A British family is bracing for a Christmas miracle after learning that their grandfather's six-year hell in Dubai prison over debts that were not his own finally looks set to end.

Albert Douglas, 63, was arrested in 2019 and spent the following years suffering in a series of high-security jails where he was tortured by guards, deprived of food and water, and witnessed the rape and suicides of fellow inmates.

His family hope that he will be repatriated within the coming days or weeks after the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) ruled following a four-year investigation that Mr Douglas's detention was arbitrary and had no legal basis under international law.

The British millionaire was sentenced to three years in prison in February 2021, after months spent in detention, over his son's company’s bounced cheques - despite evidence proving his own innocence.

In October 2023, the court extended his sentence by an additional five years.

Ever since he was detained, his 38-year-old son, Wolfgang, has spent £4million in legal fees fighting to secure his release.

During his detention, Mr Douglas, who suffers from a heart condition, was brutally beaten, forced to drink out of a toilet bowl due to unbearable thirst, and subjected to sleep deprivation by being put in freezing cold rooms with bright lights.

‘It is just like winning the lottery,’ Wolfgang said in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail after learning of the UN’s verdict.

‘The exact sentence from a lawyer that was working with me here in London was: “You've just put your hand in the grave and you've got your dad out.” Because this is impossible.’

Mr Douglas, who hails from London, once lived an enviable lifestyle in a luxurious villa on Dubai's Palm Jumeirah Island, driving around in his Rolls Royce.

He and his wife Naomi emigrated to Dubai in 2003 and he built up a successful business called Alomni Flooring, specialising in real wood floors.

The father of four, whose business was thriving amid the massive property boom in the United Arab Emirates, persuaded his eldest son Wolfgang to join him from his home in London.

But his life came crashing down in 2019 when he was arrested and ordered to pay a £2.5million fine by the Gulf state after his son’s company TimberWolf - which he had no association with - racked up debts it could not repay.

Wolfgang, who claims he was a victim of financial entrapment and strongly denies any purposeful wrongdoing, said: ‘I can’t believe we’ve got this far. If he comes through Terminal 4 at Heathrow, I’m going to cry.’

The father of three spoke about how he was plunged into a ‘very bad’ mental state over the past six years, as he spent countless hours hearing his father suffer on the other end of a phone from prison.

‘But it didn't matter how bad it was, because I knew I was his last chance of ever leaving,’ he said. ‘To kill myself would be killing my father. And that is, in my opinion, my strongest fuel to continue.’

He continued: ‘I've worked and given my whole life in the pursuit of clearing his name. I took a name badge the day [he got arrested] which said: “Advocate of Albert Douglas”. I would give the pennies I didn't have to save my father.’

After his initial arrest in 2019, Mr Douglas was given bail while awaiting his court date and spent more than £850,000 on legal fees protesting his innocence.

Fearing he would be imprisoned for life and not given access to a fair trial, Mr Douglas attempted to flee detention in Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, by crossing the border to Oman with the help of hired smugglers.

He was arrested in February 2021, stripped and hooded, before being jailed in Al Ain Prison. He was then transferred to a series of facilities in Dubai including Dur Dubai police station, Al Barsha and Al Awir Central Prison over the next several years.

Throughout his time serving his sentence, Mr Douglas was denied medical treatment and subjected to physical abuse, including one occasion when three guards allegedly hit him in the head until he lost consciousness, causing head injuries, a dislocated shoulder and fractures in his hands.

‘He was given duties to clean the toilets when one arm was broken and a bone was protruding from his shoulder, and his other hand was broken in five places,’ Wolfgang said.

‘Then you would have an overzealous guard beating him with the end of a gun if he didn't clean the toilet.'

On another occasion, the prison guards left him outside ‘in the boiling sun for two days without water, dying’.

‘There was a hole on the floor which you squat over to go to the toilet. He was forced to crawl over it and put his hands inside the water and drink from it to survive,’ Wolfgang said.

During the grueling transfer from Al Ain to Dubai, Mr Douglas spent two days trapped in the back of a scorching hot van, denied food and water. 

Speaking from a Bur Dubai facility in 2021, the grandfather told the Daily Mail: 'I fear that I will not get out of here alive.

'I am innocent and being made to pay the penalty for the debts of my son. I would not wish this on my worst enemy.

'I had nothing to do with the company other than my name being on the documents when it was founded.'

