The scale of the collapse of a Dubai estate agent and its effect on Britons seeking a new life for themselves and their families has emerged – and looks to be far worse than had been thought.

The case also has repercussions for recruitment agencies making global placements of jobs candidates.

It now appears that most of the staff who lost their jobs at scandal-hit Dubai firm Smith and Ken were mostly British estate agents who had only recently been head-hunted and flown out from the UK.

The Brits, including those who uprooted their families, had signed up for the lifestyle on offer and tax-free earnings.

It seems they were lured by a sunshine lifestyle and the possibility of high earnings, albeit against ferocious performance targets and the reality of working in a tower block.

With their dreams dashed, it now seems the British agents were recruited only because previous staff had left out of dissatisfaction at the company’s practices.

The revelations come in a story carried in the paper Al Arabiya News, and follow EYE’s own story yesterday about the shock bankruptcy of what had purported to be Dubai’s leading agent.

The British recruitment firms which sourced the candidates believed that the firm was well established, had survived through the last recession, and had won several awards.

However, according to the Al Arabiya story, “despite loud claims on its website to be the industry’s best agency, an online search for the company shows a plethora of complaints of dishonest agents and malpractices, and an overall low-level of service”.

The story also makes reference to Smith and Ken’s flamboyance and daily pep talks firing up commission-hungry agents.

Some of the British agents started only this month and will not have been paid at all. Others were still due to start and may have already flown out there.

Some 80 people are thought to have lost their jobs at Smith and Ken which also claimed to be a multiple industry award winner.

In a further twist, it is understood that the business had been largely run remotely, from Los Angeles.

One shocked former employee told Al Arabiya News that she had had a phone call in the middle of the night from the office manager, telling them not to go to work next morning “because the company’s closed down”.

The employee did go to the office, saying: “We went in the following day to pick up our passports, because the majority of the staff were new, people who had flown over from the UK.”

After pushing open the office door, the staff saw that the office had been stripped overnight of equipment, including Mac computers.

However, says the newspaper, a number of the agents have not been left jobless, and have been snapped up by a rival agent in the same office tower.