When Heather Cornelius first learned that her husband Ryan had been arrested in Dubai, initially charged with money-laundering after the state bank claimed he had misused a multimillion-dollar loan, she was, she says, ‘a complete wreck, crying all the time’. Still, she believed it was a clear mistake that would be sorted soon. As Ryan remained in a high-security desert prison without trial for three years, she tried to focus on raising their three children – the youngest just six – despite being heartbroken about the milestones he was missing.
‘I worried about all those times he would never have,’ Heather says. ‘Watching them grow, seeing their rugby games, all that learning and life. I promised the children every year that, this Christmas, we’d have Dad home – and I always believed it.’
Dubai Marina
Heather never imagined that, more than 16 years later, Ryan would still be in prison, the money-laundering charges long dropped, but now serving 20 more years for debt – a criminal matter in Dubai – with a possible release date of 2038. The thoughts that torture her aren’t of the children – who are adults now, aged from 22 to 34. All are away, living their lives. ‘Ryan is 70. By 2038, he’ll be 84,’ says Heather. ‘Now the biggest fear that keeps me awake at night is that he’s going to die in prison.’
Ryan Cornelius was arrested at the height of the 2008 financial crash. In 2022, a United Nations working group ruled that his 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, the financier and critic of state-led human rights abuses. Browder called Cornelius’s fate ‘a trumped-up case … a shakedown to seize his business’.Then, last month, Tim Roca, Labour MP for Macclesfield, tabled a debate on Ryan’s detention in the House of Commons.
In the early days of Ryan’s incarceration, Heather didn’t think it was necessary to look for publicity. ‘We have always believed there would be some help and that this would come right,’ she says. The couple also felt their children needed as stable a childhood as possible. ‘Protecting them was our focus,’ she says. ‘Turning their lives, our family, into a public campaign would have been even harder for them. If we’d done that, they might not be the strong, well-balanced adults they’ve become.’
Ryan, Heather and their children in Kenya, 2006
Intensely private, Heather, 65, has coped partly by not speaking of the horrors. ‘I never talk about it to anybody as it’s too painful,’ she says, softly, often pausing to fight back tears. When we meet, it’s at the house of her sister, in Southwest England, among fields, hedgerows and big skies. Heather lives here, supported by her sibling – the Cornelius family home, money and other assets have been seized by the Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB).
‘We have no physical possessions, but I know how lucky I am to be here,’ she says. ‘Every day I thank god for the light, the freedom, for being able to walk outside, when Ryan has none of that. In his prison, when the rains come, there are some birds outside, and he has watched them have chicks that have grown. That’s the biggest joy he gets. It’s difficult not to imagine him there and it breaks my heart every single time.’
Heather met Ryan when she was 17.
They were both born to British parents in Zambia (which at the time was Northern Rhodesia, a British colony) and met at the rugby club, where Ryan was a keen player. ‘He was fun and strong, I’d never met anyone like him,’ says Heather. They married and moved to Saudi Arabia, where Ryan built and sold a hugely successful engineering company. At the time of his arrest, he was immersed in new projects in several countries, among them a luxury development in Dubai called The Plantation.
Back then, the emirate was booming. Money was cheap and banks were awash with liquidity. The Cornelius family was based in Bahrain. ‘We had a lovely house, gardens, a pool and a boat,’ says Heather. ‘Every Friday we’d go to an island, fish, barbecue and swim. Ryan was driven – he worked very hard and travelled a fair amount but when he was home he was the fun dad, the brilliant dad.’ Her voice cracks, then she adds, ‘He still is.’
Heather, second from left, with her sons and daughter in Cornwall, 2019
Two events were key in Ryan’s subsequent arrest. The first was the death, in 2006, of Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler. He was succeeded by his brother, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who made new appointments. He handed the position of chairman of DIB to his most trusted lieutenant Mohammed Al Shaibani (the person thought to have overseen the kidnappings of the ruler’s daughters Latifa and Shamsa when they sought to break free from Dubai in 2018 and 2020 respectively).
The second was the 2007/8 global financial crisis, which devastated Dubai, a desert state built on debt. The DIB, which was providing $500 million of credit to Ryan’s Plantation project, quickly called in the loan. Even then, there seemed no reason to panic. Ryan negotiated a repayment schedule and the Plantation project pressed ahead, valued by two independent bodies at more than $1 billion.
Then, on 21 May 2008, Ryan landed in Dubai on a flight from Pakistan, intending only to change planes to get home to Bahrain. He was arrested, handcuffed, covered with a hood and driven to police headquarters for interrogation.
At home, Heather heard nothing for two days. ‘I was checking if something had happened to the flight, trying to work out what was going on,’ she says. Then one of the lawyers who had drawn up the repayment agreement called to say that no one knew where Ryan was, but that they believed he’d been arrested. Shortly afterwards, Ryan was allowed to call Heather for half a minute. ‘I cried, I kept asking if he was all right and he said, “yes”, then he was gone.’
