The former Leeds United director beaten in a Dubai prison now rebuilding his life in Cornwall

It is a sunny morning in Penzance, and for the newest recruit to the board of the town’s local football club, there is an almost inordinate amount of pleasure to be had in thinking up ways to raise the £10,000 required to fix the broken floodlights at little known Penlee Park.

In an area where football is very much rugby’s poor relation, there is also the task of encouraging the local sports shops in this sleepy seaside resort on England’s most south-westerly tip to find room on their shelves to stock Penzance AFC’s replica shirt.

Currently second bottom of the South West Peninsula League Division One West, the Cornish club is probably not where the former managing director of Leeds United expected himself to end up. But it is where David Haigh has come to rebuild his life after the trauma of almost two years being tortured and beaten in a Dubai prison. “You’ve got hell versus a little paradise and nice people around you who you can trust,” Haigh says.

For those unfamiliar with Haigh’s story, the lawyer-turned-businessman travelled to Dubai in May 2014 in the expectation of discussing a new job with GFH Capital, the Bahrain-based bank who used to co-own Leeds, and to agree a settlement on money he says he was owed from his former employers. Instead, he was incarcerated and detained without charge for 14 months after being accused by GFH of falsifying invoices, fraud, embezzlement and money laundering.

After being given a largely retrospective two-year sentence for the misappropriation of funds, Haigh was due to be released in November 2015 only to be subsequently accused by GFH of abusing them on Twitter and spent another five months in prison before eventually being freed with no charges brought.

It is 12 months now since Haigh was released from jail, and while he has just won a long-standing fight to have some of his assets unfrozen and will be back in court this month for a fresh round of legal battles with GFH, the physical and mental scars are still very apparent and will take a lot longer to heal. “Despite the fact that I’m out now, through the asset freeze and all the medical issues and treatments I’ve had, it’s like I’ve still been their prisoner,” he explained.

On the day we talk, Haigh is later due in hospital for an arthroscopy on a knee was that shattered during one of many beatings he says he took at the hands of prison guards or inmates. It is not just the knee. He requires further surgery on a broken cheekbone while his ribs, chest, right hand and teeth all took a pounding. Morphine helps numb the physical pain but the psychological anguish cuts deeper and he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“When I came out I was euphoric and spent a lot of time seeing friends and family and working on my legal case [against GFH] but it was after things calmed down and I spent more time on my own that I began getting intense flashes in my head that I couldn’t control and that really started to affect me,” Haigh, 39, recalled.

At one point he was taking up to 15 pills a day for depression and sleeping problems in addition to the morphine.

“I was like a zombie,” he said. By September last year, he was checked into the Priory hospital in Hayes, outside London and placed on suicide watch. Haigh believes the volume of medication did more harm than good.

“I was there for two months and when I came out I went to see my GP who said he was surprised I could walk with all the stuff I was taking,” he said.

Haigh says the abuse in prison stopped just short of sexual assault but for three months he attended rape counselling. Sharia law deems certain homosexual acts illegal and, as a gay man, Haigh says some of his worst moments in prison came when inmates discovered his sexuality.

He has received support from many quarters but remains hurt at suggestions he has exaggerated the suffering he encountered. “When you see people saying, 'He’s just made it up,' I think, ‘Well come and look at the X-rays and MRI scans’,” Haigh says. “You don’t go to the Priory for two months and get put on what I was if everything’s normal.”

The new year has brought fresh hope for Haigh. As well as winning leave to appeal against the orders of the Dubai International Finance Centre Court, which led to his imprisonment and were partly responsible for his asset freeze, Haigh also applied successfully himself to the High Court in London to gain access to his money to cover medical costs and legal fees.

In addition, he has lodged a formal dossier of his treatment in Dubai with the United Nations panel, which examines arbitrary incarceration and abuse of prisoners in jails around the world, and teamed up with Radha Stirling, founder of the Detained in Dubai campaign group, to establish Stirling-Haigh in an effort to fight for those denied their basic human rights.

There are still battles ahead but last month’s appointment to Penzance’s executive committee was another small but significant step towards a new life. The club approached him via Twitter and, after meeting in a bar on the beach overlooking St Michael’s Mount, realised they would be a good fit for each other.

“The problems at Penzance are the same as they were at Leeds – you’ve got to get good players in, people through the door, good sponsors – but you’re just taking five or six zeros off the numbers,” said Haigh, who moved to Cornwall as a teenager with his family.

“I went to school down here but didn’t know the football club existed. Cornwall is a rugby place so the challenge is to try and get the football team on a level footing with the rugby club.”

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/04/03/interview-former-leeds-un...