Migrant workers struggle as Dubai's population skyrockets
What was once a two-bedroom unit now houses ten men, with Hesham, a 44-year-old Egyptian salesman, occupying a modified closet just large enough for a mattress, for which he pays $270 a month.
However, even this cramped space is now under threat. Hesham is among numerous low-paid foreign labourers caught in a widespread government crackdown on illegal subletting across Dubai. This includes rooms crammed with bunk beds offering minimal privacy for a few dollars a night, and partitioned apartments like Hesham's, where makeshift divisions of plywood, drywall, and plastic shower curtains transform flats into dormitories for up to 20 people.
After a blaze at a high-rise in June, Dubai officials launched the campaign over concerns that partitioned apartments represent a major fire risk. Some of those evicted have been left scrambling to stay off the streets, where begging is illegal. Others fear they could be next, uncertain when or where inspectors might show up.
'Now we don't know what we'll do,' said Hesham, who's staying put until his landlord evicts him. Like others living in Dubai's cheapest and most crowded spaces, he spoke to The Associated Press on condition only his first name be used for fear of coming into the crosshairs of authorities enforcing the ban on illegal housing.
'We don't have any other choice," he said.
Dubai Municipality, which oversees the city-state, declined an AP request for an interview. In a statement, it said authorities have conducted inspections across the emirate to curb fire and safety hazards — an effort it said would 'ensure the highest standards of public safety' and lead to 'enhanced quality of life' for tenants. It didn't address where those unable to afford legal housing would live in a city-state that's synonymous with luxury yet outlaws labor unions and guarantees no minimum wage.
Dubai has seen a boom since the pandemic that shows no signs of stopping. Its population of 3.9 million is projected to grow to 5.8 million by 2040 as more people move into the commercial hub from abroad.
Much of Dubai's real estate market caters to wealthy foreign professionals living there long-term. That leaves few affordable options for the majority of workers — migrants on temporary, low-wage contracts, often earning just several hundred dollars a month. Nearly a fifth of homes in Dubai were worth more than $1 million as of last year, property firm Knight Frank said. Developers are racing to build more high-end housing.
That continued growth has meant rising rents across the board. Short-term rentals are expected to cost 18% more by the end of this year compared to 2024, according to online rental company Colife. Most migrant workers the AP spoke to said they make just $300 to $550 a month.
In lower-income areas, they said, a partitioned apartment space generally rents for $220 to $270 a month, while a single bunk in an undivided room costs half as much. Both can cost less if shared, or more depending on size and location. At any rate, they are far cheaper than the average one-bedroom rental, which real estate firm Engel & Völkers said runs about $1,400 a month.
The United Arab Emirates, like other Gulf Arab nations, relies on low-paid workers from Africa and Asia to build, clean, babysit and drive taxi cabs. Only Emirati nationals, who are outnumbered nearly 9 to 1 by residents from foreign countries, are eligible for an array of government benefits, including financial assistance for housing.
Large employers, from construction firms and factories to hotels and resorts, are required by law to house workers if they are paid less than $400 a month, much of which they send home to families overseas.
However, many migrants are employed informally, making their living arrangements hard to regulate, said Steffen Hertog, an expert on Gulf labor markets at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The crackdown will push up their housing costs, creating 'a lot of stress for people whose life situation is already precarious,' he said.
Hassan, a 24-year-old security guard from Uganda, shares a bed in a partitioned apartment with a friend. So far, the government hasn't discovered it, but he has reason to be nervous, he said.
'They can tell you to leave without an option, without anywhere to go.'
Dubai has targeted overcrowded apartments in the past amid a spate of high-rise fires fueled by flammable siding material. The latest round of inspections came after a blaze in June at a 67-story tower in the Dubai Marina neighborhood, where some apartments had been partitioned.
More than 3,800 residents were forced to evacuate from the building, which had 532 occupied apartments, according to a police report. That means seven people on average lived in each of these units in the tower of one-, two- and three-bedroom flats. Dozens of homes were left uninhabitable.
There were no major injuries in that fire. However, another in 2023 in Dubai's historic Deira neighborhood killed at least 16 people and injured another nine in a unit believed to have been partitioned.
Ebony, a 28-year-old odd-job worker from Ghana, was recently forced to leave a partitioned apartment after the authorities found out about it. She lived in a narrow space with a roommate who slept above her on a jerry-built plywood loft bed.
'Sometimes to even stand up,' she said, 'your head is going to hit the plywood.'
She's in a new apartment now, a single room that holds 14 others — and sometimes more than 20 as people come and go, sharing beds. With her income of about $400 a month, she said she didn't have another option, and she's afraid of being forced out again.
