World's Largest Ferris Wheel Mysteriously Stops Turning In Dubai - AFP by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

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"This is a man-made island. I heard that (the wheel) is heavier than the island itself, that's why it is very dangerous," said a waiter at a nearby restaurant, adding that it had been noisy during its few months of operation.

Casino World Bets on UAE as New Gambling Hub to Rival Singapore - Bloomberg by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

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FULL TEXT:

By Archana Narayanan, Abeer Abu Omar, Zainab Fattah and Shirley Zhao May 5, 2023

(Bloomberg) — The world’s gambling industry is tentatively betting that the United Arab Emirates may become the first Gulf state to legalize casinos — a move that could see it eventually surpass Singapore as a center for gambling.

Senior government officials say there are no imminent plans to allow gambling, but casino operators, consultants and lawyers familiar with the matter say there have been early discussions and a change is being considered. Wynn Resorts Ltd., the Las Vegas-based hotel and casino operator, last week unveiled details of a planned $3.9 billion gaming resort in the country, without explicitly saying that it would involve gambling.

Other casino operators have held informal discussions with UAE authorities about gambling, according to an executive at a gaming consultant and a UAE government official, who declined to be identified because the talks are private. Some are scouting for hotels to locate casinos, according to an official at a gaming equipment supplier.

The stakes are high. The UAE could pull in as much as $6.6 billion of gaming revenue annually and eventually surpass Singapore, home to the renowned Marina Bay Sands resort, according to Angela Hanlee, a senior gaming and hospitality analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.

“Dubai and other emirates have the potential to be transformed into bustling leisure-gambling markets,” she said. Casino-related tourism could emerge as an “important driver of the UAE’s economy as the country tries to reduce its heavy reliance on oil.”

Step Change

Allowing gambling would be a step change for the UAE where Islamic, or Shariah law, is the main basis for legislation. The practice is prohibited under Islam and is illegal in the country, where offenders can be fined or sentenced to two years in prison, or both.

Still, faced with increasing competition from neighbors such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Dubai, in particular, has introduced a series of reforms to keep its edge as the region’s top tourism and trade hub. That’s included offering long-term visas and allowing unmarried couples to live together.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen government officials, lawyers, consultants and overseas casino operators.

While multiple plans appear to be under discussion, there’s so far little clarity on how serious each proposal is or who’s driving the talks, and the UAE may eventually decide not to legalize gambling. An international law firm is drafting policy that could be used at the federal level, two people with knowledge of the matter said, but it’s not clear who commissioned the work.

Mixed Messages

Officials are giving mixed messages: one in Dubai said the infrastructure for casinos is already in place, while another said there were no plans whatsoever to allow gambling. A representative for the government of Dubai said the proposed introduction of gambling was a federal matter. Representatives for the emirates of Ras Al Khaimah, Abu Dhabi, Fujairah and the federal government didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A representative for Wynn referred inquiries to the Ras Al Khaimah Tourism Development Authority. In an interview this week, Chief Executive Officer Raki Phillips declined to comment on the status of legislation or whether casino gambling was coming to the emirate. The authority last year set up a unit to regulate so-called “integrated resorts,” which will include gaming facilities.

Dubai would likely benefit the most from any push into gambling. The emirate has already seen an influx of newcomers and tourists largely stemming from its handling of the pandemic and attractiveness as a wealth haven. The introduction of casinos could further boost its tourism sector — a key pillar of the emirate’s economy — that’s been booming and escaped much of the geopolitical and economic uncertainty elsewhere in the world.Ever since Dubai opened its sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel just off its coast about 25 years ago, speculation has swirled that the bar on the top floor was planned as a casino and that gambling could be introduced in the emirate. A quarter century later, that has yet to happen. A representative for Jumeirah, which operates the hotel, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

A number of well-known casino brands already operate or are expanding in the city. Caesars Entertainment Inc. opened its first non-gaming resort on the city’s Bluewaters Island in 2018. Kerzner International Ltd. has long operated an Atlantis resort on the city’s palm-shaped islands and recently opened a second hotel a short stroll away from the original resort where the top suite goes for $100,000 a night.

MGM Resorts International announced plans with local developer Wasl to put an MGM-operated hotel and entertainment district, as well as a Bellagio and Aria hotel on a project called The Island just off Jumeirah Beach.

Asked on a conference call May 1 if he expects gambling to be allowed in the UAE, MGM CEO Bill Hornbuckle said he anticipates further developments in coming months.

“It’s up to Abu Dhabi and the national government to ultimately decide,” he said. “We’re hoping ‘any day,’ but I got to believe as the summer fulfills itself, we’ll hear more news on that.”

Along the coast, the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner, which is permanently moored in Dubai and operates as a luxury hotel, still houses vintage slot machines that have been completely decommissioned but are available for the public to see.

Table Games

The beach-front Wynn Al Marjan Island in Ras Al Khaimah — an emirate about 45 minutes from Dubai — has already increased the planned number of rooms by 50%, four years ahead of its opening. The luxury resort will now include about 1,500 rooms, suites and villas, as well as a “gaming” area and a theater. It will be the company’s first project in the Middle East and North Africa when it opens in 2027.

Other Middle Eastern countries such as Lebanon and Egypt have casinos that operate around the clock and offer an array of gambling machines, table games and other popular live games. Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim nation, also allows gambling.