In November 2022, he was taken to hospital to have surgery on his multiple fractures and his dislocated shoulder, but because treatment had been denied for nine months, the bones had healed improperly and needed to be rebroken and realigned.

During his stay in hospital, a group of police officers tried to pressure Mr Douglas to feature in a propaganda video, where he was told to thank Dubai prison authorities in exchange for the payment of his hospital bills.

He refused, and was sent back to prison without any pain medication. The surgery was ultimately unsuccessful in healing his injuries and he was told he’d need more medical assistance.

In one facility, Mr Douglas shared a bunk bed with a young man who was ‘raped every night’ by guards, Wolfgang said.

‘He was being raped and the bed would rock, and [Mr Douglas] couldn't say a word about it, because obviously they'd rape you.

‘They'd all take turns on this boy. [He started] banging his head against the concrete, and in the end, they agreed to put him in a mental institution and he was never seen again. Of course he was trying to kill himself because he couldn't take being raped by the guards.’

Wolfgang said his father witnessed fellow inmates make suicide attempts.

‘He was put under food and water deprivation, [but] the sleep deprivation was probably the worst, where they kept him in freezing cold rooms with bright lights and stripped him naked,’ Wolfgang said.

Mr Douglas experienced several strokes throughout his detention and suffers from Alzheimer’s disease as a result of his head injury, his family said.

On one occasion, he was trying to connect to his family from an Al Barsha prison phone when another inmate attacked him from behind.

‘They put a phone wire around his neck two times, and tried to strangle him to death. Another group of prisoners actually head-butted the assailant and freed him from the cord to save his life,' Wolfgang said.

He was then thrown into an isolation room without light or fresh air for a month, where his son says he developed scabies. 

While in Al Ain prison, he was interrogated for several days in Arabic and denied access to an interpreter. There, he was severely beaten while having his hands and feet chained.

In Bur Dubai police station, he was interrogated by officers over several nights, who physically and mentally tortured him to sign a confession in Arabic, which he refused to do.

When Wolfgang’s autistic brother travelled to Dubai, officers further threatened Mr Douglas by telling him they would rape his son.

In a recording heard by the Daily Mail, Mr Douglas said: 'I am presently in Dubai Central jail, I believe I am being transferred back to Al Ain in the morning.

'Al Ain is where I was beaten, tortured, intimidated, deprived of food and water, and warned that if I ever was to complain about it, I would suffer the consequences.

'My worst fears have come true. I am literally in fear of my life.' 

In November 2023, the grandfather was pardoned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, but remained in prison until earlier this year. In April, he was let out of jail, but was still trapped in the UAE due to a travel ban.

In recent weeks he was transferred back to Al Awir Central Prison in the lead up to his deportation back to the UK following the UN’s verdict, and authorities are preparing an emergency travel document for his repatriation.

Because Wolfgang was back in Britain when his company became insolvent, creditors accused Mr Douglas of accruing the unpaid debts, despite forensic tests proving the alleged bounced cheque was not his own.

He had no association with the company when he was arrested, apart from being listed on a legal document of the flooring business, set up in 2007.

Even though it is against local law, it is common in Dubai for relatives of debtors to be wrongfully imprisoned in their place, according to Radha Stirling, a human rights lawyer and the CEO of Detained in Dubai who has been helping the family.

‘I've seen wives held for their husband's credit card debts, business partners held, grandfathers, grandchildren - anyone can be held on the basis of a mere allegation alone. That's all it takes. There's no evidence that's required to secure an arrest, let alone a conviction,’ she told the Daily Mail.

Ms Stirling advised Mr Douglas that it was dangerous to return to Dubai following his son’s business becoming insolvent, telling him there was a risk of him being arrested and held there as leverage to extort funds from the family.

But the British grandfather was in touch with other reputable lawyers in London, who gave competing advice and said there was no way he could be arrested for a case that didn’t involve him.

‘So, he had that confidence, and he'd built his life there, he'd been living there a very long time running successful businesses, and he didn't want to give all of that up on the possibility that someone could do something untoward.

‘But he went back, and the legal system was weaponised against him, essentially, to hold him on the basis of his son's business and cheques that had bounced.’

Ms Stirling added that bounced cheques are no longer illegal in the UAE. ‘So, had this happened several years later, it would have been safer than having happened then.’

Wolfgang, whose property and assets were seized by UAE authorities alongside his father’s, maintains his innocence and said he was the victim of a smear campaign designed to discredit his business.