'I don't know what they want us to do. Maybe they don't want the majority of people that are here in Dubai,' Ebony said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Statesman
24 minutes ago
- New Statesman
GB News is coming for the BBC and Sky
Photo by Simon Dack / Alamy Live News 'We are ending the dominance of the BBC News Channel and Sky News,' crowed GB News's head of programming, Ben Briscoe, as he heralded new viewing figures for the station last month. While there is some degree of selective reporting in Briscoe's numbers, there's no doubt GB News did beat its rivals in several key slots in July. It's both an impressive and terrifying gain for the broadcaster, which only launched four years ago but aims to be Britain's biggest UK news channel by 2028. Presumably, rioting outside migrant hotels and talk about impending civil unrest is good for business. Online, GB News had an audience of ten million in June (around half that of Sky and a quarter of the BBC). One former Sky journalist has little doubt GB News will reach its 2028 target, saying: 'When big stories break people still want the BBC and Sky, but the rest of the time there are a lot of viewers happy to sit and have their prejudices repeated back to them all day long.' Yet still it is making losses: GB News, which is bankrolled by its owner, Paul Marshall, and the Dubai-based investment firm Legatum, lost $33.4m in 2023-24. Nigel Farage alone has earned £330,000 since July 2024. 'The losses are now utterly irrelevant,' one former insider said. 'Since Reform's polling kicked off, it is felt every penny is money well spent.' An end to wokery awaits The Yorkshire Shepherdess and Cruising with Jane McDonald because Channel 5 falls under the ownership of Skydance Media, as part of an $8bn mega-deal. The British broadcaster is owned by Paramount Global, which is to be taken over by the US billionaire David Ellison (recently spotted hanging out UFC ringside with Donald Trump). The deal was signed off by the US TV regulator after Ellison pledged to end all diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and Paramount shelled out $16m to settle a legal battle with Trump over the editing of the 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview. There's a rumoured side deal of $20m of free ads for Trump. Friends of the London-based Channel 5 boss, Sarah Rose, are worried about how she will cope under the new regime. Just months ago she wrote: 'We are dedicated to creating an inclusive and equitable workplace,' and the channel has a 'no diversity, no commission' pledge on its website. Staff are concerned the channel's new owner might not just be looking for a culture change, but hoping to offload it entirely – or to ditch its £200m annual budget for original commissioning, in favour of a return to the dark old days under Richard Desmond when schedules were filled with reruns of US imports. ITV has been busy ramping up excitement for The Hack, which tells how the Guardian journalist Nick Davies uncovered phone hacking at the News of the World in 2011. There are such high hopes that the drama will be the next Mr Bates vs the Post Office that Mr Bates (aka Toby Jones) appears as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. Also starring is Trainspotting's Robert Carlyle, who leads the inquiry into the murder of the private investigator Daniel Morgan – a case that remains unsolved and which raised serious questions about corrupt relationships between Met detectives and newspaper staff. 'Put it this way,' one former News of the World journo told me: 'if you thought the Trainspotting toilet scene was about swimming in shit, that's nothing compared with what went on in the Daniel Morgan case.' Mentions on the BBC about the launch of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana's temporarily named Your Party have largely been of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it variety. And yet the party already claims to have 650,000 sign ups – which rather casts shade on Reform UK's (admittedly paying) membership, currently 231,721. Still, Reform is assured bountiful BBC coverage if Farage so much as sneezes. BBC journalists are keen to reset what has been a fractious relationship with Corbyn, but grumble that how little air time he is permitted lies in editors' hands. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Further trouble for the broadcaster awaits,as yet more licence-fee money is being spent on another investigation by external lawyers. This time, tens of thousands are being earmarked to probe allegations that two Strictly Come Dancing stars were regularly taking cocaine while on the show. The investigation into the former newsreader Huw Edwards cost around £400,000 (plus another £1m for a review of complaints procedures) and £3.3m was spent investigating claims against DJ Tim Westwood. As one BBC journo put it: 'I've decided the only way I'll ever get a pay rise here is to retrain as an HR lawyer.' Farewell, then, to MailOnline, the home of the sidebar of shame and 40-word headlines. The site is now to be known simply as Daily Mail – a nod to its print history. Although that is cold comfort for its few remaining staff who originated in print. 'The coup is now complete,' one said. 'It may now be called Daily Mail but we have been totally overtaken by the online staff. They know how to get the clicks, but they haven't got the first clue about how to find a proper story.' Snout Line: Got a story? Write to tips@ [See also: Inside the factions of the new left] Related
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Very British bribery: the whistleblower who exposed the UK's dodgy arms deals with Saudi Arabia
Three days before he fled Saudi Arabia, Ian Foxley was summoned to his boss's office on the 22nd floor of a Riyadh skyscraper and told to either resign or be sacked. He had been in the job for just six months and it was clear to him that something in the organisation was badly wrong – but he did not suspect that he would soon be in fear of his life. It was in May 2010, while reading the Sunday Times at home in a village near York, that Foxley had spotted the job advert. A company was looking for someone to oversee the expansion of a British army programme in Saudi Arabia called Sangcom. Worth £150m when first agreed in 1978, the programme had grown into a £2bn deal for the UK government to supply the Saudi Arabian national guard with everything from encrypted radios to satellite communications and fibre optics. Foxley hadn't heard of Sangcom, but it was well known among graduates of the Royal corps of Signals, the British army specialist communications division, where Foxley had been a lieutenant colonel. In theory, Sangcom was run by a few dozen UK Ministry of Defence specialists in Riyadh; in practice, the programme was almost entirely managed by GPT Special Project Management, a contractor hired by the British government. As and when the Saudis wanted to upgrade their military communications, GPT would draft suggestions for what they might like to buy from the British. In spring 2010, the Saudis decided to buy more equipment via Sangcom, and GPT was hiring someone to put together new spending proposals for them. For Foxley, it seemed like a perfect gig. He had worked a series