The daughters of jailed British property developer Safi Qurashi have staged a break in their 30-day vigil outside the UAE Embassy in London to discuss their father’s case with the ambassador.
Thirteen-year-old Sara and 10-year-old Maaria have been lobbying outside the embassy for more than a week in a bid to secure their father’s release from a seven-year jail term for cheque fraud.
“The ambassador kindly invited us in and we explained the background to the case,” a family member told Arabian Business. “It is a positive breakthrough… It was all very emotional.”
Ambassador Abdul Rahman Ghanim Al Mutaiwee said “he would write to his government,” the family member said. “[He said] ‘I hope you don’t hear back from me as that will generally mean a negative response.’”
Qurashi, the London-born businessman who paid $60m for an island in the shape of Great Britain on Nakheel’s The World, was told this month he must serve his full seven-year jail term after being found guilty of bouncing millions of dirhams worth of cheques by a Dubai Court.
A judge in Dubai’s Court of First Instance upheld the sentence following an appeal, quashing the hopes of the Qurashi family that he would be released.
The family has lobbied the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to appeal to the Dubai government and request a review of Qurashi’s case. It is understood the FCO is assessing the case and, pending its decision, may request a meeting between its lawyer and the office of HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
A petition on the website ‘justiceformydad.com’, established by Qurashi’s daughter Sara, has attracted hundreds of signatures. The girls said they would call a temporary halt to their London protest in the wake of their meeting with the ambassador.
“After the meeting… we have decided to stop for a couple of days. We will start our campaign again outside the UAE Embassy when [it] opens up next week. I have hope that my papa will be home soon inshallah,” Sara said on the website.
Qurashi rose to fame as the owner of the 4.5-hectare island that is part of The World, a man-made archipelago of reclaimed sandbanks located off the coast of Dubai. He had initially planned to build a mix of hotels, residential and commercial buildings on Great Britain, but the scheme stalled in the wake of the global financial crisis.
According to the site ‘Justiceformydad.com’, Qurashi had acted as a “middle-man” in a number of deals that saw clients transfer money into his company in exchange for his purchasing land on their behalf.
In exchange for the money, Qurashi signed security cheques over to the client that should have been returned on completion of the land deal, the website claims. Instead, the cheques were cashed, leading to Qurashi’s arrest and imprisonment for cheque fraud.
The London-born developer was later found guilty of signing two cheques with insufficient funds and cancelling another.
The family has previously appealed to the British government to request its counterparts in the UAE to re-examine the case. A 115-page case review written by Tarique Ghaffur, the former assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, said in February it believed Qurashi may have been wrongly convicted.
In a statement to Arabian Business, UK-based Fair Trials International, which has lobbied on behalf of Qurashi, urged the Dubai Government to reconsider the case.
“We urge the Dubai authorities to… release Safi, who has already spent nearly two years in jail, so that he can return home to his wife and children.”
The FCO said in August that he number of Britons arrested in the UAE fell by nearly a fifth last year, aided by a decline in arrests for drug offences.
The Gulf state arrested 217 British tourists and expatriates between April 1, 2010 and March 31, 2011, down from 265 arrests in the same period a year earlier.
The British Embassy said in 2009 that Brits were more likely to be arrested in the UAE than anywhere else in the world.
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