He said he tried to ‘rip up’ his father’s passport to stop him from returning to Dubai, and later begged the UK government to be detained in his stead, but his request was denied because of the possibility he might be tortured, he claimed.

Mr Douglas also refused the option to swap places with his son, after finding out from prison officers what would happen if Wolfgang was detained in his place.

‘My father [asked the prison officials]: “Okay, and what will you do with him?” And they said: “We will keep him in a dark room for the rest of his life and he shall never see sunlight again.”’

Mr Douglas apparently responded: ‘Well, why on earth would I hurt him?’

While calls to inmates were severely limited, Wolfgang routinely bribed police officers and the families of other inmates to get more contact with his father, paying £165 for 30 minute phone calls multiple times a day.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) proved to be thoroughly inadequate in helping to secure Mr Douglas’s release, according to Ms Stirling and Wolfgang.

In one email seen by the Daily Mail, sent in response to a plea for assistance on the case, a FCDO caseworker said: ‘Torture and mistreatment are not in themselves grounds for the FCDO supporting a clemency application.’

‘Even though the UAE is one hundred per cent at fault for being corrupt, I blame the British government for allowing this to continue,’ Wolfgang said.

‘I shouldn't need to be at the UN, a third-party organisation for international law. I shouldn't need international law to protect a British citizen being tortured.’

He said he 'forced' the FCDO to 'take stock of reality, because I couldn't allow him to just die'. 

Ms Stirling said: ‘The FCDO, at the best of times, does not really want to help citizens, so that means they see citizens requesting assistance as burdens on their time.

‘Their focus is absolutely on trade, on building relations, and marketing the UK to their counterparts in the UAE for investment, and they don't really want to have to engage in diplomacy that's a bit uncomfortable, including talking about the torture of a grandfather. It makes them look very weak diplomatically.’

She continued: ‘From the very beginning, they don't want to get involved. 

'So as an advocacy group, you have to do everything that you possibly can to force that involvement, and that might include - as it did with us - getting testimony from Albert, setting up a website, writing and engaging with his local MPs.’

She described her attempts to lobby the government to take action as a ‘tug of war’.

‘We’ve got to be constantly chasing them when they’re running away, hoping to not do any work.’

She compared the lax approach of the UK Government to her dealings with Ireland, the US and Canada over the past 20 years, whose politicians are a lot more ‘effective at helping citizens in these situations’.

‘They say: “Right, this isn't happening to our citizen.” I’ve [seen] Trump, or JD Vance with someone in prison, [and] two weeks later, they're out, because they just don't tolerate it.

‘They ring up, and they say: “You will release our citizen. End of story. There's no question, release them right now.” The UK doesn't do that.'

Wolfgang, based in Kensington with three children aged 6, 11 and 14, is an asset liquidation and reselling agent and the founder of the Romanichal Group of Companies.

He has previously organised 900-strong protests outside of Parliament to gain publicity surrounding his father’s case and has received support from British businessman Alfie Best in his advocacy.

He has helped in cases of other British citizens detained in Dubai, including that of football coach Billie Hood, who was sentenced to 25 years when he was 24 after four bottles of vape liquid containing cannabis oil were found in his car in 2021.

Wolfgang has gotten close to Mr Hood’s family and sponsored some of the rallies calling for his release. 

Hood later had his sentence reduced to 10 years after he was forced to sign a confession written in Arabic despite not speaking the language.

‘We come from Romany Travel Gypsy people, which I can assure you is not an easy group of people to have to come from because all doors are closed to us,’ Wolfgang said.

He accused the UK Government of being prejudicial towards his family during the case.

‘The only racism came from our British government. The UAE were extortionists, and they were corrupted.’

Despite being hopeful that the six-year nightmare is over, Wolfgang won’t fully stop the fight until his father is back home in the UK.

‘My father is in a state of fear at the moment. He's in a very tense mode. He won't believe it until he's back on that plane because we've been told this already, we've been down this road,’ he said.

When Mr Douglas comes home, they won’t be popping bottles of champagne because of all the trauma the family has experienced. ‘It’s sad and sombre,’ he said.

‘We beat the system, we beat the impossible here. We were told it was impossible and to discontinue - but I didn’t give up.’

He continued: ‘Christmas is about Christianity. A lot of people think it’s about presents, but it’s not. But if there is a present I want this year, that is the only present I need in my life.’

A FCDO spokesman said: 'We are supporting a British man in the UAE and are in contact with his family.'