of contracting jobs since leaving the army in 1998, ranging from project managing fibre optic networks for Tiscali to two years running Domino's Pizza franchises in York. He knew other ex-Signals officers at Sangcom, who reported positive things. A preliminary interview in Dubai went well, and GPT hired him on probation. He arrived in Riyadh in July 2010, and his wife, Emma, planned to follow once he had settled in. Western contractors in Saudi Arabia typically live in compounds: gated communities complete with their own shops, restaurants, swimming pools and tennis courts, all enclosed by 12ft-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. Foxley's compound, Arizona, had checkpoints patrolled by armed guards and a nine-hole golf course. He described it as 'a luxurious penitentiary', and enjoyed familiarising himself with its thriving culture of illicit home brewing. (There exist specialist online retailers that sell 'bakery kits' and 'cake mix' to western contractors relocating to countries where alcohol is illegal.) Adapting to his new workplace was trickier. GPT's management could be eccentric, he would later recall, and occasionally opaque. On one occasion Jeff Cook, the managing director, abruptly warned Foxley that one of his co-workers, an accountant called Michael Paterson, was 'a madman' who was 'going around saying people were trying to kill him' and that Foxley should not talk to him. Another time, a colleague casually joked about a Saudi general being willing to sign anything GPT suggested, on account of something called 'bought in services'. Foxley didn't recognise the term and when he began asking about it, he received only vague non-answers about 'things we buy in'. At the time, Foxley considered these to be oddities, artefacts of unfamiliar business practices in a foreign country, rather than signs of anything suspicious. In November, however, Cook began criticising Foxley's performance, and accusing him of missing his targets. GPT would later insist these were genuine objections to underperformance, but Foxley believes they were early indications that his questions about 'bought in services' were rattling cages. These tensions culminated, after several increasingly difficult weeks, in the showdown in December where Cook told Foxley to choose between resignation and dismissal. The following day, Foxley went to see David Hargreaves, the brigadier who ran the Ministry of Defence's Sangcom team in Riyadh. Foxley looked 'shaken' and 'shocked', Hargreaves later told a court. According to Foxley, he told Hargreaves that something was gravely wrong with Sangcom, and Hargreaves asked him to provide proof. (Hargreaves remembered it differently: he said the conversation went no further than Foxley asking his advice on how to respond to Cook's resign-or-be-fired ultimatum.) Driving home, mulling his options, Foxley suddenly recalled Michael Paterson, the supposedly lunatic accountant whom Cook had told him not to approach. What on earth had all that been about, he wondered? Once home, he rang Paterson's apartment and introduced himself. A quarter of an hour later, Paterson, who also lived in the Arizona compound, was sitting down at Foxley's dining table. 'Do you know about the Cayman Islands?' Paterson asked. Over the following 90 minutes, the accountant set out a series of discoveries that implicated GPT in years of bribery and corruption. What neither man knew was that the scheme they had stumbled upon had been overseen and authorised for decades, in both Britain and Saudi Arabia, by the highest levels of government. It would be 14 years, three criminal prosecutions and two jury trials before the full truth would emerge. Bribery and corruption has been the lifeblood of the international arms trade for decades. In France, until 1997, corporations were able to offset the cost of bribing foreign officials against their tax bills; in the UK, overseas bribery was declared illegal in 1906, though it wasn't until 2010 that the various loopholes were closed. Arms deals are valued in the millions, if not billions, of dollars, and take place in conditions of extreme secrecy for national security reasons. The products are unique, and can be bundled together with support services or complex financing arrangements, making it near impossible to discern what a fair price should be. According to Robert Barrington, professor of corruption studies at Sussex university, the international arms trade 'is probably the single highest risk sector for corruption, and it has been for years'. The most common form of bribe is the commission or kickback – a percentage of the total value of a deal, usually paid to a middleman, who takes his cut before passing the lion's share on to the politician, prince or president who has ultimate responsibility for deciding how public funds are spent. Upon receipt of the bribe, the decision-maker makes the 'correct' decision as to who wins the contract. Middlemen are essential to such transactions, because they can disguise themselves as consultants offering legitimate services that might explain the payments. In the event that the whole rotten arrangement is exposed, the company paying the bribe can try to claim, however implausibly, that it had no idea the middleman was paying off the decision-maker. Paying the bribes is the easy part; the challenge is concealing them. Any payment leaving a company needs to be explained, lest auditors or regulators get suspicious, but, for obvious reasons, the true nature of the payment can never be recorded. Commission payments are therefore normally obscured under some code or rubric, the more innocuous the better. For the Sangcom deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia, the cipher of choice was 'bought in services'. GPT added a 16% 'bought in services' fee to all of its invoices, then paid those proceeds to a company in the Cayman Islands called Simec. GPT claimed to receive 'bought in services' in exchange. In reality, Simec provided no services and simply acted as a middleman, passing the bribes on to their true recipients. Michael Paterson, the supposedly lunatic accountant, had learned much of this and his career had ground to a halt. Sitting across from Foxley at his dining room table, Paterson, a stout, plainspoken Scotsman, recounted his story. He had joined GPT in 2003 as part of the finance team, and started to hear about 'bought in services' shortly after arriving. He was surprised by the nature of the payments – the flat 16% commission, as well as the degree of secrecy that seemed to surround the arrangement. But it was not his responsibility, and he served contentedly as a financial controller for three years. In 2007, however, GPT was acquired by the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (Eads), and after a corporate reshuffle, Paterson began to feel uncomfortable about signing off the 'bought in services' payments. Sixteen per cent of a British government arms contract worth hundreds of millions of pounds was an enormous amount of money. What were these payments for? And who was receiving them, exactly? On 17 November 2007, Paterson emailed his bosses to record his objections to signing off the payments. On a phone call the following month, which Paterson secretly recorded, Jeff Cook and two other GPT directors put pressure on him to approve the 'bought in services' payments. Paterson refused, hinting loudly that the arrangement was obviously bribery. 