The adrenaline rush that comes with it is the lifeblood of investigative journalists. It’s what keeps us going. It’s what made me go after Gill Wallace aka Ambassador Hope –  a middle-aged British blonde who had relocated to Abu Dhabi with stunning credentials. Gill’s Linkedin profile and Facebook page described her as an advisor to Obama and the UAE government on Economic and Environmental Sustainability. She also claimed to have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Her mission: launch a grand project called CULA Liquidity Programme to help 200,000 UAE residents by a cash injection of Dh.5.4 billion.

Gill told everyone that the project was backed by the United Nations , G20 countries and the UAE government. But that’s not what the anonymous caller who tipped me about said on the phone.  “Gill is a convicted globe- trotting fraudster. Everything you see about  her iis fake. Her CULA programme is a nothing but rip-off scheme targeting the UAE,” he warned. 

By now Gill had posted a video of herself citing an official decree instructing “all UAE government employees to collaborate and cooperate” 

I had to get to the bottom of the  story and, if what the caller said was true, stop the woman in her tracks.  But how do I do that without alerting her? The caller’s words rang in my ears.  “You have to tread carefully, my friend. Gill is no ordinary con artist. She is the best out there. She will eat you alive.”

I thought of meeting her as a potential investor but quickly overruled the idea.  Even in my expensive Massumi Dutti blazer, I didn’t look anywhere close to someone who could be part of a $1.5 project.

“What if you try to get a job with her?, a  colleague suggested. “You will get first hand insights into what she does or at least meet her.”

The idea was shot down too. It was highly likely that she would hire me. If she indeed did, there was no way the newspaper would spare me to work for her in the hope of getting a story that may just not be there.

My wife solved my dilemma.

“Why don’t you see her as who you are?” she said.

“You mean as a journalist? But that would be dead give away,” I protested.

“On the contrary, it would be the perfect foil. You don’t need to tell her that you are investigating her. Tell her instead that you came across her wonderful humanitarian initiatives and want to interview her for the newspaper’s lifestyle section.”

She was right. And not for the first time.

The plan worked perfectly. Lest Gill looked me up online, I got our newly hired  reporter Razmig Bedrian to call her and seek time for an interview. 

She readily agreed. We were asked to meet her at Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Tower 3 the following day.

I remember it was a blistering hot Ramadan day in 2014 when we drove down to the UAE Capital. I was fasting but Razmig and our photographer Virendra Saklani weren’t but there wasn’t much they could do as food outlets in the country remained closed during Ramadan those days.

Gill made us wait as she needed to go to a salon. “I want to look good for the camera,” she told us over the phone. We spent our time window shopping at Marina Mall.  

Nearly three hours after the scheduled time, Gill showed up accompanied by an Egyptian man wearing a dark suit and lugging two heavy leather bags. Gill introduced him as her manager Yasir as we were led us to a plush 27th floor conference room overlooking the Abu Dhabi coastline.

As Gill sat regally behind an oval table, Yasir unzipped the bags and pulled out several sheets of paper.

Gill didn’t waste any time on sociabilities. 

“We’ve been very busy,” she said, pointing to the large stack.

“And this is just the beginning. Under CULA, we’ll help 200,000 residents put the crisis behind them. And we will do that by injecting Dh5.4 billion at the street level. I’ve got Dh69 million in the UAE Central Bank awaiting clearance. It will be released within two weeks and used to help 200 applicants in the first phase.”

She didn’t bat an eyelid as she rattled the benefits of CULA which she said was the Arabic word for liquidity. Over the next hour we were told how the US, Poland and Cyprus among other nations were all waiting to see the outcome of the programme in the UAE so that they could replicate it in their own countries. “Help the poor, and get the UAE’s economy on track, that’s what CULA will do, ” she said.

Gill said she was assisting people who were in jail or hospital or had overstayed in the country. We were told CULA was also reaching out to students facing dropouts because of financial constraints.

“As a third party we’ll cover all pending school fees. I am already coordinating with the Abu Dhabi Education Council,” she claimed.

Midway through the meeting, Yasir also chipped in. “We help all this poor very much.” .

Gill said she was glad to have him on board. “Yasir is so devoted he has left his family and quit his job to focus on CULA,” she said.

Sitting before the confident woman it was hard to believe that she had been jailed abroad twice and was wanted in multiple countries.

Her confidence remained unwavering throughout the conversation as she ran us through her fanciful schemes, dropping names of international celebs and political heavyweights and using obscure financial jargon to bubble-wrap her sham show.

 “I want to inject cash at the street level to end gridlock, get cash flowing and pay down debt so that businesses can refocus on growth. The aim is to achieve quantitative easing, rewire the economy with horizontal collaboration and create self-employment and micro entrepreneurship.”

At one point she fished out a letter from the bag and thrust it before us. “UK prime minister David Cameroon believes in our cause and has personally appointed me as a diplomat to take forward my initiatives. ‘That’s his signature and stamp here,” she said.    

She also claimed to be leading an international network of stakeholders committed to improving the ‘quality of life’ of 1 billion people who live on $1 a day or less.”

And yes, she had also invented a solar cooker that could prepare a meal for 10 under an hour. 

