After decade in Mongolian limbo, Australian Mohammad Munshi pleads for help to return home

For Mo Munshi and his family, the Australian government’s role in securing the release of the Bali Nine drug smugglers has only exacerbated their pain and frustration about the way it has handled his case.

Australian mining executive Mo Munshi has been detained in Mongolia. He claims he is innocent and is desperate to return home to his family. Picture: X

An Australian businessman who has been stuck in Mongolia for almost a decade has lashed the Australian government and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade over what he says is their lack of effort to bring him home.

Mohammad “Mo” Munshi spent more than seven years in a Mongolian prison after being jailed on what he calls sham charges of financial misconduct.

The veteran mining executive had raised some $200m to advance the development of a substantial coking coal deposit in the developing nation, but wound up in prison amid a complex dispute with one of his Mongolian investors. He has consistently maintained his innocence, and has assembled reams of documents that he says not only prove that, but which show multiple issues, inconsistencies and even potentially corruption in the way his case was handled by Mongolian authorities.

Mr Munshi remains stuck in Mongolia despite having completed his sentence, living out of a small one-bedroom apartment and relying on money sent to him from his family in Australia, after Mongolian authorities slapped a travel ban on him upon his release. That ban, he says, will be lifted only if he pays $2.5m to his estranged Mongolian business partners.

“Over the past 10 years I’ve been given all kinds of wonderful advice by what I thought were intelligent and smart people to pay the money, or do this, that or the other. But I live off my principles. We are what we are, and my parents never taught me to pay bribes, especially for crimes I’ve never done,” he told The Weekend Australian.

For much of his sentence, Mr Munshi – a dual Australian and UK citizen – was detained in a maximum-security prison alongside murderers and rapists. The conditions inside the Mongolian prisons, he says, were brutal.

He shared a cell with up to 10 other people at a time, sleeping on a 1cm-thick mattress and being ­allowed to shower only once every fortnight.

The food was horrendous: typically a soup of boiled fat and ­unwashed stomach tripe, with barely a vegetable to be seen.

The diet and conditions took a huge toll on his physical health.

During his time in prison, he had to have a stent inserted into his heart to address the chronic ischaemic heart disease he developed while behind bars.

He also suffered from acute prostatitis, which led to bleeding from his penis whenever he urinated and acute incontinence. That condition, he said, went untreated for four years.

To make matters worse, he was denied any direct contact with his family for years. His only means of communication with his loved ones was through messages ferried back and forth to him through his lawyers.

“The conditions were meant to be hard,” Mr Munshi said.

“The intent was to make it very, very difficult for me, to isolate me and make sure that I couldn’t tell the world what they were doing.”

The saga has been made all the worse for Mr Munshi and his family through what they say is the lack of meaningful support from both the Australian and British governments.

That disappointment has been further confounded by steps taken by the Australian government at the same time as he has been left to wallow.

DFAT recently committed $39.9m in development aid towards growing Mongolia’s mining industry, while the deal late last year to return the surviving members of the Bali Nine heroin importation ring from Indonesia to Australia was devastating to both Mr Munshi and his family.

“I have been up here, investigated, incarcerated, destroyed and abused for nearly 10 years now for a crime that I never committed, and they refuse to lift a finger to help me but are happy to help convicted heroin drug smugglers,” Mr Munshi said.

Mr Munshi’s youngest child was just three years old when he was detained. He has been unable to develop a normal parental relationship as a result.

In 2021, Mr Munshi’s mother passed away. He says it was the only time during the past 10 years that he allowed himself to cry.

Back in Australia, the toll on his family has been immense. His oldest son Arif says the ordeal has been “soul-crushing” for all of them.

“We just keep hitting our heads against brick walls,” he told The Weekend Australian.

“You go to various different people asking for help, particularly with our own government here, and we don’t feel like we’ve been given a particularly large amount of help.

“We just get very, very, very little assistance from DFAT, almost to the point of it being useless. It’s meaningless word-salad statements and nothing meaningful happening at all.”

The long-running uncertainty about their father has been a constant weight on the family.

“That’s been the real killer, because here we are 10 years later and we’re still no closer to knowing if he’s going to get out, if he’s ever going to leave Mongolia alive, if we will ever see him again,” he said.

The repatriation of the surviving Bali Nine members, he said, was extremely upsetting.

“As Australians, we all think that we’re going to be OK when we go overseas if we get in trouble. We have faith in our government, we have faith that our country is going to look after us when we are in a different country, and at least help us to get out and get home. But as we’ve learned in our 10-year journey through this nightmare, that’s not how it happens at all,” he said.

“The government seems to pick and choose who they want to help and how much they want to help. That’s also been really depressing for me and my family here because we see other people in similar situations getting help, and my father just gets nothing.”

Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the Australian academic who spent more than two years wrongfully detained in an Iranian prison, has studied Mr Munshi’s case closely in her role as the director of the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance and firmly believes he is innocent.

Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance director Kylie Moore-Gilbert says she has studied Mr Munshi’s case and believes he is innocent. Picture: Martin Ollman / NewsWire

She says his case clearly shows the need for Australia to follow the lead of nations such as the US and establish a criteria and process to have Australian citizens formally recognised as wrongfully detained.

“His terrible treatment in prison and the gross lack of any due process in court, these kinds of issues of really big red flags that could indicate a wrongful detention, that he is an innocent person,” she said.

“He’s never been treated as though he’s wrongfully detained, not by Australia and by the UK, they don’t seem to have taken any great interest in his predicament at all. He only received the very bare minimum of consular assistance and there were significant periods of time where he didn’t even get that.”

She says that the impediments to Australian intervention in Mr Munshi’s case had eased since he was released from prison.

“It’s much, much less of an ask, in my view, for the Australian government to get a travel ban removed than it is to get someone released from prison,” she said.

“From the Mongolian authorities’ perspective, justice has been served and he’s done his time. We have leverage, we have extensive investments in Mongolia so for me it seems like a relatively low-cost diplomatic form of outreach, just to request that that travel ban be lifted and try to assist him to depart the country.”

A DFAT spokesman confirmed that the department was providing consular assistance to an Australian released from detention in Mongolia last year, but privacy obligations meant it was unable to provide further comment.

“The Australian government works tirelessly to support and advocate for Australians detained overseas,” the spokesman said.

“We carefully assess the circumstances of each case to inform our consular support but cannot intervene in another country’s legal matters.”

A Senate inquiry into the wrongful detention of Australian citizens overseas late last year handed down a report with 18 recommendations aimed at improving the way the government and DFAT handles the cases such as that of Mr Munshi.

That same inquiry heard that DFAT typically counsels those wrongfully detained overseas and their families from speaking out publicly, for fear of making their situation even worse.

Mr Munshi says he is aware of the risks of telling his story.

“They’ve already killed me anyway. I am living, eating and breathing, yes, but everything else they destroyed. I’ve got nothing to lose,” he said.

“I’ve got to tell the truth.”