'We all know we're paying a percentage of our turnover to a company in the Cayman Islands,' he said. 'We can dress it up however we like, but we all know what it is.' Cook tried to reassure him, insisting that the Ministry of Defence knew about the payments and was comfortable with the arrangement. 'It doesn't make it any more legal!' snapped Paterson. Their disagreement dragged on for more than a year, until June 2009, when Paterson filed a confidential complaint about the arrangement with Eads' internal compliance department. The complaint immediately leaked internally, and within days Cook confronted him. Paterson was stripped of his duties and later placed on gardening leave. Worse still, the Eads compliance officer assigned to his complaint, a Frenchman named Philippe Troyas, seemed to think Paterson's attempts to shine a light on the bought in services payments had placed him in some danger. At one point he texted Paterson: 'Take care when out in public, same for wife.' On 4 November 2009 Paterson met Troyas, secretly armed with his recording device. 'We know these payments are illegal,' he fumed to the compliance officer, in an exchange later played in court. 'Eads knows it, whoever you report to knows it. Why are we having this discussion?' 'Err, because we won't be able to change it,' replied Troyas. 'Eads is going to agree to carry on making illegal payments?' 'Yeah,' said Troyas, adding opaquely, 'it's not in a position to stop it, because [of] the customer willingness.' This admission – that Eads' compliance department was unable or unwilling to prevent corruption despite being handed evidence on a plate – stunned Paterson. 'You can go home and resign, because we don't need you any more!' he exclaimed. 'EADS is a corrupt organisation!' 'I like my company better than ethics, stupidly,' said Troyas. (A spokesperson for Eads' successor organisation, Airbus, said that 'the sentiment expressed in this historical recording is unacceptable and completely at odds with the values and ethical standards of Airbus today'. Troyas could not be reached for comment.) Paterson hired lawyers back in London, who began negotiating a financial settlement with Eads on his behalf. He spent his days on reduced duties – 'surfing the internet, killing time' according to his evidence in court – for almost a year, until 5 December 2010, when Ian Foxley unexpectedly invited him round for a chat. Ever since the age of four or five, Foxley had wanted to be a soldier. He came from a proud military family, and they were pleased to see him following in their footsteps. Both Foxley's grandfathers had been officers in the first world war. His father was an MoD official and his mother was a consultant haematologist, a committed Roman Catholic who enforced weekly attendance at mass. At 16, Foxley entered Welbeck, the military sixth form college, and subsequently joined the army. (Three of his siblings also entered the forces.) His career progressed fast: commissioned out of Sandhurst into the Royal Signals in 1975, stints in Germany, Australia, the Arctic, Belfast, Bosnia; a promotion to captain in 1983 and lieutenant colonel in 1993. Forthright and jovial, with a tendency to speak in short, clipped sentences, Foxley can spend hours happily recounting episodes from his military career or overseas adventures – helping to build a school in the Himalayan foothills, doing a sponsored drive across the Sahara, walking the Camino de Santiago. 'He speaks about integrity a lot, and always did,' said Jim Dryburgh, who was an officer in Foxley's unit. He recalled Foxley taking a dim view of soldiers who had affairs – 'playing the dirty' – while deployed overseas. Hugh Bardell, another officer from the same unit, described an incident early in their shared military career, in which Foxley objected to officers using a large and mostly empty building as an annexe, while the more junior sergeants were relegated to a portable building. Unable to comprehend this obviously unfair use of resources, Foxley went into battle with the chief of staff. He won, but it did him no favours in climbing the career ladder. 'He has been known to do the odd pyrrhic victory bit,' Bardell said. Almost universally, Foxley's friends said he was stubborn, bordering on pugnacious. 'He is so, so intense and strong with his opinions,' said one, a former airborne officer. Another, a former commanding officer, said that 'if he thinks he's right, he will pursue it to the death.' Foxley's rigid sense of right and wrong was set long before he discovered that his father, Gordon, was on the wrong side of the line. One morning in 1989, Foxley, then 33 and serving in Northern Ireland, was summoned by his commanding officer and informed that his father had been arrested for receiving bribes. As head of ammunition procurement for the Ministry of Defence from 1981 to 1984, Gordon Foxley had supplemented his salary of £25,000 a year with at least £1.3m of bribes. In exchange, he had redirected contracts from the Royal Ordnance Factory in Blackburn to European suppliers. Hundreds of employees in Blackburn lost their jobs after the ammunition contracts vanished; the local MP, Jack Straw, described the effect on his constituency as 'devastating'. Gordon was jailed for four years in 1994, though a subsequent attempt to confiscate the bribes he received was prosecuted so ineptly that he escaped ever having to pay restitution. The Evening Standard described it as 'a catalogue of errors so extensive that you quickly stop laughing and start to wonder'. The impact on the Foxley family was devastating. Gordon's pension was confiscated and the family home sold. Foxley's brother Paul was also jailed for six months for destroying evidence; he had been managing his father's accounts. Foxley's mother never recovered from the trauma of the family's bankruptcy and social disgrace. 'It destroyed her,' Foxley told me. His own career prospects in the army were permanently damaged, with his father's conviction obstructing him at every turn. He learned that the chief of defence procurement had been heard observing that it was 'too early to have another Foxley' anywhere near his department. After his father's conviction, Foxley's commitment to integrity – his horror of anything that seemed underhand, unfair or corrupt – intensified. 'I've seen what happens when it goes terribly wrong and the impact it has on your family, and I'm not going to put my wife and children through that,' he told me. 'I know what it was like. It was horrible.' Now, more than 20 years later in Saudi Arabia, sitting across from Paterson, the spectre of corruption was looming over the Foxley name once more. It was obvious to him what he had to do. 'If you don't reveal, you're complicit. It's a very simple equation,' he told me. 