I think that issue is that the government claims there are legal cases against him, and the British government is wiping their hands of it claiming that they can't interfere until the legal issues are tied up. Though I think it's possible for him to stay at the embassy if he runs out of money and has no place to stay.<p>These are diplomatic issues. I don't think that the British government really has much leverage to apply pressure to Qatar. It's also possible that they don't do much in the way of action/applying pressure unless it becomes a major media event.<p>There was a media event a couple of years ago around a Canadian citizen that was detained in Mexico because her boss was a crook. Apparently they couldn't get/punish him so they grabbed her and claimed that she was implicit in the crime because her salary (~$30K IIRC) came out of the money that he cheated people out of (she was his secretary, IIRC).<p>The Canadian government was able to convince the Mexicans to allow her to serve her sentence in a Canadian prison. When she was in Canada I believe they waived her sentence, gave her community service instead, or something similar. This brought a lot of other people with similar issues to the forefront. Some of which had been trying to get the Canadian government to intervene for years, but they didn't get enough media coverage to warrant decisive action.  I think that the number the CBC trotted out was ~120 similar cases of Canadian citizens detained in foreign countries for dubious crimes (or no claims of crime whatsoever).<p>I think that, in general, governments don't want to play the diplomacy game for these 'small gains' if they don't have to since diplomacy can be give-take in many cases. They are only forced to act to avoid losing face with the general public when a specific case becomes a media-storm.<p>[UPDATE] I guess I should mention that in the case of the woman in Mexico, her ex-boss even came forward to say that she had no knowledge of his crimes (for whatever that's worth, seeing-as the guy was a conman for all intents and purposes). Also, I can't remember of the money was her salary or a 'bonus' that he paid to her, but I'm pretty sure the amount of around $27K and she wasn't a rich woman, so I think it was her salary.