Dubai - 3 Britons accused of $500m fraud !

I was expecting to see Mr. Paul’s name in this list, but thankfully not so !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ryan Cornelius divided his time between his property and energy businesses in Bahrain and his beach hotel in Kenya. It was there he kept his yacht and pursued his passion for big game fishing.
Charles Ridley dealt out sums in the billions as local representative of a boutique bank owned by a Turkish multi-millionaire. He too kept a million-dollar yacht berthed near his home in Bahrain.
Mr Fitzwilliam was more low-key but his venture was perhaps the most breathtaking of all: a villa and hotel development in the Dubai desert called The Plantation.
It was to have an equine theme - built around not one but five international quality polo pitches, with stables for 800 horses. It was valued at $1 billion.
Now their ambitions lie, like those of many other Gulf investors, in tatters. They have swapped their outdoor lives for the central al-Awhir jail in Dubai, whose government has accused them of building their dreams on the emirate's biggest ever fraud.
Though their living conditions are said to be decent, they look a forlorn trio as they make their regular three-weekly appearance before judges at the Dubai Court of Misdemeanours, standing in white cotton prison tunics as they follow a case against them conducted entirely in Arabic.
In the cases of Mr Cornelius and Mr Ridley, their families are left to rue their newly straitened circumstances back in Bahrain.
"It's pretty tough to hold one's head high," said Mrs Ridley, who nevertheless remains defiantly optimistic. "I'm sure it will all work out all right in the end."
The three Britons are by no means the only people to have fallen on hard times as the credit crunch swept into the Gulf last year. From former ministers under arrest for corruption to British families who ploughed their savings into holiday apartments, many participants in one of the world's most extravagant financial bubbles are ruing the day they stepped into the market.
Dubai has been worst hit. Unlike neighbours such as Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar, it is not sitting on a sea of oil or natural gas. For the last five decades it has been reliant - usually successfully - on its own brand of entrepreneurship for economic success.
Mr Cornelius and Mr Ridley are charged with conspiring to defraud the state-run Dubai Islamic Bank of $501 million, and of presenting forged receipts to back up the fraud. Mr Fitzwilliam is accused of assisting them.
Also charged are two Pakistani bank employees, accused of receiving bribes to agree payment.
Two other men, a Turkish businessman and an American, are wanted by the authorities but have remained out of the country. Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) is owned by the Dubai government, and there is no dispute that it provided the money to CCH, the boutique bank.
But the prosecution alleges that the money was given for short-term business financing, not to pay for the long-term investments to which Mr Cornelius put them.
He was buying a Canadian oil refinery for $1 billion in order to dismantle it and ship it to Pakistan, where there is a shortage of refining capacity. He was developing property in Bahrain, and had also been offered a 30 per cent stake in Mr Fitzwilliam's polo development, The Plantation.
Their newly constrained environment is one in which the three men may have to learn to operate for some time longer. The trial is expected to last till the autumn, with a three-year sentence likely if they are found guilty. More may be added in lieu of repayment of the money, according to one source.
Mrs Ridley says she believes that the worst will not happen.
"We have faith in the legal system in Dubai," she said. "Hopefully they will do their due diligence and sort it out."

Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/5588310/End-o...