'People overcomplicate it. You're either on board, or you're not.' In his conversation with Foxley, Paterson had mentioned a dossier of evidence he had compiled to support his claims. He declined, however, to hand it over to Foxley. And so, at 5am on the following day, 6 December 2010, Foxley drove to GPT's office, hoping to arrive ahead of his boss. Once inside, he located the deputy IT manager and pulled rank, requesting access to Paterson's emails. He located the dossier that Paterson had mentioned and forwarded it to himself, then returned to his desk. He sat down and opened the file. Inside he found emails, contracts, spreadsheets, authorisations for payments to the Cayman Islands. Cook's signature was all over them. Foxley forwarded the documents one by one to a member of the MoD's Sangcom team in Riyadh. He then followed up with a message. 'I think we should discuss this as soon as possible please,' he wrote. Afterwards, he tried to go back to work, his mind racing as he waited for what he assumed would be a priority phone call from the MoD, followed by an invitation to a debrief and the swift commencement of an unstinting investigation. Six hours later, his mobile phone rang. It was not the MoD. 'Ian,' said Jeff Cook. 'Would you come up to the office for a chat please?' Does he know? Foxley asked himself. Was it possible that Michael Paterson had spoken to him since their conversation last night? He took the lift up to Cook's office, where his boss was waiting for him, along with GPT's head of HR, a stern-faced Saudi princess who was a niece of the king. Foxley would later give evidence to a court about the confrontation that ensued: Cook demanded to know if it was true Foxley had been sending documents to the MoD. There was no point in lying, Foxley thought. He confirmed that he had. Cook accused him of theft, and threatened to call the police and have him arrested and jailed. He turned to the princess, telling her to cut off Foxley's access to the IT system. The Saudi princess stalked out of the office, clutching her phone. Foxley recalls Cook continuing to berate him for what he had done, but Foxley could barely hear him. Instead, his mind followed the king's niece out of the office, as he suddenly began imagining how the next few minutes might play out: the princess ordering the police to come to the office. Arrest, detention. 'Time just slows down, you're thinking so quickly,' Foxley told me. 'I was just thinking, if the princess rings the police and says 'come and arrest you for theft', you're dead. I mean, literally.' Foxley realised he had one objective and one objective only: get out of the building as quickly as possible. He stood up abruptly. 'This conversation's not going anywhere, Jeff,' he announced, before marching out of the office. Cook bellowed at him to come back, but Foxley made for the lift, determined to get out before the princess returned with the police. As the lift descended, he rang his contact at the MoD and relayed what had happened. The contact told Foxley to get in his car and drive to the MoD offices in Riyadh. As Foxley raced down the highway, he worried that the police might know his registration number and stop him. 'You become very paranoid,' he recalled. Halfway there, the contact rang again and told him to urgently change direction and instead meet them at the MoD residential compound; Foxley swung his car around a roundabout and sped off. Once he arrived, he learned what had happened after he leaked Paterson's dossier: Foxley's contact had shown the documents to Brig Hargreaves, the MoD's Sangcom lead in Saudi Arabia, who then immediately contacted MoD headquarters in Whitehall to ask for instructions. Rather than notify anti-corruption police, Whitehall had ordered Hargreaves to hand the documents over to GPT. At this stage the significance of the dossier, or who it might implicate, was not clear to Foxley, or any of those present. But all, including Foxley's MoD contacts, agreed that he needed to get out of Saudi Arabia immediately. 'I think that the threat of arrest and jail – and the implication of that when you're in the hands of the Saudi royal family – was too much [for the MoD],' Foxley said. 'They could not deal with that, and didn't want the implications of what that might turn into.' They discussed various options for an exit – trying to fly out of Jeddah undetected, or crossing the border to Bahrain – before deciding that simply getting the first commercial flight out of Riyadh was the best option. If Foxley was arrested, at least his friends would know where he was. Foxley drove home and packed a bag, then handed his apartment keys to a friend. (Fearing Saudi authorities might use illicit alcohol as a pretext for arrest, the friend later conscripted two soldiers into helping him destroy evidence, consuming six jugs of wine and a dustbin of beer hidden in Foxley's airing cupboard.) Then, as night fell, Foxley's friend drove him to the airport. At security, his friend wished him good luck and told him to text when the aircraft doors had closed. Doing his best to act casual, Foxley told passport control that urgent business had summoned him back to London. When the plane took off, shortly after 1am, Foxley was on board. For Britain, Saudi Arabia has long been an exceedingly useful partner. In 1965, the Labour government commissioned a report by the head of the carmaker British Leyland, Donald Stokes, on revitalising the arms manufacturing industry. 'I believe it is vital to the country's interest that the firms should adopt the right attitude to exports, in arms as in every other field, and I think we must be prepared to be quite ruthless in bringing that about,' Stokes wrote. When Stokes wrote his report, Saudi Arabia was not yet half a century old. Flush with oil money, it was busy buying all the accoutrements of a modern nation state, including arms, and there was intense competition between western nations over which country should be the one to supply them. Britain was exporting £130m of arms globally each year, but Stokes thought this was a fraction of what was on offer. A barrister for Jeff Cook would later summarise the scene as a 'postcolonial battle between Britain, America and France; who can grab as much as possible out of this super-rich country, oil swilling everywhere, money everywhere.' An entire ecosystem of middlemen emerged to service this lucrative new sector, forging introductions between western corporations and Gulf royalty. 'Good commercial agents will be of the greatest value,' Stokes wrote in his report. 