Labour ‘keener to do business with Dubai than free Briton’

The family of a man who has been imprisoned in Dubai for 16 years have claimed that the Labour government has ignored his case over concerns about disrupting the economic relationship between the UAE government and the UK.
Ryan Cornelius, a property developer, was jailed over a $501 million bank loan from the Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) that he and another British businessman were using to fund investment programmes in the Gulf.
As the financial crisis began to emerge in 2008, DIB reconsidered the loan, claiming that it was not being used for the purposes intended and that fake receipts were being provided to cover the expenditure.
A settlement was reached under which new repayment terms were set and property owned by Cornelius, valued at $1 billion, was put up as collateral.
However, despite the settlement, he was nonetheless arrested and imprisoned for ten years. At the end of his sentence in 2018, he was sentenced to another 20-year term under a law that was enacted a year after Cornelius was originally imprisoned.
A United Nations working group on arbitrary detention ruled in 2022 that Cornelius’s trial was unfair and his imprisonment “arbitrary”, contravening eight separate articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the UAE is a signatory.
The case has also been picked up by the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, founded by Bill Browder, after his own lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested, imprisoned without trial and later murdered in Russia after he uncovered a massive fraud perpetrated by Russian government officials.
Cornelius, who turned 70 this year, contracted tuberculosis in prison, for which he was not treated for 18 months. He is not scheduled to be released until he is 84 and has been in arbitrary detention, as ruled by the UN, for more than a decade longer than any other British citizen in history.
After years of inaction, the former foreign secretary Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton undertook to give the case his personal attention, according to his wife, Heather. He is the only foreign secretary to meet Ryan’s family and also intervened directly with UAE leadership to petition for Cornelius’s freedom.
However, after the general election, the family say that the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, has not engaged with their case. Lammy visited the UAE in September to underline the importance of the UK-UAE bilateral relationship, though he did not raise Ryan’s case with the government.
This has prompted concerns from the family that the new government, keen to promote ties with the UAE, has avoided bringing up Cornelius’s case.
“His Majesty’s government would let the UAE government do as they pleased with his subjects, provided UAE money kept rolling into the UK,” his wife said.
Jonathan Reynolds, the trade secretary, announced soon into the new government’s tenure his intention to deliver trade talks, starting with the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the government has already proven keen to promote investment from the UAE into the UK, even if it means limiting criticism of the country.
As Cornelius remains in prison, concerns about his health among his family have only grown. “There isn’t a good diet, not a lot of sunshine,” Mrs Cornelius said. “Every day he phones me and if he doesn’t phone by about midday or something I’m pretty much in a panic, thinking he had a heart attack or something. It is a huge fear … it is massively worrying.”
A spokesman for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “We are supporting Ryan Cornelius and are in contact with his family and the UAE authorities. The minister for the Middle East met with Mr Cornelius’s family to discuss their concerns on October 23.”
A spokesperson for the UAE government said that all due processes were followed during the trial and that his sentence was lawfully extended in line with UAE law. They added that all inmates receive medical care as required.
“The UAE judicial system is independent and equitable, and guarantees the mandatory presence of a translator at all stages, the right to seek a lawyer at all stages, the provision of a lawyer at the state’s expense if the defendant cannot appoint legal counsel, and the right to appeal,” they said.