Lessons from Djibouti terror case

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A GNA feature by London Bureau Chief Desmond Davies)

The High Court in London has been hearing an appeal by UK solicitor Peter Gray, who was severely criticised for misleading the court in what has turned out to be an unsavoury political matter. Gray, a partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, one of the largest law firms in the world, is fighting to save his career after it was discovered that he used an unsafe conviction in a Djibouti court to devastating effect.

Djiboutian businessman Abdourahman Boreh and others were found guilty on what eventually turned out to be trumped-up charges of terrorism brought by the government of Djibouti.

Mr. Boreh, a former confidant of President Ismail Omar Guelleh of Djibouti, was charged in his absence with terrorism offences following a grenade explosion in a supermarket in Djibouti, which was carried out on March 5, 2009 by an organisation that had been engaged in subversive activities against the government.

The case against Boreh hinged on two telephone conversations he had had with two brothers who said an ?act? had been ?completed? in Djibouti. As a result Boreh and others were found guilty and the government of Djibouti had sought to extradite him from Dubai.

In reality the conversations took place on March 4, before the grenade attack, and therefore could not possibly relate to the terrorist incident ? thus making the conviction of Mr Boreh and others unsafe. Indeed, the coded discussions were referring to the distribution of anti-government leaflets in Djibouti.

But this did not stop Gray from using this to push for the freezing of Boreh?s worldwide assets, put at $100 million, by the High Court in London.

It was part of an elaborate plan by the government of Guelleh to ?get? Boreh who had fallen out with the president. The government followed through with its anti-Boreh mission by seeking to gain some sort of legitimacy for the unsafe conviction in a credible legal jurisdiction.

So the matter was brought before Justice Flaux in the High Court in London by Gray, who is based in Dubai ? where Boreh is resident ? using the wrong date on transcripts of the phone calls that took place on March 4..

This, though, did not seem to have worried Gray or Gibson Dunn. On August 27, 2013, Gray and two colleagues working in the Gibson Dunn office in Dubai held a ?strategy? meeting in the offices of the US security consultancy and private investigation firm, Kroll.

Others in attendance included Hassan Sultan, Inspector General of the State of Djibouti, and Djama Ali, the Attorney General of Djibouti who was prosecutor in the Boreh trial.

This strategy meeting was meant to aid Gray to deliberately mislead the court in London when the matter came up in September 2013. Once this was successful, and Justice Flaux had placed a freezing order on Boreh?s assets in November 2013, Gray moved on to the second phase of squeezing Boreh.

He then used the UK court?s decision to get the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) courts to grant an application brought by the government of Djibouti against Boreh to freeze assets worth more than $5 million in the UAE?s financial free zone. It was the first time in the DIFC?s nine years of existence that its courts had granted a freezing order on the basis of a ruling in a foreign court.

The campaign against Boreh continued when Gray wrote to Interpol and contrived to get the global police agency to place the millionaire businessman under a Red Notice for his extradition to Djibouti.

It was put to Gray by Dominic Kendrick, representing Boreh, last month in London: ?So you and your assistants, frankly, pored over the transcripts [of the UK hearing] for the purpose of writing to Interpol, didn?t you?

Gray replied: ?I don?t think I pored over it. I gave it to one of the associates to write the letter, which I think she then did.?

The letter noted: ??an extradition request has now been made to the UAE authorities and we submit that it is appropriate for the UAE judicial authorities to be able to consider the merits of that application before any further consideration is made as to whether or not the Red Notice should remain in place.

?An English court has held that there is at least a good arguable case that Mr. Boreh committed the crimes of which he is accused. In particular it noted the contents of the recorded telephone transcripts??

Gray further wrote to the Department of Homeland Security in the US to get it to put Boreh on a terrorism watch list, thus hindering his global activities even more.

This exercise by Gray and Gibson Dunn clearly illustrates how governments in Africa, in an attempt to neutralise their real or perceived opponents, use Western legal institutions and multilateral agencies to justify their actions. Gibson Dunn pressed Interpol to act against Boreh based on an unsafe conviction that the firm had managed to give credibility to in a UK court by misleading it.

One political analyst told the GNA in London: ?What we have seen here is a case of double standards. While Western governments talk of respect for the rule of law in Africa, you get a reputable law firm and one of its partners working in concert with an African government to subvert the rule of law for clear political reasons.?

Indeed, there is no way that Gibson Dunn and the barristers that it briefed could not have noticed the discrepancy with the dates. After all, lawyers and their forensic analysis should have spotted this from the outset.

The lawyer who represented the government of Djibouti at the DIFC hearing, Khawar Qureishi, is an experienced barrister who has been involved in tricky Africa-related legal disputes in the UK courts. Two years ago he was involved in a matter between the Ugandan government and Tullow Oil, which was full of skulduggery on both sides.

Indeed, could Gray have been the fall guy? Justice Flaux noted in his March judgment: ??I am far from satisfied that what occurred was entirely the fault of Mr. Gray, in the sense that the strategy of concealment which essentially led him to deliberately mislead the court was one which was formulated at meetings on 27 August 2013 which were attended by the Inspector General and Attorney General of Djibouti.?

Gray, who has been suspended by Gibson Dunn, should have known better than to have agreed to be complicit in the attempt by the government of Djibouti to discredit Boreh. After all, Gray has been railing in tweets against government corruption in Nigeria and the UAE.

?How come he agreed to be a party to the government of Djibouti?s illegal action against Boreh and his associates?? the analyst queried. ?Such trumped-up charges have had fatal consequences in some cases in Africa,? he added.

Indeed, Boreh is a lucky man. While he was in Dubai after the unsafe conviction, one of his co-accused, Mahdi Ahmed Abdillahi, died in prison on April 14, 2009. Such a fate has befallen many in Africa who dared challenge governments on the continent.

Others have been executed on made-up charges of treason. Now in the global war against terrorism, African governments, like the one in Djibouti, are using this to silence their opponents.

In most instances, the government of Djibouti would have got away with its chicanery. But the government, Gray and Gibson and Dunn failed to reckon with Boreh?s determination and wealth to fight the case.

During the hearing in March, which the GNA covered, Boreh would tell anyone who would care to listen that he believed in British justice and that he would be vindicated. He took on Gibson Dunn, which saw global revenue soar by six per cent to $1.47 billion last year in its 19th consecutive year of growth.

The government of Djibouti has finally admitted that it was out of order to use the British courts for its own political ends. After apologising to the court and Mr Boreh, the government says it ?no longer relies on the terrorism conviction for any purpose? because it is no longer satisfied that the conviction was safe.

Djiboutian Attorney General Ali has filed a request before the country?s Supreme Court to review the conviction.

?This has been a salutary lesson for those who are worried about some governments in Africa that want to now capitalise on terrorism, while using international legal institutions, to suppress the rule of law in their countries,? the political analyst told the GNA. ?But what is equally important, in this case, is the role of a reputable global law firm acting in concert with a president whose government used illegal means to nail one of its opponents.?

GNA

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