'Apart from providing an additional source of information, they are better placed than an official to dispense less orthodox inducements' – that is, to pass on bribes to powerful individuals, in return for those figures agreeing to use the national coffers to buy arms from Britain rather than from other countries. Stokes's attitude was codified in a 1977 memo by the MoD permanent secretary, the year after Sangcom was established. Payments to middlemen, the permanent secretary acknowledged, were a 'difficult and sensitive area'. Civil servants should endeavour to cap them at 10% of a contract value, he said, exceeding this threshold only 'with great caution'. Bribery was part of Sangcom from the start. Government documents from the 1960s and 1970s identify Prince Abdullah, then head of the Saudi Arabia national guard, as the primary recipient of British backhanders in exchange for signing off military deals. Two episodes from subsequent decades suggest that officials of the British government fully understood the role of bribery within Sangcom. In 1994, when GPT first won the Sangcom contract (it was previously handled by Cable and Wireless), one of its directors, Geoff Simmons, was summoned to a meeting in Whitehall. There, he said, the MoD's head of arms sales informed him that somewhere in the bowels of the building was a sealed letter, signed by representatives of the British and Saudi governments, affirming that the payments to Saudi royals and their associates were necessary for the smooth running of Sangcom. (The MoD says it cannot find this letter.) GPT, Simmons later said in evidence to a court, was instructed by the British government to send money to a company called Simec, which would then pass it on to the relevant beneficiaries – the very same 'bought in services' arrangement later discovered by Paterson. The second episode was in 2007. In an email from that year, Jeff Cook, who was then an MoD civil servant on secondment to GPT, informed his boss that, after some setbacks, he had successfully obtained written approval from the British government for a new round of 'bought in services' payments. The letter 'provides the government top cover that we wanted,' Cook wrote. 'It also makes us 'clean'.' In other words, because the government had signed off on the bribes, nobody at GPT could be held responsible. 'This,' Cook wrote, 'is a considerable achievement and a relief.' Back in Britain, having fled Riyadh, Foxley spent several weeks trying to compute what had just happened. 'It took a long time for the details to come out to us,' his daughter Jessica told me. 'I think he was almost in shock at one point.' He began to ruminate upon the possibility of Saudi agents pursuing him. At one point he sent copies of documents to a small number of friends and family, with covering notes declaring he had no plans to kill himself. If they found him dead, he wanted them to know he had been murdered. Foxley had not yet realised that the dodgy payments to Simec discovered by Paterson were not the result of a private contractor going rogue, but had, in fact, been signed off by the British government itself. And so, after three weeks mulling his options, he visited a senior civil servant at the offices of the MoD's arms sales division in Corsham, Wiltshire. Unless an investigation was launched into the dossier, Foxley said, he would go to anti-corruption specialists at the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) directly. The MoD seemed to take Foxley's threat seriously, and the case was referred to the SFO, where Paul Brinkworth, an agency veteran, was assigned to investigate the case in the autumn of 2012. Most SFO tips are isolated pieces of information, and witnesses are often reluctant to give evidence. Public spirited whistleblowers with large bundles of documents are rare. Brinkworth quickly realised that Foxley would make a compelling witness for any potential jury. 'Because of his family background, and the burden, to an extent, that his name placed on him, he was never going to tolerate corruption in any walk of life,' Brinkworth told me. 'When he thought he was encountering it he would call it out, and that's how he came across.' In other respects, however, the case was a nightmare. Sangcom had a five-decade history that would need to be explained to a jury, and the fact that the case involved the Saudis was also ominous. Six years earlier the SFO's reputation had been seriously tarnished by the collapse of an investigation into a British-Saudi deal bigger even than Sangcom: al-Yamamah, a monster £43bn deal for British arms manufacturer BAE Systems to supply the Saudis with fighter jets. This deal, too, had its origins in secret payments, with commissions of up to £30m being paid every few months to a Saudi prince called Bandar. When Bandar discovered in 2007 that he was being investigated by the SFO, he issued an ultimatum to Tony Blair's government: either the SFO's inquiries ended, or the Saudis would stop sharing intelligence on terrorist activity. Blair ordered that the SFO investigation be shut down. Anti-corruption groups denounced the decision. A judicial review to reverse Blair's intervention failed, though not before two high court judges mournfully observed that 'so bleak a picture of the impotence of the law invites at least dismay, if not outrage.' Battered by near universal condemnation of its apparent tolerance of corruption, Britain appeared to change its ways. A fully fledged Bribery Act was passed in 2010, which among other things clarified that employees of a firm committing bribery could no longer plead that they were merely following orders. The MoD declared that its 'policy towards irregularity, fraud, theft, bribery and corruption is one of zero tolerance' and established a specialist oversight board to fight graft. Later, in 2013, the prime minister, David Cameron, told the G7 that Britain would lead a global crusade against bribery and corruption. Finally, it seemed as if the country was cleaning up its act – just as Foxley arrived at the SFO's door with a bundle of documents that threatened to drag the ugly truth back into the light. For almost two years, Brinkworth and his colleagues at the SFO worked quietly, interviewing witnesses and piecing together cash transfers between bank accounts in Saudi Arabia, Britain, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland to uncover the secrets behind Sangcom. Then, early one morning in July 2014, SFO officers sprang into action. In coordinated dawn raids, key figures from GPT and Simec, including Foxley's old boss Jeff Cook, were arrested. In a prepared statement for an interview at Bishopsgate police station, Cook denied any wrongdoing. 'My aim has simply been to follow the procedures set out in the contracts, all of which had been approved by the [then] king of Saudi Arabia and the UK Ministry of Defence and have been in place for decades,' he said. SFO prosecutions require signoff by the attorney general, and for several years after the arrests were made, the government dragged its feet as to whether the SFO should be allowed to bring the case to trial, before relenting in 2020. Meanwhile, Foxley was struggling. In the years after he first handed the evidence to the SFO, he had heard nothing about how the case was developing. After word got around that he had become a whistleblower, work as a contractor, which had previously been abundant, dried up. There was a strange irony in the fact that two decades earlier, his career had suffered as a result of his father's corruption; now, it felt as if he was being punished for trying to root corruption out. 'My dad's always had a very steady job and an income, and it's never been a worry. And then suddenly it was,' said Jessica. Foxley's wife, Emma, went back to full-time work as a teacher so the family could make ends meet. Bardell, who had known Foxley for three decades, observed that he became 'distinctly introvert, very unlike the Ian that I have grown to know'. Experiencing people turn their backs on him was, for Foxley, 'a little bit of a surprise, and I think a great sadness,' Bardell said. 'He's probably a little bit of an idealist, in that he will always think the best of anybody, until somebody proves him wrong.' As his frustrations grew, Foxley turned his ire on prosecutors. 