Written evidence submitted by Chris Pagett CMG OBE (UKS0001)

Ryan Cornelius: A test case for Magnitsky sanctions.

1. My name is Chris Pagett. I am 72 years old. I served in the British Foreign Service from 1975 to 2007, and as HSBC’s Group Head of Security, Fraud and Geopolitical risks from 2007 to 2017.

2. My brother-in-law, Ryan Cornelius, has been arbitrarily imprisoned in Al Awir Dubai Central Jail for almost 17 years: more than 10 years longer than any British citizen in history has suffered foreign arbitrary detention.

The Ryan Cornelius Case – Background

3. Ryan was a British property developer who built up a successful construction company over two decades in Saudi Arabia before selling it and moving to Bahrain in the late 1990s. He went on to become an investing partner in several large construction ventures across the Gulf, including a 480-acre residential/equestrian complex in Dubai called ‘The Plantation’.

4. At the onset of the global financial crisis, credit was abruptly withdrawn from his projects, and he and his partners were obliged to negotiate a restructuring agreement with their ultimate lender, the Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB). DIB stipulated that Ryan should pledge all his business and personal assets as security in exchange for a 3-year loan repayment schedule. The Plantation was independently valued for collateral purposes at over US$1 billion—more than twice the amount of DIB’s outstanding loan.

5. Shortly after the restructuring agreement was signed, a new DIB chairman was appointed: Mohammed Al Shaibani, who was also (and remains) Head of the Dubai Ruler’s Court, with oversight over all arms of government.

6. In May 2008, Ryan was arrested at Dubai airport at and placed in solitary confinement for 7 weeks. While in solitary confinement and unable to communicate with the outside world, he was served by DIB with a notice of foreclosure, despite the fact that he was $10 million ahead of the agreed repayment schedule at the time. DIB foreclosed 15 days later and seized The Plantation. Ryan was then transferred from solitary confinement to a shared prison cell.

7. Over the following 2 years while Ryan was in prison, DIB systematically drove him into bankruptcy, seizing his personal assets and choking off the pledged funding for his other construction ventures, forcing them into collapse. In 2010, Ryan was put on trial, charged with fraud and money-laundering. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence by the judge, who recused himself from further involvement and left the country shortly afterwards.

8. A new charge of “theft from a state body” was brought before a different judge: something which entailed re-defining DIB (whose shares are traded on the Dubai Stock Exchange) as a state body, and the debt that Ryan had been rendered incapable of repaying as theft. Ryan was convicted and sentenced to ten years, which he served in full.

9. But he was not released. In 2018, Ryan was taken from his cell to a judge’s office and told that DIB had asked for his sentence to be extended by an additional 20 years, retroactively invoking a controversial law (Dubai Law 37) which had been enacted a year after his arrest.

10. Ryan remains in prison. His health has progressively deteriorated; among other things, he has had COVID twice, and tuberculosis, which went untreated for 18 months.
     
11. In April 2022, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention investigated Ryan’s case. It concluded that he had never received a fair trial, that he had been held in conditions equating to torture, and that his detention was arbitrary. His treatment by the Dubai authorities had entailed 8 separate violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[1] The UN called for Ryan’s immediate release and compensation.[2]

12. At his trial in 2010, DIB had claimed that the Plantation real estate development which they had seized was “worthless”. In 2024, now transferred to a Dubai Holdings subsidiary and re-named “The Acres”, it was re-launched as Dubai’s latest prestige development, with a project plan for 1,200 villas, the cheapest of which is priced at US$1.5 million.[3] The whole project is valued at $3 billion.[4]

13. Ryan turned 70 in April 2024. His Dubai lawyer made a pro-bono application to the Dubai courts for his release on the grounds that both the UAE constitution and Dubai Law 37 stipulate that prisoners should not be held beyond the age of 70. DIB opposed the application. The judge ruled in DIB’s favour. Ryan’s sentence runs to April 2038. He is unlikely to live that long. 

The British Government’s Handling of the Case

14. Ryan’s case has been a source of acute embarrassment to the FCDO: a jarring note in their pursuit of close commercial ties with the UAE. They have responded to it largely by looking the other way. The early years of Ryan’s detention were marked both by a pattern of consular neglect and a refusal to acknowledge the numerous abuses of legal process which were later highlighted by the UN (and indeed commented on at the time in international press reporting.)

