‘I was beaten and tortured’: how a British father and son made a fortune in Dubai then became wanted men

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.”
The escape plan was activated. Soon, Albert was making his way to the border, switching cars along the way. They pitched up in a nearby village to await nightfall. As he approached the fence, trying to locate a hole that had been cut in advance, all seemed to be going smoothly. Then the calm of the desert was broken by shouts and gunshots. Red dots peppered Albert’s body – laser sights from the weapons of UAE soldiers closing in on him. Wolfgang, who was following the situation from his home in Kensington, London, was dialled into the phone of one of the people smugglers on the other side of the fence. Now gunshots crackled down the line. Before he could find out what was happening, the phone went dead. Out in the desert, soldiers surrounded Albert. He begged them not to shoot. A hood was pulled over his head.
Albert doesn’t know where he was taken (his family believes it was a military base), but he found himself in a dark, dirty cell. He says he was stripped, slapped, deprived of sleep and interrogated over several days. He was asked repeatedly for details about the smugglers. “I wasn’t withholding information,” he says. “I didn’t have the answer. So I was beaten and I was tortured.” Albert was then taken to Al Ain central prison in Abu Dhabi. While he was being held there, three guards entered his cell. By the time they left, he was unconscious. His head had been “kicked around like a football”; his shoulder badly broken. Albert, who still wakes up screaming about the experience, recalls a state of total shock. “You just assume it’s going to stop,” he says. “It doesn’t stop, but you just think it’s gonna stop, and, basically, thereon after, you think you’re gonna die.”
In London, Wolfgang was spiralling. With no means of getting hold of Albert directly, he activated his contacts in the UAE to look for him. His first thought was that the gunshots came from the smugglers, not soldiers. He had heard about people getting killed and dumped in ditches along the border, and organised a search along the line to look for a body. They called the hospitals, even the police, but nothing. Days passed, a week. While Wolfgang frantically searched, Albert was being held in solitary confinement. About 10 days had passed when Wolfgang received a phone call from an unknown UAE number. “Son,” Albert’s voice came through the earpiece, the sound of shouts and screams echoing in the background, “I am not OK.”
Dubai has always been a place you escape to, or escape from. The competing visions of the city – the one beamed out on social media, and its complex reality – have never been more pronounced than in recent weeks, its pristine veneer pierced by Iranian missiles, causing expats, tourists and the much‑maligned “influencer class” to scramble for flights out of the country. The conflict has shaken the notion that the UAE is an island of stability in the Middle East, tarnishing its appeal to foreigners. It has also exposed the extent to which its public image is tightly controlled by its rulers. Influencers – who, since 2025 have required a government licence – as well as the general population, were warned that they faced fines or imprisonment for sharing footage from “unknown sources”. Twenty-one people – including a 60-year-old British tourist – have reportedly been charged in relation to sharing content related to the attacks.
Before the US-Israel war on Iran, an estimated 250,000 British expatriates lived in the UAE, a number that had grown substantially in recent years. Most reside in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, the latter being the most aggressively marketed of the seven emirates. The UAE is, to many, a welcome off-ramp from the high taxes, crumbling public services and miserable weather back home. Never mind the criminalisation of homosexuality; the absence of political parties; that married victims of sexual assault can be prosecuted for extramarital sex; or that the city’s network of AI-powered facial recognition cameras and biometric identification makes it one of the most highly surveilled locations in the world.
Successive UK governments have championed closer economic relations with the UAE, Britain’s largest trading partner in the Middle East. In 2021, the UK launched a joint partnership aimed at deepening ties across various sectors; this £23bn trade relationship is one reason why there are now more than 5,000 British businesses operating in the country – a number that is predicted to double by 2030. Lately, Dubai’s economic vitality has become a stick to beat the UK with, in particular by those on the political right. Nick Candy, the property developer and treasurer for Reform UK (who recently launched a $2bn luxury property venture in the UAE), told the National that Dubai had “all the ingredients you need to make the perfect cake … you’ve got low crime, low taxation, great quality of life”. After the Iranian missiles rained down in March, he said he still felt “safer in Dubai than in Sadiq Khan’s London”.
The reality is that those arriving in the UAE to do business are uniquely vulnerable. Debt is frequently treated as a criminal matter, and a bounced cheque – even a dispute over a taxi fare – can land you in prison. Power is concentrated within the minority Emirati population, and the legal system can be weaponised against foreigners who fall out of favour. In 2023, the Labour peer Helena Kennedy KC oversaw a fact-finding report on “the real cost of doing business in the UAE”. It noted “concerns regarding the criminal justice system … in particular the impact … on non-Emirati nationals”, and a “substantial disconnect” between the public image of Dubai and the evidence presented.
One of the most egregious cases is that of the British property developer Ryan Cornelius and his business partner Charles Ridley, who were jailed in 2008 after a fraud conviction related to a loan from Dubai Islamic Bank. They received a 10-year sentence, while the bank has seized assets worth $1.6bn – three times the value of the original loan – including Cornelius’s family home in London. In 2018, their sentence was extended by a further 20 years. They have remained there ever since.
These dangers are not mentioned in the UK government’s latest guidance on overseas business risk in the UAE. Previous guidance (which was withdrawn in 2020) only went so far as to admit that the country can be “a demanding and sometimes frustrating market in which to do business”. Pitched against Albert’s testimony, this is quite the understatement. His story raises uncomfortable questions about the nature of the UK/UAE relationship; the reluctance of the Foreign Office to intervene when citizens are detained there; and whether the British citizens who flock to Dubai, for work or leisure are being adequately warned about the risks of doing so.