'The longer it takes, the more embarrassing it will become,' he fumed in a letter to the attorney general. At the SFO, Brinkworth also took his share of incoming fire. 'Your staff, from successive directors downwards, have been outstandingly close-lipped about either your progress and intentions or timetable,' Foxley ranted in another missive. 'One day I will reveal the disappointment, frustration, and despair that the past eight years have brought and the secondary effects they have wrought on my family.' In these messages, it is easy to detect the pained disappointment of someone with faith in the system now having to face its flaws. What is perhaps most surprising about the whole saga is how surprised Foxley was by it. One of his friends told me he could not understand how Foxley could not have known bribery was rife in Saudi Arabia. And surely, given the crimes of his father, himself an MoD official, Foxley must have known that it was not impossible that there were government officials involved in the corruption at GPT. But when I made these points to Foxley, he was insistent that when he took the job at GPT, the possibility of corruption on Sangcom had never occurred to him. 'This was a government to government contract!' he exclaimed, incredulously. And it seemed that his father's offences had made him think corruption in an MoD contract was less likely rather than more. 'It's unconscionable that the MoD, who had pursued him so hurriedly for corruption, would actually be party to corruption. I mean, it just doesn't make sense,' he argued. 'Maybe I'm naive. I don't live in a world of horrible things.' It was not until more than a decade after Foxley blew the whistle that any cases relating to Sangcom finally reached court. In July 2020, it was announced that GPT as a corporate entity would face trial for corruption, as would Cook and Simec's accountant, a man called John Mason. (Simec's mastermind, Peter Austin, was too ill to face trial. He died in early 2024.) In 2021, GPT pleaded guilty to corruption. In sentencing remarks, the judge found that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the British government had known about Simec's role in forging arms deals between Saudi Arabia and Britain; it had also known about 'high-level Saudi individuals who benefited from corrupt payments'. Some civil servants, he said, 'may have known about, or turned a blind eye to, the payment of bribes over many years.' This was the moment when Foxley finally realised how deep the corruption went. Soldiers, he said, don't tend to think much about the Ministry of Defence. 'It's where the politicians and the accountants live,' he said. 'The bean-stealers or the bean-counters.' But the judge's sentencing remarks revealed that his assumption that the government could not have been involved had been dead wrong. Not only had the government ratted him out to GPT when he discovered the bribery conspiracy, it had in fact played a decisive role in organising the conspiracy in the first place. Until then, 'I did not realise the involvement of the MoD,' Foxley told me. 'I had no idea.' The following year, in front of a jury at Southwark crown court, the SFO commenced its prosecution of Cook and Mason. (GPT's guilty plea was kept secret from the jury so as not to prejudice their trial.) Foxley was the SFO's star witness, recounting for the jury his discovery of the Paterson dossier, the MoD exposing him for whistleblowing, his dramatic escape from Riyadh. In his cross-examination of Foxley, Ian Winter, counsel for the defence, sought to suggest that Foxley was no whistleblower at all, but rather an opportunistic incompetent who had turned on his employer because he had been threatened with dismissal. Foxley's pugnacious streak kicked in. 'Are you trying to besmirch my professional reputational capabilities?' he barked. 'Is that where you're headed with this?' Winter suggested Foxley was puffing himself up. 'You are trying to demean my professional capabilities for the advantage of doing down my character and invalidating my information!' snapped Foxley. 'It doesn't invalidate the invoices and the payments to Simec. You can do your worst, sir!' Farcically, two months into the case the trial collapsed when it emerged that the MoD had failed to disclose key evidence. A second trial, with a fresh jury, began in October 2023. As with the first trial, all parties – including the defendants – agreed that the 'bought in services' payments were made to ensure the continuation of the Sangcom contract. Eight Saudis received a collective £10m between 2007 and 2012 alone. The question for the jury was whether the British and Saudi governments had authorised the payments in the window between 2007 and 2010, the period when the SFO had its most solid evidence of a money trail from GPT to the Saudis. If they had, Cook and Mason were innocent. In other words, if GPT, the British government and the Saudis had knowingly approved a corrupt deal, then legally speaking, any employees carrying out that corrupt deal were not themselves corrupt. In March 2024, after almost 40 hours of jury deliberation, both Cook and Mason were acquitted. Their defence – that the British government had authorised the entire scheme – had won out. Cook was convicted by the jury of a separate charge of taking kickbacks while he was a civil servant at the MoD, before he went to work for GPT. He had commissioned reports from a consultant in exchange for cash and cars, including a Nissan Primera. Foxley was in the gallery to watch his old boss get sent down for 30 months. In one of our conversations, Foxley described Cook as 'a grubby little crook, quite frankly.' But, he added, 'by the same call, so was my father.' Despite the acquittals of Cook and Mason, Paul Brinkworth, the corruption investigator at the SFO, spoke of Sangcom almost as a deliverance for his agency. When Foxley blew the whistle on Sangcom, people had warned that this would just be a repeat of the BAE case: the government would simply crush any attempt to investigate Britain's deals with Saudi Arabia. Instead, GPT had pleaded guilty, and 'the most sensitive, the most embarrassing, difficult case, which the government really has every reason not to like, has been aired, in all its grim glory, in a Southwark court.' Even so, reaction to full exposure of the Sangcom arrangement has been strikingly muted. Parliament's defence committee has exhibited zero interest in the case. There has been no mea culpa from the MoD. After the trial, it issued a short statement applauding Cook's conviction for the unrelated misconduct offence. It said nothing about historic government complicity in the Sangcom bribes. When I asked for a comment on Foxley's account of the saga, a press officer told me 'we have a zero tolerance approach to misconduct' and said staff were expected to observe government and military codes of conduct. Cook, who has been released from prison, told me in an email via his lawyers that: 'I accept the findings of the jury [in March 2024], which found me not guilty of the corruption charge, and now consider this matter closed.' The Sangcom debacle has not diminished the UK's appetite for Saudi cooperation. In December 2024 Keir Starmer travelled to the Gulf to champion closer relationships in the region. After his visit to Saudi Arabia, a British government press release touted an increased 'strategic partnership between the two countries' that would 'pave the way for greater defence industrial cooperation.' Starmer reportedly invited Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's crown prince, to Downing Street and suggested they watch a football game together. In one of my conversations with Foxley, I asked whether the whole ordeal had been worth it. He replied in the affirmative instantly, but not without regrets. Blowing the whistle to the MoD rather than the police, he said, had been an initial, fateful mistake that altered how everything else played out. 