UK – The Guardian, Nov. 21, 2025
Ryan Cornelius was arrested in 2008 over a bank loan and will be 84 years old when he is due to be released
A Dubai bank is instrumental in the long-running detention of the 71-year-old British businessman Ryan Cornelius, who is serving a 30-year sentence that will keep him in jail until he is 84, his brother-in-law claims.
Recent accounts show the Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB), which claims to be the trailblazer in championing Islamic values in banking, is on course to make more than $2bn in profit this year.
Cornelius was detained in 2008, and convicted with three others of defrauding the bank in 2011. He has already served 17 years but his sentence in 2018 was extended at the request of the bank for a further 20 years, according to information given to a UN working party on arbitrary detention, meaning he will not be released until 2038, when he will be 84 years old.
He was accused of failing to keep up payments to the bank over a loan to fund a business deal, a charge he denies, and was required by a Dubai court to pay $432m.
DIB brought proceedings to recover the loan using a law that extends prison sentences for convicts who fail to return proceeds of fraud.
Cornelius’s wife, Heather, is in effect homeless and he has no means of raising the sums required to secure his release.
The bank has seized all of his assets, including a property development called the Plantation land, now renamed the Acres, that would be worth more than $3bn on the basis of advertised villa prices. That valuation after the land has been developed is more than double the amount of his outstanding restructured loan from the bank.
Cornelius was arrested apparently at DIB’s request while travelling through Dubai in May 2008 on his way back from Karachi, Pakistan, to his home in Bahrain. At the time he and his partners were $10m ahead of the agreed repayment schedule, his brother-in-law Chris Pagett claims.
