Sheikhs, Lies and Real Estate: The Untold Story of Dubai (4 page)

Asim sighed and paused for a moment in deep
thought. ‘Okay, well, you sound like you want this and your résumé is
outstanding. When can you start?’

I couldn’t believe it! My bullshit seemed to
have worked and Asim made me a formal offer within a week. As I was only a
junior banker, I would not receive the full expat package of a housing and car
allowance that more senior expatriates were getting, but that didn’t bother me
too much. All I really wanted was the break. I was convinced that within a
couple of years I would be sailing around the clear waters of the Persian Gulf
in my own private yacht, so petty matters of allowances were trivial in the
greater scheme of things. I immediately resigned from my dreary job and
urgently made the last minute preparations to leave my life in London behind.

The night before I left to begin my new life, I
sat on my bed for the last time and stared at the giant poster on my wall. It
was the object of my childhood fantasies and the thing I desired more than
anything else in the world: a Porsche 911 Turbo. As a kid, while my friends had
drooled over pictures of Pamela Anderson and Carmen Electra, it was this fine
example of human engineering that had got my testosterone flowing like nothing
else. For me, the Porsche 911 Turbo represented the ultimate status symbol: a
feat of human engineering and an icon to show that one had truly made it. I had
always dreamed about making one of them my own, and I was convinced that the
pot of gold waiting for me in Dubai could turn that dream into reality in no
time.

I lay back on my bed and pondered the adventure
that lay ahead. I felt like Columbus on the cusp of his journey to discover a
new world. Yes, I was a little afraid and I would miss my dear family and close
friends. But I couldn’t wait to see the back of my banal job and pushy boss. I
was destined for greater things and I was determined to make the most of the rare
opportunity I had been given.

Little did I know that the journey that lay
ahead would be the most important of my life.

Once upon a time, in a distant corner of the Arabian
Peninsula lay a sleepy nation called the United Arab Emirates. The UAE was made
up of seven autonomous cities (‘Emirates’) where seven kings, or sheikhs,
benevolently ruled their respective territories according to strict Islamic
laws and customs. Life across these Emirates was docile and conservative,
governed by the old Bedouin tribal customs of centuries before. Despite the
bounties of oil wealth and the temptations of the modern world, these rulers
remained insular and reactionary, and their people were suspicious of change.

Yet of the seven, one was desperate to break
away from the chains and shackles of tradition. In a region where
shway
shway
(‘slow, slow’) was the overarching mantra, this Emirate’s visionary sheikh
was brimming with ambition to embrace the New World and cement his legacy for ever.
For years his predecessors had watched with envy as the Western world surged
ahead, leaving the envious East in its shadow. No longer would he settle for
second best. Although many dismissed his grandiose visions as the foolish
dreams of a madman, his resolve grew to the point of obsession. Money was of
little importance and time was a mere inconvenience. This sheikh would not stop
until the world was at his feet and the name of his city was spoken in the same
breath as London, Paris and New York.

That man was Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al
Maktoum, and his great project was Dubai.

***

The origins of the great Dubai experiment can be traced
back to the 1800s, when the formidable Bani Yas tribe dominated the remote
deserts of the Southern Arabian Peninsula. The Al Abu Falasa clan, a faction of
Bani Yas, broke away from their brethren to a remote and uninhabited corner of
the desert where a new settlement was established under the auspices of Sheikh
Maktoum bin Buti in 1833. With the support of the British government in
exchange for protection again the Ottoman Empire, the settlement soon attracted
other Bedouin settlers, and the foundations were laid for a new city of trade
and commerce to emerge. They called it
Dubai
.

The city leaders’ flair for shrewd business was
clear as early as 1901 when the savvy Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher Al Maktoum
established a free port by abolishing tariffs and persuading wealthy Iranian
merchants to relocate their trading activities to the Dubai Creek, a natural
harbour where traders could dock their goods and import and export freely
between Europe and the Far East. In the 1950s, before oil was discovered,
Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum dredged the Creek with a loan from the Emir
of Kuwait to expand its capacity for trade. And in 1959, Sheikh Rashid founded
Dubai airport and established the emirate’s first hotel, cementing the foundations
for his city’s bright future.

Oil was first struck in the Emirates’ capital
city Abu Dhabi in 1958, transforming the fortunes of the nation. However, Abu
Dhabi’s incumbent Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan failed to visualise the
potential to develop his city by utilising its new-found revenue stream. He was
replaced in a bloodless coup in 1966 by his more ambitious British-backed
brother Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who immediately went to work to
unite a land beset with tribal rivalries, and inspire its transformation from a
modest trading outpost to an economic powerhouse.

