Marcus Lee, one of the Australian property executives trapped in Dubai for almost five years, has described jailhouse tensions with his fellow countryman and prisoner Matt Joyce, including the day that Mr Joyce confronted him in jail and said: “The only reason I’m not going to beat the shit out of you is that I don’t want another case against me.”
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Mr Joyce was Mr Lee's boss on a Dubai Waterfront development that led to both of them landing in prison, accused of a plot to deceive the Australian developer Sunland into paying $14 million too much for a plot of land. Both men were exonerated after intense diplomatic pressure after nine months in jail and more than four more years under house arrest on fraud charges.
Mr Lee writes of the encounter in a new book, Trapped, which he has co-authored with his wife, Julie.
The book describes how a news report about the Lees angered Mr Joyce because it had been published without the "sign-off" of his wife, Ange. It had provoked Mr Joyce to threaten Mr Lee with the “beat the shit out of you" comment, and to tell him: “You’ll get what’s coming.”
Mr Lee describes further strains between the prison mates in 2009, when Fairfax Media revealed Mr Joyce had been Geelong Grammar schoolmates with another developer accused in the case, Angus Reed.
“This, after Matt had repeatedly told me he hardly knew Reed,” Mr Lee writes. When he confronted Mr Joyce, he had replied: “No, no, they have it wrong.”
Sunland alleged it was deceived into believing that Mr Reed’s company, Prudentia, had established rights over the plot of land. Sunland executive David Brown agreed to pay Prudentia $14 million to walk away, so Sunland could then buy it for more than $60 million from Mr Joyce's and Mr Lee's employer, Nakheel.
Half of the $14 million was paid into Mr Joyce’s account in the Channel Islands, but he repaid that money to Prudentia and the Dubai Court of Appeal - when it finally found him not guilty last November - accepted he had been holding it in trust. The appeal court also upheld Mr Lee’s earlier acquittal.
Mr Joyce said on Friday: "Marcus and I have quite different recollections about what happened during that period. This episode in our lives, brought about by Sunland's false accusations against both of us, was extremely stressful for the two of us and our families.
“We've dealt with that in different ways, especially while we were detained in Dubai. Both Marcus and I have been beneficiaries of the hard work that went into exposing Sunland ... and in securing our release."
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