Former Leeds United managing director David Haigh has accused Gulf Finance House (GFH), who remain co-owners of the Championship club, of homophobic discrimination, suggesting that their attitude towards him is a contributory factor to his ongoing imprisonment in Dubai.

In making this incendiary claim via family and friends, Haigh, 37, who is gay, will bring fresh attention to the subject of homophobia in football, especially with co-owners of a club implicated. GFH own 25 per cent of Leeds.

In correspondence seen by The Mail on Sunday, Haigh alleges that his anti-homophobia campaigning while Leeds managing director was discouraged by GFH. He worked with gay rights charity Stonewall and with former Leeds midfielder Robbie Rogers, after the player came out, to promote Rogers’ ‘Beyond It’ campaign.

Former Leeds United managing director David Haigh has been in prison in Dubai since May

Haigh (right) has told friends his work in this area caused ‘extreme offence to those in Bahrain and Dubai at GFH’, and alleges they tried to prevent him using the Leeds programme to publicise these causes. Against their wishes, he went ahead anyway.

Haigh is currently in a Dubai prison cell, where he has been held since May, accused but not charged of stealing around £4million from GFH, his former employers. Under local laws, GFH as accusers are influential in whether proceedings continue or not.

Haigh claims he is entirely innocent, and in a formal defence document filed in the past week, claims he was owed the money he allegedly stole in unpaid wages, expenses and commissions.

The document makes a variety of allegations about GFH running their subsidiary office in Dubai, where Haigh was based, as a means of avoiding regulators scrutinising GFH business in the parent company’s home country, Bahrain.

On Friday evening a series of tweets were made to MPs and other influential figures by a friend of Haigh, Matthew Sephton, a Conservative party councillor from Cheshire and long-time gay rights campaigner. These tweets claimed Haigh was ‘in jail without charge or trial, probably because he’s gay’.

It is understood Haigh knew his friend would do this, and in supporting the move Haigh has effectively outed himself in public for the first time.

Haigh has made no secret to friends and close acquaintances about being gay. But he has never been openly gay and at times has taken steps to prevent it becoming widely known.

Sources say this was partly because he feared discrimination, and partly because GFH businesses adhere to Sharia law, which deems certain homosexual acts illegal.

A spokesman for Haigh said: ‘David has never made any secret to his friends and associates of his sexuality.

‘Naturally he has preferred to keep his personal life private, although he was always a determined campaigner on equality issues throughout his time at Leeds United.

‘It is understandable that, after he has been held in jail for more than seven months without any charge against him, his friends are speaking out on an issue which they believe may have contributed to his incarceration.’

A GFH spokesman responded: ‘We don’t know if David is gay and hence how could we treat him differently? He has been given golden opportunities (by GFH), trusted to lead our Dubai office and was then given the great opportunity at Leeds. This is enough proof of how decent the company was with him, but unfortunately he betrayed the trust.’

The spokesman added that Haigh has been promising his defence for months but ‘as yet seems to only have time to create multiple stories trying to divert attention from his fraud’.