Zayed was a man of great principles and values;
a Bedouin before a statesman. He won the loyalty of his people by establishing
a welfare state that offered them free healthcare, comfortable housing and
education. His religious tolerance of Christians and the freedoms given to
Western expatriate workers were unprecedented for the region, and he was also
one of the world’s first environmentally friendly statesmen, remembered as ‘the
man who turned the desert green’ after ordering the planting of thousands of
trees in the barren sand. After the British withdrawal in 1971, Zayed continued
to utilise the country’s immense oil revenues and instilled a program of
infrastructure development and national investment, which led to the building
of new roads, schools, hospitals and utility plants. Despite being one of the
wealthiest men on the planet, Zayed chose to live a modest and traditional life,
which won him great praise from the masses as a man of the people.

Then, with the aid of big brother Abu Dhabi’s
oil revenues, Sheikh Rashid Al Maktoum surged ahead with Dubai’s own
modernisation program. Rashid was a realist and understood well that the gift
of oil was finite and that urgency was required to modernise and prepare his
city for an uncertain future. His famous words summed up his sentiment:

‘My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a
camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a
Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.’

Sheikh Rashid astounded his advisers with a
decision to build a new mega-port, the $3 billion Jebel Ali Free Zone and a
cornerstone for the commercial development of the city. The construction of the
colossal million-ton capacity Dubai Dry Docks project was entrusted to his
younger son Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s precocious future
ruler. It was a great example of financial clairvoyance that Sheikh Rashid
bequeathed to his sons when he passed away in 1990.

On 3 January 1995, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid
Al Maktoum became the Crown Prince of Dubai, marking a new era of decisive
leadership and economic growth. An RAF-trained pilot, a keen falconer, talented
poet and accomplished endurance equestrian, Mohammed outlined his ambitious
plans in his 2006 book
My Vision: Challenges in the Race for Excellence
,
in which he compared Dubai to Cordoba, the medieval capital of Arab Spain and a
centre of intellectual enquiry, debate and interaction, revealing his vision to
revive the glory of the Arabia of yesteryear.

Sheikh Mohammed shared his father’s urgency and
built on his legacy of modernisation. The late 1990s saw the emergence of new
real estate projects the scale and size of which had never been seen in the entire
region. Among these were the iconic Emirates Towers, which became the tallest
and most contemporary commercial buildings in the Middle East. Mohammed also
established tailor-made business parks like Media City and the DIFC, which
offered 100 per cent foreign ownership and tax-free incentives to the world’s
top companies to make Dubai their regional hub.

However, the crowning glory of the new Dubai
was to be the opulent Burj Al Arab, the tallest free-standing and only
seven-star hotel. The magnificent sail-like structure instantly became the
iconic symbol of Dubai’s ambitions to become one of the globe’s leading
destinations. Sheikh Mohammed’s decisiveness and the impressive speed of his
execution won him great praise from his peers. He was the entrepreneur sheikh;
the chief executive of a new giant city-corporation, later aptly nicknamed
‘Dubai Inc.’.

Yet despite the sheikh’s monumental efforts
throughout the 1990s, Dubai remained utterly insignificant in the corridors of
global power. The West’s close alliances with the Gulf’s other oil-rich regimes
had served them well to keep supplies up and providing useful cash-rich
customers for weapons and Treasury Bonds when coffers were low. But the
reputation of the region remained that of a mysterious backwater of old-fashioned
Bedouins beset by tribal bickering. Dubai’s lack of any significant oil
reserves ensured that it would never be given the same respect as its
neighbours Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Abu Dhabi.

In 2001, a quite unexpected event would disturb
this longstanding status quo for ever. This single incident served as the
unlikely catalyst to catapult Dubai onto the global stage and usher in a new
era of recognition and respect. That event was 9/11. Within days, wealthy Arabs
pulled billions of dollars out of US and European capital markets through fear
of a political backlash from Western governments. There were reports of planes
loaded with gold bars and dollar bills flying across the Atlantic in a frantic
display of financial repatriation as Middle Eastern regimes scrambled to bring
their money out before the tide turned against them.

