zlacker

>>Geeket+(OP)
One of many reasons that I will never enter the UAE. There is no rule of law, and so no protection if anyone decides to charge you for anything. I've read of women being raped and then being charged for reporting it which essentially admits sex outside of marriage, or of foreigners who get driven into by a local and then charged as if they were the ones being reckless.

That's not even going into their de facto slavery with foreign construction workers, environmental damage, and sexism.

>>JohnGB+vf
For those who did not bother to read the article, it is about fraud during the financial crisis. I feel sad for Cornelius and wish he is set free. As a resident of Dubai for 30 years, I am always curious to learn things that I may have missed about 'my city', yet this article is misleading in many ways, its few first paragraph where it states that Ryan Cornelius 'thought the authorities had simply made a mistake;' Really? He has taken a loan to complete a project in Dubai yet he took the money for a project in Pakistan. Later the writer says'Cornelius’s business forged invoices for items such as furniture and building materials to match the investment capital being funnelled to the Plantation. A later civil case, brought by dib in Britain, concluded that Cornelius was “fully implicated” in the creation of fabricated invoices to perpetrate a fraud'. The Economist used to be a decent publication with great journalism, unfortunately that is not the case anymore.

>>Teraco+hT
Yeah, they really buried the admission of fraud pretty deep in the article. They forged invoices and spent 342m on unauthorized riskier projects. Sounds like the sentence may be excessive, but not the conviction.

>>dahdum+IY
Because it isn't really relevant if he was guilty or not. Being arrested for a crime, forced to sign a document in a language you don't understand, no access to legal or diplomatic representation, repeatedly denied any hearing or appeal, and charged with a crime retroactively is what is being questioned.

This article is not about someone's innocence, it's about the system and processes, some of which are considered illegal by the UAE's own constitution.

>>penult+kh1
But the article is written in a deceptive way and appears to rely totally on the testimony of a man they admit was a large scale fraudster, implying that many of the things it claims may be false.

The hook in the article is the following claim: "foreigners doing business in Dubai are often unaware that local politicians and businessmen – elite figures are often both – may use the courts to pursue vendettas, settle scores or raid assets they covet. Even the smallest debt can lead to years in jail. Cornelius is just one of thousands of expats who are either imprisoned in Dubai after falling foul of the emirate’s draconian legal system."

So they are presenting Cornelius as an innocent, almost random person with a small debt, who is merely an example of what could happen to anyone doing business in Dubai. That's a lot of people and thus a topic of general interest.

Later on we learn that in fact Cornelius was even by his own admission a massive fraudster, operating in the hundreds of millions range. Yes, Dubai's court system sounds like a joke. Not a good look for them. But this guy is hardly a source of generalizable lessons that might interest other people especially as it becomes clear later in the article that he appears to have been specifically targeted by the Sheikh himself.

I'm actually quite appalled at how far the Economist has fallen. I haven't read it for years and didn't expect such a manipulatively written article from them.