When Albert first landed in Dubai in the late 90s, the place was everything a businessman could want: a new frontier, bursting with potential. Albert, from Enfield, north London, comes from a Romany‑Gypsy business family and had built up his wooden flooring company, CCS, over many years. He is a soft-spoken, old fashioned sort of man – the sort, Wolfgang says, who would always wear a three-piece suit, even on the beach – and has a strong work ethic. In 2002, Dubai sparked a boom in immigration when it passed a law allowing foreigners to buy property in certain areas, and a couple of years later Albert and his wife, Naomi, decided to move there full-time. Wolfgang, the eldest of four siblings, who had entered the family business as soon as he left school, continued to run operations in the UK.
At the time, Dubai was experiencing explosive growth. Mega-projects such as the Palm Jumeirah and the Burj Khalifa – today the tallest building in the world – were well under way and the population was booming. Albert soon realised that the market in the Gulf was even bigger than he had imagined, so in 2008 he suggested that Wolfgang join him and start another flooring company. It was to be a “friendly competitor” that would allow the family a bigger footprint in the region. Wolfgang closed the UK firm and flew out to start his own, named TimberWolf Flooring. By then, construction had been completed on the Palm Jumeirah and soon most of the family was living there. Albert lived on O Frond. Wolfgang on F.
At first, it was all very on-brand. The family were embraced by the Dubai elite and invited to galas and dinners. The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, gifted them a pet tiger cub, Snowy (Wolfgang took care of it until it grew too big to handle, when it was returned to the sheikh’s private zoo). Every day, Wolfgang says, felt “like winning the lottery”, and as part of the “original expats” community, cruising around in Aston Martins and Ferraris while sparkling new skyscrapers rocketed up around them, they embodied the image that Dubai wanted to project. The state was developing in real time. It reminded Albert of the “wild west”, he says. “Jumeirah Janes” was the nickname given to the wives of western expats living there at the time.
Albert says he was never really there for the lifestyle. He was a “workaholic”, and spent any spare time with his family. But extroverts such as Wolfgang were happy to lean into the city’s flashy culture. Wolfgang enjoyed being part of Dubai’s social scene and soon became a point of contact for other British entrepreneurs and expats who wanted to move there. He describes being part of a community of “hand-picked B-list business development celebrities” who would be rolled out at parties, or encouraged to drop in when a new celebrity bought a house in the city. “I was the example of ‘This is what success looks like’,” says Wolfgang. “The proof in the pudding.”
And it was good, until it wasn’t. Wolfgang was involved in supplying wooden flooring, as well as bespoke wood designs and facades, for big government‑related projects, including the Burj Khalifa, La Mer beach and City Walk. Over time, he says, it became increasingly difficult to recoup payments for the work he was doing. “We’re talking tens of millions,” he says. With no money coming in, Wolfgang was unable to pay his creditors and once you start to default, “the laws are heavily tilted against you”. Pursuing this money would have meant taking on the government, says Wolfgang, and he knew enough about how Dubai operated to realise that a situation like this could quickly spin out of control.
Being in debt is a vulnerable position to be in in Dubai, where financial offences are met with severe penalties. In the UAE, a creditor can use the civil courts to have a debtor jailed or subjected to an indefinite travel ban. Though in recent years the country has introduced new insolvency laws and largely ended the criminalisation of bounced cheques, such cases can still be pursued in civil cases and result in imprisonment. Being jailed does not absolve a debtor – you will not be released until it has been paid or, under the recent reforms, the debt formally restructured. The system is often summarised as, “No pay, no go.”
If someone doing business falls out of favour with those in power, the criminal justice system can be exploited. This could be to force someone out of a partnership, extract bribes or, in the case of Cornelius and Ridley, who were targeted by Mohammed Ibrahim al Shaibani, chairman of DIB, and Sheikh Mohammed’s right-hand man, used as part of a corporate raid in which money and assets are seized. “It’s always the same story,” Radha Stirling, founder of Detained in Dubai, a human rights and advocacy organisation, tells me. “A foreigner comes, sets up, is embraced, starts trading, then an Emirati official or bank manager will target them.”
In 2019, Wolfgang returned to the UK for treatment after a health emergency. While there, he sought legal advice from a UAE law firm. He was told that people in the country wanted him in prison and that he should not return. As Wolfgang was recovering, Albert travelled to London. They met at the Exhibitionist hotel in Kensington to take stock. Albert told Wolfgang that the police in Dubai had been seizing Wolfgang’s goods without paperwork. “They’re out of control,” he told his son.
Albert was indignant. In his view, neither man had done anything wrong and he was unwilling to relinquish the business he had built up. He had secured a legal letter that confirmed he was not connected to Wolfgang’s business and believed he could continue to operate his own company safely. Crucially, he believed in the system. “I just thought it was going to sort itself out,” he told me. Wolfgang urged his father to stay in the UK. “If you go back,” he said, “they will target you.” Albert brushed it off. In August 2019, he flew back to Dubai, ready to resume business. When he landed at Dubai international airport, he was arrested.
For a foreigner, Dubai’s legal system can be as dizzying as its skyline. After his arrest, Albert was bailed and given a travel ban. There followed a hearing in Arabic in which no evidence was presented by either side but Albert was found guilty. Only later did he begin to learn of the case against him. The prosecution rested on the fact that Albert’s name appeared as a signatory on a trade licence used when he was helping Wolfgang set up in the UAE. However, the document they pulled up, which needs to be renewed annually, was outdated. Albert’s