zlacker

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+(OP)
To me at least, the issue is less about his guilt, and more about the lack of due process. In this case he was guilty, but in many others the lack of due process provides a way of punishing someone without any oversight or fair treatment and trial.

>>dahdum+(OP)
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.

>>dahdum+(OP)
I think when sums go over what local worker can earn in their lifetime. The life in prison is fully justified. That sounds to me as reasonable standard.

>>penult+Ci
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.