As the Middle East is drawn into war, expats and influencers are under pressure to only share the positive side of the UAE. In reality many are at risk of being put behind bars, and often find the UK government has little interest in helping them get out
A four-metre barbed-wire fence runs through the desert at the UAE‑Omani border. In the early hours of 17 February 2021, Albert Douglas, 58, a British businessman, was creeping along it, looking for a way through. Douglas, who cuts a slight figure, wears spectacles and has a broad, earnest smile, never expected things to come to this. He’d been forced to abandon his home on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, the tree-shaped archipelago lined with upmarket residences, and go into hiding. Usually he’d be driving around in a Rolls-Royce, now he was in a pickup truck, being chauffeured by people smugglers. They’d transported him to the edge of the Al Ain border, which neighbours Oman, in the dead of the night. It was incredible, really, how fast the life he once led could evaporate. All that mattered now was getting to the other side of that fence.
A few weeks earlier, Douglas had been sitting at home, watching his supreme court appeal via video link. He was being hounded by the Dubai authorities over debts incurred by his son Wolfgang Douglas’s company and, while Wolfgang was in the UK, Albert had been arrested. Albert was facing a £2.5m fine and a three-year prison sentence – this was his final chance for a reprieve. He had always believed the truth would prevail, but as he watched the hearing play out, his faith in the system deserted him. He decided to lie low in a friend’s apartment while he weighed his options. It soon became clear that he didn’t have any. “That’s when I decided to leave,” he says. “I left it not to the last minute, but the last second.”
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