Hello and welcome to Business Daily Meets from the BBC World Service.

I'm Sam Fenwick.

Today, from shaping economic policy at the highest level

to being accused of spying and locked up inside one of the world's most notorious prisons.

The lights in the prison cells are never turned off.

It's very, very hard to sleep and your mind

just swirls around what's happening to you, and you can often find yourself in great distress.

Sean Ternal was an economic advisor to Aung Song Suu Kyi and Myanmar's democratically elected government

until the military seized power in 2021.

He was arrested, charged under the Official Secrets Act and imprisoned.

Charges widely condemned as politically motivated both inside Myanmar and abroad.

It was a complete farce. You know, so much of the evidence was just patently manufactured.

Sean Tennell spent 650 days in detention before being freed in a mass amnesty on the 17th of November

2022. Suddenly, I got a knock on the door, a prison guard who just suddenly announced,

Sean, you're going home. That's Business Daily Meets with economist Sean Tunnell.

Before Myanmar, Sean Tunnell was working as an economics professor in Sydney,

known more for his number crunching than controversy.

He taught at the Macquarie University,

specialised in financial reform, and spent his days with spreadsheets, students and the occasional policy paper. I was very much a normal person. I lived in a suburb not unlike neighbours,

the TV show. But my job and a professor of one of the

universities here in Sydney meant that, you know, I had a fairly sedentary life. And you'd call

yourself, I think, a bit of an economics geek as well. Totally. Economics was the thing that I loved

...