Curtain about to come down on a nightmare that would enthral Hollywood Matt Joyce, his wife Angela Higgins and two of their three children. If the story of Matt Joyce and Marcus Lee and their families were to be made into a feature film - and this battle of innocent men falsely accused has all the ingredients - it might be called Enduring Love, hadn't someone already thought of that title. "I hope not," Mr Joyce's wife, Angela Higgins, sighs at the suggestion of a movie. You do whatever it takes to get through as a family. I don't know if there's a romantic side to it. It hasn't been easy. The pressure on our marriage has been intense. But all of us have known Matt's innocence, and a man who is innocent deserves to be stood by - for as long as it takes. It has taken almost five years. That is how long the couple and their three young children have been trapped in Dubai. It was January 2009 when Mr Joyce, then managing director of Dubai Waterfront, the world's biggest development project, and his colleague Marcus Lee were arrested on property fraud charges. They were jailed for nine months then held under effective house arrest ever since, even while an Australian court found in a parallel case that there was no fraud. Relief: Marcus Lee and his wife, Julie. In a surprise verdict on Sunday, the Dubai Court of Appeal acquitted Mr Joyce, who had been sentenced to 10 years' jail and a $25 million fine. It also upheld the May acquittal of Mr Lee, whose wife Julie has also endured in Dubai for these five years. "What this has taught us," Mr Lee told Fairfax Media, "is that we've got ourselves. We've lost everything financially, but we've got us. Julie and I have each other. And that's what it really comes down to. We were both very career-orientated before . . . It takes something like this - some kind of a big shock - to give you a reality check in life. Both families must now wait up to 30 days to learn wether the prosecution will appeal the verdicts. If not, both could spend Christmas with their ageing parents and families. While the full reasons for the verdicts are not expected for another two weeks, the Joyce legal team says the court focused on inconsistencies in the evidence of his chief accuser, David Brown, an Australian executive from the Gold Coast-based developer Sunland. Sunland had claimed Mr Joyce and his Geelong Grammar schoolmate Angus Reed conned it into paying a consultancy fee of more than $12 million so it could then buy a plot of land on Dubai Waterfront, D17, from the emirate's government-owned master developer, Nakheel. It accused them of claiming Mr Reed's company, Prudentia, had rights over the plot, but an Australian court - in a failed civil action launched by Sunland - found there was no deception, and that Sunland knowingly paid Prudentia to walk away from a proposed joint venture at D17. While Mr Brown told investigators that Mr Joyce introduced him to D17, he later told the Dubai court it was another Australian, Jeff Austen. "The appeal memo that our lawyers submitted focused on the fact that Brown did not report any allegation of fraud until he was under investigation in Dubai," Ms Higgins said. Mr Brown was originally treated as a suspect and questioned over an alleged bribe, but the prosecution then treated him as the victim and official documents described him as the plaintiff and the complainant. Sunland stresses that it did not launch the Dubai case. The case was brought by the Dubai authorities on the basis of a report by the Government of Dubai's Financial Audit Office . . . [The] prosecution was a matter for the Dubai authorities. Ms Higgins said she was grateful the truth finally emerged through the Dubai justice system. I never lost hope or the belief that the truth would prevail. That's what's kept me going all these years. I just had to wait. Ms Higgins said the family planned to return to Victoria and "for our children to become Australian again, and to learn what it is to be Australian." Her constant focus in Dubai had been that the children - now aged 7, 9 and 11 - "would have as much normality as possible." We've had to work really hard to push the stress aside when we were in their company. We weren't always successful. I think the children have absorbed a lot of our distress. But she said: "You keep it in perspective. We still had each other, and all hardships come to an end. Neither couple yet knows what they will do for work in Australia or how they will recover financially. "We've got to rebuild ourselves physically and mentally first," Mr Lee said, "and then we've got to [decide] how we'll exist for another 30 years and get along with our lives so we can be happy." Julie Lee said: "If there is one small positive we could find in all this, it is that we have each other, we are stronger, we know we can handle immense strains that would have tested the best of relationships, and we are more committed than we have ever been."