British Saudi Aramco executive gets jail term for using satellite phone in India

A British oil executive has told how he was jailed in India alongside hardened criminals after taking a banned satellite phone to a yoga retreat.

Fergus McLeod, who works for the oil company Saudi Aramco, says he spent a week in an Indian jail with several “very serious” convicts after he accidentally broke the country’s strict rules.

Mr McLeod, who is head of investor relations for the company, the world’s biggest oil exporter, says he was arrested at a hotel in the UNESCO heritage site Valley of Flowers National Park in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand this summer.

The 62-year-old says police took him from his retreat after finding a satellite phone in his possession. Foreigners are not allowed to use satellite phones while in India. This type of phone was banned after terrorists used it in the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 175 people.

Anyone who is not from India must seek permission from the government to use a special type of phone that uses satellites to pick up signals rather than ground towers.

Mr McLeod was arrested on 12 July and was held in prison in the town of Chamoli until 18 July. The executive, who was on vacation with friends, including some Saudi Aramco colleagues, said he was treated well throughout the ordeal.

Officers arrested Mr McLeod after he switched a satellite phone on and off in his hotel room but claimed not to have used it.

Authorities were then able to obtain the phone’s coordinates before arresting him.

Mr McLeod, who has led investor relations at the oil giant since 2017, said Financial Times he did not know about the ban.

The Saudi Aramco boss was on a yoga retreat at a UNESCO heritage site called the Valley of Flowers National Park in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Photo of an adult meditating

He also said he successfully passed through two airports in the country without being stopped by security. He claims he purchased the phone legally in the UK in 2017 for personal use.

He later used it when traveling in the desert of Saudi Arabia in case of emergencies.

Mr McLeod added that although he had been treated well by lawyers during his detention, his request for the assistance of a lawyer had been refused. He also failed to contact his family.

He said: “It was a scary place and a very traumatic experience where I was in a shared cell with long-term prisoners who had committed very serious crimes.”

A police officer in Chamoli, Narendra Singh Rawat, confirmed to the FT that Mr McLeod had been arrested and was carrying a satellite phone “by mistake”.

While in prison, he tried to contact the Foreign Office hotline, adding that while the government department was “sympathetic”, no “significant action” had been taken.

The oil executive was eventually released after his friends paid bail. Despite this, he was able to leave the country before a court hearing at the end of the month on July 27, where he pleaded guilty and paid a fine of just 10 pounds ($12), or 1,000 rupees.

Satellite phones (pictured left) use satellites to receive signals, not ground towers. The Indian government banned foreign nationals from using the phones in the country after they were used in the deadly 2008 Mumbai terror attack (pictured right)

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it had “provided consular support to a Briton in India”, but did not provide any further details.

Mr McLeod is one of the most senior Western executives at Aramco, based in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

The Oxford University PPE graduate joined the company and moved to Saudi Arabia in 2017, a few years before the oil company became one of the most valuable companies in the world, just behind technology company Apple.