15. When Ryan’s sentence was extended by 20 years through a retrospective application of Law 37. Lord Tim Clement-Jones and I met the then FCDO Minister of State for MENA, Alastair Burt, to ask for FCDO support for a private plea for clemency by the family to the Ruler of Dubai. He declined. That same month, Mr. Burt signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) pledging FCDO support for Dubai to project a favourable image in UK media. This MoU was a precursor to the all-encompassing UK/UAE Partnership Declaration still to be found on FCDO’s website.

16. When the UN Working Group published its finding in 2022, the FCDO spent 8 months “studying” a succinct 13-page document. When they finally responded, they chose not to echo the UN’s call for Ryan’s immediate release. Instead, they told Ryan’s wife, Heather, that they were now willing to support a private family plea for clemency.

17. In the UAE, there are three annual windows for clemency prisoner releases: at Ramadan, Eid al-Adha and the National Day. Since January 2023, a family plea for clemency has been submitted at each of these occasions to the UAE, through MFA channels, under an FCDO covering letter. Ryan’s family has never been shown the text of the covering letters and does not know in what terms FCDO’s “support” has been expressed. Although this “support” has manifestly been ignored by the Ruler of Dubai for more than two years, FCDO persist in citing it as evidence that they are doing something concrete to secure Ryan’s release: a claim which is now either deeply cynical or hopelessly naïve.

18. There was a brief departure from this posture in May 2024. Lord Cameron signalled that Ryan’s case had his personal attention and met the family to agree on a plan of action. The General Election was called a week after the meeting, however, and from that point on his international authority was correspondingly depleted. Lord Cameron did, however, write personally to the Ruler of Dubai before leaving office, urging him to release Ryan. To our knowledge, no reply was ever received.      

19. Since the advent of the current government, the FCDO has reverted to its traditional posture. The Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, made an early visit to the UAE in September 2024, but did not raise Ryan’s case. Ryan dictated a personal appeal from the prison telephone to Sir Keir Starmer in advance of the latter’s own visit there last December, but he too chose not to raise Ryan’s case. Sir Keir claimed in the House of Commons that he had subsequently instructed David Lammy to raise Ryan’s case with the UAE, but we do not know in what terms this was done, or with what outcome.

20. In short, aside from a few weeks in the summer of 2024, the UAE has never had to contemplate the possibility that its treatment of Ryan would be anything other than cost-free.

Magnitsky Sanctions and the Case of Ryan Cornelius

21. Magnitsky sanctions legislation was enacted to protect British citizens from autocratic thuggery. In Ryan’s case, state apparatus was used to imprison him in order to appropriate a valuable business asset. The power to keep Ryan in prison until he dies is clearly seen by his jailer as the simplest and most expedient way to ensure that he is never in a position to challenge the confiscation of his property in a foreign jurisdiction. This medieval abuse of human rights has utterly destroyed not just Ryan but his family.
     
22. The case would meet every criterion for designation under the UK’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations 2020, and yet the Government has never applied them in this case.

23. In 2021, acting pro-bono, London based human rights barristers made a submission to the FCDO for sanctions to be placed upon those responsible for Ryan’s continued incarceration.

24. In late 2024, taking account of the subsequent UN finding, the blatant monetisation of Ryan’s confiscated asset, and DIB’s role in blocking his release at age 70, they made an updated submission to FCDO, calling this time for the designation of DIB’s Board of Directors.
    
    This includes, as Sir Iain Duncan Smith noted in a Parliamentary debate on the 5th December 2024, “His Excellency Mohammed Al Shaibani, who was the chairman of the DIB; Yahya Saeed Ahmad Nasser Lootah, the vice chairman of the board of directors; Hamad Abdulla Rashed Obaid Al Shamsi, who was a board member; Ahmad Mohammad Saeed Bin Humaidan, a board member; Abdul Aziz Ahmed Rahma Mohamed Al Muhairi, a board member; Dr Hamad Buamim, a board member; Javier Marin Romano, a board member; Bader Saeed Abdulla Hareb Al Mheiri, a board member; and Dr Cigdem Kogar, a board member.”[5]

25. FCDO has responded to neither submission.

Magnitsky Sanctions: An Abuser’s Perspective

26. The UK’s Magnitsky sanctions legislation should have looked sufficiently threatening to Ryan’s jailers to deter them from their unconcealed aim of prolonging his imprisonment indefinitely. They have huge assets at risk: the Ruler of Dubai is the sixth largest landowner in the UK and Mohammed Al Shaibani has very substantial assets here.

27. But they have plainly not been deterred, and this is down to one very basic feature of the UK’s Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations 2020: designation for sanctions can only be done by FCDO.
     