All of this was hogwash.

We found out that the woman’s real name was Gill Edwards. She was a fugitive who had fled Britain for the US in 2001 following an arrest warrant. Gill was convicted for fraud in 1994 and also served a jail term.  In the US, she was accused of trying to rip off victims of 9/11 and in Uganda, arrested for failing to pay a hotel bill.

However, none of this had deterred her from reinventing herself as a champion of the poor and seeking investments in seemingly innovative concepts and projects such as detox centres for NYC responders of 9/11, IPO forex for funding the green economy, and now CULA.

A 2010 video posted on the sidelines of a sustainability conference in Sharjah showed  the ‘Queen of Green’ as she called herself then, boasting a $1 billion investment in the UAE. “We are going to green the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and the Sharjah Ladies Club,” she is seen saying in the video.

It wasn’t true, of course. Both Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Sharjah Ladies Club denied the claim. There were also videos of phoney interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Larry King where Gill can be seen rambling about her hare-brained schemes but she and presenters and Gill are never in the same frame. I found the man who stitched the videos together.

We spotted a picture on Gill’s Facebook and Twitter accounts showing her standing next to footballer David Beckham.  The caption read: “Discussing Africa with Beckham in Dubai. Met with David Beckcham to discuss how football can teach  orphans in Africa how to be team players.”

I found out that the man in the picture was not Beckham but his UK-based lookalike Jamie Gleeson.  He even wrote back to us when I contacted him for a comment. 

But Gill was as calm as a toad when I confronted her “Oh it was not Beckham. I thought it was him. We still discussed football and Africa,” she said.

She also denied any wrongdoing and instead blamed the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) for tarnishing her image when we called her later.

“All of this is a lie. I’ve never served time in jail… it’s a smear campaign run by racists in San Diego. The Klu Klux Klan is behind it. They’ve been after me since 2002 when I took on the Africa project,” she said before adding this priceless gem:

“Human capital is the driver of robust TFP driven growth as the coefficient correlation of the CULA initiative has a far better aggregate than what is pursued by traditional economies in pursuant of UN policies which may not be financially rewarding from the investment point of view.”

A few days earlier an Abu Dhabi real estate company had nearly fallen for the mumbo jumbo after Gill tried to talk its owners into transferring a Dh50 million building in her name.

Georges de Castro, the firm’s French manager, told me that Gill was so convincing that they almost got duped.

Later, we also reached out to Martin Seward-Case, a Dubai-based chartered surveyors who was approached by Gill to build 2,200 orphanages in Africa at costs running into millions of pounds. Initially tempted to go ahead, Martin backtracked when he found out about the woman’s criminal past.

Gill was horrified when we put her picture on the front page under the screaming headline ‘Queen of Con Exposed’ and followed up with another stinking article.  

She shot off a series of tweets accusing me of trying to sabotage her charity initiatives. One of the tweets carried my picture with a caption that read: “Mazhar is an economic terrorist who has been reported to Interpol, DHS, ECIPS UN and intell comm”

Who would have thought an HR manager at a rival publication would come across these mad ramblings while doing a background check upon me and, believing them to be true,  turn down my job application. But that’s another story for another day.

In one of her tweets, she claimed that President Obama has accepted my invitation to visit the UAE,” she boasted on Twitter, sparking a storm on the micro-blogging site.

For days she was the butt of jokes on Twitter. Hundreds trolled her. “Breaking News. @AmbassadorHHope signs a cooperation deal with Godzilla. Godzilla will plough land in Africa to make way for agriculture development,” said one user.     

Gill responded by mounting a fierce attack targeting me and my family.

I asked our legal department if we could sue her for slander but they said they wouldn’t want to get involved as it was a personal matter between me and her. I was livid. How could it be a personal matter? My story was published in the newspaper, not my blog, I argued. But the Indian guy heading our legal team refused to budge. But that changed quickly when Gill attacked the newspaper. And she did it in her own inimitable style: She issued a fake press release claiming that the UAE’s Telecommunications Regulations Authority is suing Gulf News and me for $5.4 billion for an Act of Economic Terrorism plus slander and libel. That got the legal team moving. A meeting was hurriedly called. After a long discussion our British editor at large, Francis Matthew, was tasked to write to the National Media Council drawing their attention towards Gill’s press release demanding action against her.

Roughly two years after this incident, on July 4, 2016 to be precise,   Matthew, 60, was arrested for killing his wife Jane with a hammer at their Dubai home. By a quirk of fate, I was also arrested on the same day. But more on that later.

Gill and his Egyptian partner who turned out to be her husband were arrested. But Gill was sprinted out of the UAE by the UK Foreign Office while her accomplice and hubby Yasir remained in jail to face fraud charges.

But the setbacks had no effect on Gill. Two years later she resurfaced as a guest speaker at Rotary Club’s 5 meet in Warwickshire, UK claiming she had received a  Nobel Prize nomination for her project to slash school fees in Abu Dhabi.

Fortunately, someone among the audience Googled her and came across our reports and asked the club president to stop her speech.  I haven’t heard from Gill as yet and often wonder what she’s up to now.