> Saadiyat’s extraordinary offer to the buyers of its opulent villas is that they will be able to stroll to the Guggenheim Museum, the Louvre and a new national museum partnered with the British Museum. A clutch of lustrous architects —Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, Rafael Viñoly and Norman Foster—have been lured with princely sums to design these buildings. New York University. . . will join the museums when its satellite campus opens later this year.
The offer needs to be good, the other side of the coin is that to enjoy it you have to submit to the legal system of an incredibly backward feudal monarchy where the rule of law is not even comprehended. You would have to be completely mad to even visit this place, let alone reside there, as the following recent story illustrates. It is a place where extortion, torture and murder is the law. Its one thing for desperate workers from third world countries to go there, but for anyone with means to take the risk is simply insane.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
Trapped in Dubai FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2014/s3976206.htm
On Australia Day 2009, Australian property executive Marcus Lee was thrown into a seething, violent Dubai jail and nearly died. Nine months later he emerged accused of a crime he says he never committed. Despite his confidence of innocence and the wholesale lack of compelling evidence against him it took the better part of five years, trapped in Dubai, to shake the charge and the threat of a much longer prison stretch and get back to Australia.
During that time he lost his house, his step-father, his grandmother and couldn’t return for their funerals.
During much of that time Marcus and Julie Lee permitted Foreign Correspondent to follow their paralysing plight. Now they’re clear of Dubai and back home, they’re free to tell their story.
They were locked in Dubai’s archaic and sclerotic court system – the same system that’s jailed foreigners for overt expressions of affection and rape victims ahead of their assailants. But the Lees were fighting accusations that he was part of a multi-million dollar sting involving a prize waterfront property. In Dubai financial crime is considered among the worst. Even bouncing a cheque equals prison time.
continued at: http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2014/s3976206.htm