ve already served has brought me close to despair.’
The MoS has revealed how, even before the latest twist, the Briton’s case suggests that normal legal rules do not apply to expatriates in Dubai.
It began in 2007, when Smith, from West London, took a job with Limitless – part of Sheikh Mohammed’s property empire, Dubai World – on a tax-free salary of £150,000. In 2008, shortly before the firm went bust in the global financial crash with debts of £40billion, he resigned. He left Dubai for Thailand with his wife, Ning, planning to open a restaurant.
The following year he was arrested by Thai police, acting on a Dubai warrant, and accused of stealing £100million from the Sheikh – a charge he has always denied. Eventually, this was reduced to £550,000.
Legal papers seen by the MoS show that Smith – who was detained in the notorious ‘Bangkok Hilton’ jail – only agreed to drop his fight against extradition after Dubai prosecutors told him he faced a maximum three-year term – and that his 748 days in the Thai prison would count towards it. Continuing to resist extradition would have meant at least two more years in the ‘Hilton’ while the Thai courts considered the case. But soon after reaching Dubai’s Central Prison, a sunbaked fortress in the desert, he was sentenced not to three but 12 years, reduced to six on appeal, and found that his time in jail in Bangkok was not being counted. In June 2014, the Sheikh pardoned him as part of an amnesty marking the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Smith watched other pardoned inmates leave, but he was not released. Eventually he discovered that he had been tried a second time, without his knowledge, by a civil court in 2012. This had ruled he would stay in jail unless he paid back the £550,000 he had been convicted of stealing. However, by this time he was penniless. Even so, he should have been freed in October. But then came the third trial in April – on civil charges identical to those ruled on in 2012. Smith said: ‘I protested. I said the court had already dealt with this, that I had been sentenced and done my time. Surely, the same case cannot be tried three times. Yet nobody will take any notice.’ The Foreign Office sends officials to visit Smith in prison regularly, but has repeatedly stated that it ‘cannot intervene’ in Dubai’s legal system. A spokesman said: ‘Staff are providing assistance to a British man who is detained in the United Arab Emirates, and are in contact with the UAE authorities.’