With such enormous wealth flooding home, it
needed to be parked somewhere safe and lucrative. Dubai’s visionary sheikh saw
his opportunity. In May 2002, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed announced the ground-breaking
Dubai Freehold Decree, which allowed the open purchase of property in Dubai for
the first time in its history. A surge of pent-up demand was unleashed and this
piece of legislation proved to be the stroke of genius that would win Sheikhs
Mohammed the praise his craved.

From Dubai’s perspective, the 2002 decree was
the latest step in the progressive history of a modernising city that had begun
in the early twentieth century. But to the outside world, 2002 was the beginning
of history for Dubai. It represented the tiny Emirate’s arrival onto the global
stage like a tremendous ‘big bang’ that kick-started its ascendancy as a global
destination for tourism, trade and investment. The timing could not have been
more perfect. Destitute funds returning from the West were welcomed with open
arms by Dubai’s government-backed property developers Emaar and Nakheel to
bankroll their grand real estate ambitions. They were soon followed by hundreds
of private developers, and the subsequent gold rush would transform the city’s
skyline for ever.

After decades in the shadows of obscurity,
Dubai had finally found its place in the sun. It was now time for Sheikh
Mohammed to step up and show the world just how high he could reach.  

‘
Yalla, habibi, yalla
…!’

I was abruptly woken from my blissful slumber
by the repetitive Arabic pop song blasting out of the wall-mounted television
above.

‘Let’s go, oh baby, let’s go…!’

As I scrambled for the remote control to get a
few extra minutes of much-needed snooze, I caught a glimpse of the vivid images
and jumped up to get a proper look. An attractive Lebanese bottle blonde was
prancing provocatively around a forest dressed in a skimpy school uniform,
which was conveniently too small for her buxom physique. The pop video was
littered with sexual innuendo as its voluptuous star teased her audience with
the guile of a stripper. Was this mild pornography really allowed to be
broadcasted in the conservative Middle East? I was eventually startled out of
my trance by the bellowing echo of the Muslim call to prayer from a nearby
mosque. It signalled the crack of dawn and time to get ready.

As I brushed my teeth, I looked down at
Imperial Bank’s state-of-the-art office block from my twenty-seventh-floor
window. From this vantage point I could see that it was only a short walk away
from the Emirates Towers, so I took my time to shower, shave and get dressed.
But it was as I was applying my complimentary rose-scented shower gel that I
remembered I had failed to consider one important factor in my scheduling: the
punishing desert heat outside. Considering my brief encounter with the Dubai
summer at the airport yesterday, the prospect of even walking to the other side
of the road caused a shudder down my spine. Throughout breakfast I formulated
strategies on the back of my napkin with the tenacity of a military general in
preparation for round two with the sun.

After a couple of false starts by stepping
outside the lobby and running back inside to the amusement of the hotel staff,
I went for it. The first five or six steps were fine. Seven and eight were
okay. But it was around my tenth stride that the blazing sun decided to strike
again. Once again, my face turned bright red and large rings of sweat formed
under my armpits and around my groin. I felt sticky and wet, and within a few
moments I resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t go a single step further.
I stopped, turned round and staggered back to the hotel lobby.

After some deliberation, I accepted that there
was no option but to do something highly embarrassing, but necessary. It was
something I would never have dreamed of doing back in London, but there was
simply no other choice in the circumstances: I took a taxi to cross the street.

As the cab pulled up, I jumped in the back head
first to avoid the gawping valet attendants who had now gathered in a huddle to
mock me. But before I could utter a word to the driver, I was struck with the
most appalling odour: a hideous fusion that could only be described as curry,
sweat and rotten eggs. I held my poor nostrils together as tightly as I could,
but the smell alone was not the worst of it. The sound of strangely repetitive
Indian flute music was pumping out of the struggling stereo at full volume, and
the seats were sticky and damp. The only redeeming feature of this taxi from
hell was that the air conditioning was working reasonably well, which was
enough to keep me planted in the back seat.

‘Where you go?’ shouted the driver at me in a
strong Asian accent. He was an older man with oily hair and hairy ears, and he
looked like he hadn’t bathed for weeks.

‘To the DIFC, please.’

‘Dubai Internet City, no problem,’ he said and
slammed his foot on the gas.

‘No!’ I screamed. He braked abruptly and turned
to stare at me with his beady yellow eyes. His breath was unbearably foul. ‘I
said
DIFC
.’

‘You say DIC!’

‘No, I said D-I-F-C. Dubai International
Financial Centre.’

He looked utterly bemused. ‘Where is this
place?’

‘You don’t know where the DIFC is?’ He shook
his head. ‘It’s there, across the street.’ I pointed desperately.