28. The FCDO’s approach to Ryan’s case from the outset, and their subsequent lack of sanctions application after almost 17 years, would have given Ryan’s jailers every confidence that what they did with him was a matter of indifference to the UK.
     
29. In the time elapsed since Ryan’s arrest, the UK’s posture towards the UAE has become unambiguously that of a supplicant, prepared to overlook not just human rights violations but actions inimical to UK interests (Ukraine/Russia sanctions evasion, etc) in its quest for stronger commercial ties and inward investment. The Ruler of Dubai would have felt certain that the UK would never dare to sanction him or his henchmen for their treatment of Ryan.
     
30. As a risk calculation it was, and remains, entirely sound.

Magnitsky Sanctions: FCDO’s Poisoned Chalice

31. The FCDO’s insistence that it alone should have the power to designate foreign individuals for sanctions is understandable. Magnitsky sanctions are a formidable weapon and the power to wield them enables FCDO to adopt a strong posture towards potentially hostile actors.

32. But having the sole prerogative to designate sanctions means that whether or not someone is designated for sanctions is a matter for FCDO’s discretion, rather than something that follows automatically once he/she has been adjudged to have committed a sanctionable act. Once sanctions become a matter of choice, imposing them becomes a political act rather than an objective application of law.

33. This puts FCDO in a very difficult position. Its core mission is to advance the UK’s national interests overseas. But human rights will not top its priority objectives in most of the countries with which it seeks to maintain a substantial relationship. So, it will need to make a calculation as to whether or not sanctioning a human rights abuser from that country is in the national interest, knowing that doing so will be interpreted by that country as a hostile political act.

34. This has led, in practice, to a state of affairs in which Magnitsky sanctions are predominantly reserved for post-hoc virtue signalling, imposed against individuals from countries with whom our relationship has already turned antagonistic, often long after doing so might have had some deterrent effect. The slew of Putin-connected Russian oligarchs whom the UK sanctioned after bilateral relations had irretrievably broken down should have been sanctioned several years earlier, but their money was then considered too important to London’s economy. Meanwhile, human rights abusers from countries with whom FCDO is charged to pursue closer commercial ties go largely unsanctioned. 

35. No one, other than a human rights abuser, benefits from this state of affairs. Inconsistent application of Magnitsky sanctions leaves the UK open to inevitable accusations of double standards and undermines the UK’s moral authority on the world stage. The sanctions themselves have minimum deterrent effect against any autocrat who knows that the FCDO will never summon up the nerve to impose them. At a time when the “Rules-based International Order” is becoming increasingly a fiction and British businessmen are enjoined to build market share in countries which don’t even pay lip-service to it, we are leaving them unprotected from corporate raiding in the growing number of jurisdictions where it takes place very easily.

Recommendations:

36. There is a straightforward statutory change that would enable Magnitsky sanctions to act as a genuine deterrent against would-be human rights abusers and corporate raiders. It would consist of the following steps:  

• Remove from FCDO the exclusive right to impose Magnitsky sanctions. The FCDO would still have that right, but it would not be exclusive.
• Create an expert panel of judges under some form of appropriate cross-party parliamentary governance.
• Create a procedural pathway for victims of human rights abuse or corporate raiding to make legal submissions to it for their abuser to be designated for Magnitsky sanctions.
• If the panel of judges finds that the alleged abuser has engaged in sanctionable behaviour, vest in them either the power to mandate Magnitsky sanctions, or to seek authority to do so from the parliamentary oversight body.
   

37. As a former diplomat, I know that such a change would meet reflex opposition from the FCDO. But I would hope that calm reflection would enable them to see that it would actually make their job easier. They would be free to manage problematic relationships with autocratic states as they saw fit, unencumbered by what has hitherto been a conflict of objectives, in the knowledge that their interlocutors would be held to acceptable standards of conduct by the independent application of law in the British courts.    

38. As for British businessmen, the knowledge that they could rely on their own recourse to UK sanctions law rather than FCDO fudge and obfuscation, in the event that they are targeted for corporate raiding by a well-connected kleptocrat, would undoubtedly boost their confidence to tackle difficult markets.

39. I hope that the Committee will take time to consider this proposal. It could, I believe, command cross-party parliamentary support. Ryan’s life has been irretrievably ruined, and he has no good reason at present to believe that it will not end in a Dubai prison. But it would, I know, be a source of strength to him if he could see that his case had at least become a catalyst for a change that would ensure that others in his position were better protected in future.                                                                                          

5th March 2025