'My biggest disappointment, and my biggest failure, was in trusting a team of people that by rights I should have been able to trust,' he said. The MoD and the government 'had been running the scam, the bribery, since 1978, ever since the project was set up'. Foxley is now suing the Ministry of Defence for the damage to his livelihood and career caused by blowing the whistle. 'Part of not giving up this – I don't want to call it a crusade – this pathway I'm on, to assure accountability of the MoD, part of it has to be the fact that when they arrested [my father] and prosecuted him, they were quite relentless in doing so,' Foxley said. 'At the same time, they were paying bribes to the Saudis, and had been for 30 years. So the rank hypocrisy of it actually hurts.' After he fled Riyadh, Foxley spoke to his father. 'I told him everything. Everything I knew,' he said. 'I couldn't be certain but I thought what it was was corruption.' I asked how his father had responded, given his own history with corruption. ''Well, you know,' Foxley replied matter-of-factly. ''Well done. Carry on. Follow it through.'' It was, he said, a surprisingly straightforward conversation for them both, despite their very different choices. 'By then he was resigned to the fact that he had done wrong and got caught and paid the price for it,' he said. His father's past was, for the most part, left where it belonged, and 'we didn't really talk about [it] at all.' One weekend in 2013 when Foxley went to visit him, Gordon Foxley told his son that he was sorry for what he had done. 'He did actually say that it was one of the things he regretted in his life,' Foxley said. It was the first time Gordon had expressed remorse for his crime. He died the following week. A court will rule on whether Foxley's claim against the MoD should be dismissed early next year. If not, it will proceed to trial. He has accepted the prospect of the case continuing to hang over him; it will be worth it, he thinks, if it results in the government changing its ways. 'They shouldn't get away with it,' he said, 'and they shouldn't be allowed to think that they can do it again.' Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Scottish Sun
11 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Scots forensics teams working furiously round-the-clock to narrow in on warring gangsters
It's added to the workload of crime scene experts who helped gather evidence for the forthcoming prosecutions expected to go through court GANG WAR CRACKDOWN Scots forensics teams working furiously round-the-clock to narrow in on warring gangsters FORENSIC teams are working round-the-clock on the orders of Scotland's top law chief to deal with the number of cases linked to Scotland's raging gangland turf war, we can reveal. The details emerged in a report placed before a police watchdog about the 55 arrests made so far by cops involved in Operation Portaledge. Advertisement 3 Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC ordered an all out effort to crack down on Scotland's warring hoods Credit: Alamy 3 Property has been attacked during the heated gang war 3 Ross 'Miami' McGill is said to have ordered a spate of attacks across central Scotland Credit: Collect It's added to the workload of crime scene experts who helped gather evidence for the forthcoming prosecutions expected to go through court. Fiona Douglas, director of forensic services, told the Scottish Police Authority they were working overtime to process the evidence quicker at the request of the Lord Advocate. Officers have nicked dozens of suspects since a gang war erupted in March, with Dubai-based hood Ross 'Miami' McGill, 31, said to have ordered the carnage. Cops have had to investigate a wave of firebombings, machete attacks and murder bids on associates of caged Edinburgh cocaine kingpin Mark Richardson, 38, and his allies in Glasgow's notorious Daniel crew. Advertisement The report reads: 'Forensic Services is working closely with Police Scotland and COPFS colleagues to support Operation Portaledge which is the investigation into organised gang violence in the East and West of Scotland. 'Fifty-five arrests have been made and the specialist forensic support provided by Forensic Services has made a significant contribution to many of these. 'Within Forensic Services this work has consisted of more than 91 cases with more than 227 individual packages of work which are being undertaken across disciplines involving many staff.' Ms Douglas goes on to explain the need for urgency in dealing with the wave of cases with Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC stepping in to press home the point. Advertisement She wrote: 'At the request of the Lord Advocate these cases are being expedited to ensure that intelligence and evidential reports are provided at the earliest opportunity. 'In order to support this important operation, further overtime is being worked across the relevant teams however there will inevitably be an impact on some of the routine casework being undertaken within the service. 'Managers will continue to liaise with Police Scotland and COPFS colleagues to ensure that this does not impact on high priority casework and discussions will continue within the Forensic Performance Operational Group.' The issue will be discussed at the SPA meeting tomorrow. Advertisement We told this week how ex-Union Bear McGill, of East Kilbride, is being backed in his gangland turf war by top mob boss Jamie 'Iceman' Stevenson. McGill has got the 'full protection' of feared criminals linked to the caged 60-year-old cocaine kingpin. A source said: 'McGill follows instructions via associates of Stevenson, who is still pulling the strings.' The chaos was triggered by a fake cash scam involving cocaine that belonged to jailed godfather Stevenson. Advertisement A wave of violence erupted across the Central Belt in March after dealers stung the mob supremo's rising star McGill with £500,000 in counterfeit notes. Cops have so far arrested 55 suspects as part of the Operation Portaledge crackdown on the worst explosion of gangland violence in years. But tensions between rival groups escalated further after the murders of Lyons gang chiefs Ross Monaghan, 43, and Eddie Lyons Jnr, 46, on May 31 in Fuengirola, Spain. Scots cops at first dismissed a link to their arch enemies the Daniels but Spanish authorities insisted the double killing is linked to a decades-long conflict between the crime crews. Advertisement Michael Riley, 44, of Liverpool, is in custody facing extradition to Spain charged with the murders.