‘There?’

‘Yes, there.’

‘If there, why no you walk?’ It was a
reasonable question.

I sighed and muttered sheepishly under my
breath, ‘It’s too hot.’

‘It’s too hot?’

‘Yes, it’s too hot to walk.’

‘Not too hot!’

‘Yes, it is. It’s just too hot to walk today. I
tried, but I can’t do it. Please, I’m begging you, just drive me there.’ 

My driver had forced a confession and he didn’t
look too happy. He had assumed, quite correctly, that passengers from the
Emirates Towers at this time of the morning usually went to work at the city’s
other business districts like the Dubai Internet City or the Media City, which
were both a fair distance away. Nobody ever took a taxi from here to the DIFC!
By accepting my pitifully short fare he was probably sacrificing a better one
elsewhere, and he didn’t hide his frustration. He turned up the hypnotic Indian
music and began singing at the top of his voice. I was sure it was a small act
of revenge, and it wasn’t long before I cracked under his torture tactic and
decided to attempt some small talk just to make it stop.

‘That’s, erm, very interesting music. Where is
it from?’ I shouted over it.

‘From Peshawar.’

‘Ah, I see. Is that where you are from?’

‘Yes, I am from Peshawar in Pakistan.’ He
stared at me again in his rear-view mirror. ‘Where are you from?’

‘I’m from London.’

The driver began to shake his head as if I had
told him a massive lie. ‘You are from London?’ he asked. ‘Your face looks like
Arab. Where your mother, father from?’

‘Well, their roots are in Pakistan. But they
live in London.’

‘So you are from Pakistan!’ he shouted, now clearly
overjoyed by our shared ancestry.

‘No, like I said...’

 ‘Which
pind
is your father from?’ he interrupted.

‘I’m sorry,
pind
?’

‘
Pind
. How you say, village?’

‘I have no idea...’

 ‘Very, very bad! You should know your
pind
!’
Great, that’s just what I needed right now, a history lesson from a taxi
driver. ‘You speak Urdu?’

‘No, only English I’m afraid.’

‘
Yaar
, very bad,’ he scolded. ‘You
should speak Urdu. You think you are from England?’

‘I
am
from England!’

‘No, you are from Pakistan!’

This conversation was clearly going nowhere, so
I conceded I was an ignorant immigrant with an identity crisis. It was the
first of many lessons on f Dubai’s social hierarchy. The colour of one’s
passport meant very little. Whether you were British, Indian or Chinese, your social
status in Dubai was determined ultimately by ethnicity. If you had blond hair
and blue eyes, you were considered a Westerner, no matter where you called
home. And if you were of Pakistani or Indian origin, you were Pakistani or
Indian first, even if you were British. It was all rather confusing, but it was
the way Dubai society had functioned for decades, a clearly defined social
pecking order based on skin colour. I seemed to present an unwelcome spanner in
the works of this well-oiled system, as I had a British passport yet was of
Pakistani ethnicity and looked like an Arab!

The journey was embarrassingly short. After
driving down the ramp from the hotel lobby and around a small roundabout, we
were pretty much there.

‘Here, DIFC!’ he shouted in a patronising
tone.  

‘Thank you,’ I replied sheepishly and paid him
a handsome tip to offset the humiliation, although I gathered he was now more
upset about my lack of knowledge of the regional tribes of Pakistan than the
short fare.

‘Never forget your country, my friend,’ he
warned before driving away to the sounds of his strange music. I was just grateful
to escape the dreadful smell.

I stood at the foot of the financial centre and
glanced up at the colossal stone that towered over me. The iconic arch of the
Gate was even more impressive from this vantage point than from my hotel room.
It reminded me of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, except this structure incorporated glass
in its walls, looking into the numerous offices inside. The surrounding six
buildings were positioned like a giant semi-square around the Gate, all of them
recently finished and many still unoccupied. Covered cloisters ran around the
perimeter of the buildings, and a few empty restaurants and cafés with outdoor
pavilions overlooked the grounds below.

The creation of Dubai International Financial
Centre in 2004 marked the city’s claim to becoming one of the world’s great
financial centres. It was established as a Federal Financial Free Zone,
offering over a hundred acres of prime office space for investment banks and financial
institutions to set up their regional offices in Dubai on an attractive tax-free
basis. The elites of global finance and banking were coaxed into establishing
operations in the DIFC and it soon became the world’s fastest-growing financial
hub, comprising almost five hundred local and international companies and employing
more than eleven thousand professionals.

