Robert Pether, a 50-year-old Australian engineer who had been based in Dubai before his arrest, left Iraq on October 12 and is now travelling to reunite with his family in Ireland. Pether and his Egyptian colleague, Khaled Radwan, were detained in Baghdad in August 2021 amid a contract dispute between their employer, CME, and Iraq's central bank over a $33 million construction project.
Both men were later fined $12 million each by an Iraqi court. Pether was released from prison in June 2025 but remained barred from leaving Iraq for months afterwards, before authorities finally allowed him to depart. In 2022, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had already ruled that his detention was arbitrary and in breach of international law, adding pressure on Baghdad to resolve the case.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Australia's ambassador to Iraq, Glenn Miles, were both involved in the diplomatic effort to secure his release. Pether's family, who had campaigned publicly for years to bring him home, said he was expected to reunite with them in Ireland on Monday morning.
Before travelling to Baghdad for the central bank project, Pether had lived and worked in Dubai, where his employer was based. His case became one of the longest-running detentions of a foreign resident of the UAE in the region, drawing sustained attention from rights groups and renewing scrutiny of the legal risks facing foreign contractors and their employers operating in Iraq.