A few weeks later she was allowed to visit him in the police headquarters. ‘He was in handcuffs and his skin was extremely grey,’ she says. ‘He had a beard, longer hair. He had lost so much weight. He looked so different. He was still extremely strong – he has never, ever complained. Horrendous as it was, we both thought it was going to be sorted out.’
Instead the nightmare deepened, with hearings taking place in Arabic and no legal representation. All Ryan’s assets were seized. (The Plantation, which DIB valued as ‘worthless’ when it was expropriated, was quickly turned into a multibillion-dollar development now owned by Dubai’s ruler.) Finally, Ryan was convicted – not of money laundering but of fraud. He admits he had submitted forged invoices to secure funding – although he insists he was following the instructions of his creditors with the full knowledge of the DIB. While serving that sentence, he was given a further 20 years in jail under a new law, applied retrospectively, in 2018, which lets a creditor keep a debtor in prison for failing to repay the money owed.
For Heather, there have been so many ‘worst moments’. In the first year of Ryan’s imprisonment his mother died suddenly.
‘She was an incredible matriarch, a mum of four boys, really strong, a lot like Ryan. I had to tell him on the phone – he did cry, even though he never cries, and I remember thinking, “There couldn’t be a worse moment,’’’ she says. ‘Less than a year later I was telling him that his dad had died.’
Explaining to her youngest son that Ryan was in jail was another. ‘I just couldn’t tell him for a whole year,’ she says. ‘I told him that his dad was away working on a very important project, but my son was missing him so much he’d come into my bed at night. We’d travel to the UK. We had a picnic in St James’s Park and together with the two older children I told him the truth: that his dad was in jail but was fine, we were going to get him out and we had to stay strong.’
Visiting Ryan in prison has revealed a very different Dubai to the city of gleaming towers and turquoise seas loved by influencers. ‘It’s a big, concrete, steel-doored building in the middle of the desert,’ she says. ‘There are very few windows. The air-conditioning keeps it really cold all the time. Ryan shares his cell with six others, under 24-hour strip-lighting. He has no phone, no laptop, no books.’ At night, prisoners have no access to a guard, no way to contact anyone in the event of an emergency. Ryan has contracted TB there and developed high blood pressure. When a prisoner in the cell next door died of Covid, his body lay there for eight hours before being removed in a plastic bag.
Heather and her children have not visited since they left Bahrain in 2016. They can’t afford the trip and, since Covid, the prison rarely allows visitors inside anyway. ‘The phone is our lifeline,’ she says. ‘He has to queue to use it for five minutes, but he’d do it all day if he had to. When our youngest was growing up, he’d call when we were on our way to school every morning and chat to him. If one of them had a rugby game or an event, he’d call to be there while it happened. He knows all our moves. Everything we do, he’s there with us.’
While the UN concluded in 2022 that Ryan Cornelius’s trial was unfair and his imprisonment arbitrary, until Labour MP Tim Roca raised the issue in Parliament last month the British government had not supported the family. The last foreign secretary, Lord Cameron, was the first to get behind them and start to petition for his release. ‘I’ve never had so much hope,’ says Heather, ‘but a week after our meeting, the election was called.’ Cameron’s replacement, David Lammy, visiting the UAE in September to promote investment and trade, failed to raise Ryan’s case.
Every new day feels harder, says Heather. ‘At the start, I was a wreck; but then I made a decision that I wasn’t going to be a miserable mum. I would cope and make the days happy. I guess it’s just a pretence but sharing the children’s lives was my biggest joy. Even now, when we get together, I change character a bit. I allow myself to be happy.’ (Although Heather is fiercely protective of their privacy, she says all three are doing fine: ‘They’ve grown up positive and strong and we’re both so proud of them’.)
Alone, though, she struggles. ‘I’m not as good at coping as I was,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to be with other people. The anger has surged up and I don’t seem able to surface above it any more.’ Still, the family continues with legal challenges and Heather is now campaigning publicly, too. ‘You have to keep doing something,’ she says. ‘Without that you would not survive.’
THE UNFOLDING OF A NIGHTMARE
2003
Ryan Cornelius starts working on luxury development The Plantation, set on 480 acres of prime Dubai real estate, partly funded by Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB).
2006
Dubai’s ruler Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum dies and is succeeded by his brother Mohammed Bin Rashid.
2007
Amid the global credit crunch, DIB recalls a loan of $500 million. A restructuring agreement is agreed, with a three-year repayment schedule secured against Ryan’s business and personal assets. The Plantation project is valued in excess of $1 billion.
2008
Ryan is arrested and held in solitary confinement for more than six weeks. He is given 15 days to repay the $500 million to DIB before the bank begins seizing his assets, including his home and The Plantation.
2010
Ryan goes on trial for fraud and money-laundering. The case is thrown out by the judge. Ryan remains in jail.
2012
Convicted of colluding to defraud a public body, Ryan is sentenced to ten years. He is told he still owes the DIB $500 million. An additional $500 million fine is imposed.
2018
Ryan’s sentence is extended until 2038 ‘because of the debt still owed’.
2024
Ryan’s plight is picked up by Bill Browder, critic of state-led human rights abuses. MP Tim Roca tables a debate in the House of Commons on Ryan’s detention.