In theory, it was an excellent idea. The DIFC
bridged the time-zone gap between London and Singapore and offered a convenient
hub to access Africa, the subcontinent and the near east. But as Dubai threw
millions of dollars into gleaming tower blocks and tax breaks, the only thing
it couldn’t buy was credibility. That would take much longer to earn and the
Emirate wasn’t best known for its patience. Imperial Bank had been one of the
first international institutions to move its entire regional operations to the
DIFC, and building number four was to be the location of my new office. I
entered through the revolving glass doors and announced my arrival to the
Indian security guard at the reception desk.

‘Hi, my name is Adam. I’m here to meet Asim Ali
at Imperial Bank.’

‘Welcome, sir. Please, one moment,’ he said and
picked up the phone beside him.

A few moments later, my new boss Asim came
downstairs to greet me. He was just as I had imagined, a slim-built Pakistani
man in his mid-thirties with a dark complexion, a side parting in his hair and
an ill-fitting suit. However, he seemed surprised by my appearance and stared
at me curiously for a moment, as if he had pictured me completely differently. It
was obvious that I wasn’t exactly what he had been expecting.

‘Adam?’

‘Hi, Asim! It’s great to meet you finally.’ I enthusiastically
shook his hand.

‘Yes, you too.’ He hesitated. ‘You look quite
different to what I was expecting.’

‘Oh really, how so?’

‘Well, with a name like Adam and an Oxford degree
I was expecting you to be, well, white...’ He looked a little disappointed.

‘Well, this is me!’

‘Indeed. Let’s head upstairs, I’ll show you to
your desk. Nice suit, by the way.’

As I followed Asim into the elevator and out
into the bank’s dealing room, I was struck by how quiet it was. The trading
floor felt more like a library than an investment bank. There were no
salespeople shouting at clients on phones, or traders yelling at salespeople,
like I was used to in London. Instead, rows of Indians, Pakistanis and Emiratis
sat obediently in front of their computers, intensely involved in their work.
It was a far cry from the dynamic, money-making boiler room I was familiar with,
and it made me a little concerned.

 ‘Meet Deepak, Ram and Sanjay,’ said Asim, and
I shook hands with three identical-looking Indian men with thick moustaches and
side-parted hair. They seemed distracted by my arrival and reluctantly tore
themselves away from their screens to greet me.

‘What is your good name?’ asked one of them in
a robotic voice.

‘Sorry, my good name?’

‘Yes, your good name.’

‘Do you mean my name?’

‘Yes, your good name.’

‘It’s Adam.’

He then sat back at his desk and got back to
work. It was already obvious there was not going to be a great deal of banter between
us.

I made myself comfortable at my new desk and
began to ponder whether I had made the right decision to take such a huge
gamble with my career. I tried to take solace in the belief that I was a
pioneering young banker in a fast-growing global financial centre, well placed
to ride a wave of expansion in one of the world’s most up-and-coming regions. My
first impressions were hardly encouraging. I desperately hoped my hunch was
right.

***

That evening, I wanted nothing more than a quiet drink
alone. The stress of the past few weeks had taken its toll and I was craving
some time by myself to relax and switch off. After a long shower, I took the
elevator up to Vu’s Lounge, a trendy hotel bar on the fifty-first floor of the
Emirates Towers. I took a seat on the deliciously comfortable red-leather sofa
and scanned the extensive drinks menu.

The bar was not too busy at this early hour and
I was glad I could hear myself think over the soft jazz music trickling out of
the speakers. I treated myself to a Monte Cristo cigar and a Mojito cocktail
and as I puffed away gently, I looked out onto the hazy sunset falling over the
city skyline and the ever-busy Sheikh Zayed Road below. The view of the city
from this unique vantage point was breathtaking, and I hadn’t felt so relaxed
in days. I sank further into my seat to make the most of this rare moment of
bliss.

Ping
. The elevators doors opened and out
strolled a stunning blonde who nearly made me fall off my chair. Dressed in
seductive skinny jeans, a fitted white jacket and five-inch heels, she could
have easily passed for a supermodel. I almost burned my leg with cigar ash as I
watched her strut into the bar with an irresistible swagger. She looked
European, perhaps Russian. As she walked over in my direction, she seemed to
spot me staring from the corner of her eye before taking a seat at the bar. She
was too beautiful to ignore, yet I didn’t want to make my interest too obvious
so I decided to play it cool.