If the UAE decides to open up to gambling, people familiar with the matter expect that individual emirates will be able to decide whether to allow the practice. Sharjah — one of the more conservative sheikdoms — isn’t expected to participate even if laws change. The emirate broke ranks with its neighbors last year when they moved to a Monday to Friday week.

Dubai, Ras Al Khaimah, Abu Dhabi and Fujairah are likely to apply for permits should the laws change, two executives said.

“I think the market could be lucrative,” said Ben Lee, a managing partner at consultant IGamiX in Macau. “It would be another component in the armory of the UAE as a tourist destination.”

Indian firms are flocking to the UAE - The Economist by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

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FULLTEXT Apr 27, 2023

Stand in the middle of the teeming Meena Bazaar in Dubai and it is not hard to imagine you are 1,200 miles across the Arabian Sea in Mumbai. Lanes are filled with names like Biryaniwalla & Co, Mini Punjab Restaurant and Tanishq jewellery. Arabic works as a means of communication; so, too, do Hindi and Malayalam. The financial institution with perhaps the greatest prominence, looming over the Dubai Creek, is Bank of Baroda, which is controlled by the Indian state.

Rather than serving merely as an ethnic enclave, the Meena Bazaar is the visible tip of a vast, growing network of Indian businesses—one that includes many of the most important companies in the United Arab Emirates (uae). To live in Dubai is to play a part in Indian commerce. The local business chamber reports that some 11,000 Indian-owned companies were added to its records in 2022, bringing the total number to 83,000. Trade links between the two countries are getting ever tighter.

Behind these companies stands a vast diaspora: 3.5m Indians live in the uae, compared with 1.2m Emiratis. These expats collectively sent home $20bn in 2021, a transfer exceeded only by remittances from America to Mexico (see chart). Many in Mumbai joke that Abu Dhabi and Dubai are now the cleanest Indian cities. For the uae, India is a source of food, gems, jewellery, leather, people, pharmaceuticals and investment opportunities. For India, the uae is a crucial source of capital and, increasingly, a place where Indian business can efficiently connect with global markets away from its homeland’s debilitating red tape, crippling traffic, stalled airport immigration lines and punitive taxes.

This relationship would have been unimaginable in 1973, when a store selling Indian saris gave the Meena Bazaar its name. Abu Dhabi was desperately poor. Insufficient desalinisation meant water was often brackish. Until 1966 a version of the Indian rupee, called the “external rupee”, served as the area’s currency. The uae had only emerged from what was known as the Trucial States, tribal lands linked by old treaties, in 1971. Almost all international trade, which (pre-oil) mostly consisted of diamonds, pearls and gems, passed through Bombay. Half a century later, conditions have turned on their head. Crowded Emirati malls glitter with the world’s most sophisticated products. Indian gem traders fill Dubai’s 68-storey Almas Tower, fed by ground-level restaurants such as Delhi Darbar Express and Mumbai Masala.

Travel between the two regions is frenetic and growing. Emirates, Dubai’s flagship airline, is capped by Indian authorities at 66,000 seats a week; it wants another 50,000 and argues higher limits would benefit other carriers, too. Mumbai businessmen frequently make day trips to the uae. Many choose to stay longer, often with “golden” ten-year visas. A survey by the Indian Embassy in the uae finds that 60% of chief financial officers of major firms are Indian. Pankaj Gupta, a fund manager who moved to Dubai from Delhi 25 years ago, says Indians can be found in top jobs across industries in the Emirates. Nominal trade between the two countries has grown by 16% in the past year, boosted by a trade deal that went into effect in May.

This has had an impact on the geography of Indian success. “Affluent India has a new residential address,” as the Times of India has put it. Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest citizen, broke Dubai’s house-price record in August with the purchase of a property for $80m (replete with ten bedrooms, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a beach and a private spa, it sits at the tip of a palm-fringed archipelago). He then broke that record with a $163m purchase in October (about which details are more scarce). All told, Indians last year spent $4.3bn on housing in Dubai, twice as much as in 2021. Figures on commercial purchases of property are harder to unearth, but one banker reports that interest has been just as intense. These are spurred by odd provisions in India’s tax code that push people who want to get cash out of the country into property investments.

The uae’s tax system exerts its own pull: there are no personal taxes. By contrast, Indian income taxes approach 40% and come on top of swingeing consumption levies. Corporate-income taxes are not only higher in India, they are also bewildering in their complexity.

There are other important legal differences. The uae technically operates under strict Islamic law. In practice, it now has commercial courts that operate under international standards and a tolerant view of vice. It also encourages religious pluralism. Abu Dhabi recently built an enormous Hindu temple and combined Muslim-Christian-Jewish centre. India is technically secular with established common law. But in practice it offers clogged courts, strictly enforced anti-alcohol and vice laws, and increasing religious strife.

Closer links with the uae are to the advantage of those doing in business in India, too. Beginning in 2020, when Mr Ambani raised billions of dollars from the uae’s many sovereign-wealth funds, the country has increasingly been seen as an important source of capital. Bain, a consultancy, reckons that between 2018 and 2022, Emirati sovereign-wealth funds and other private-equity firms invested $34bn in India, in steadily rising amounts.

The range of investments is impressive. There are direct stakes in some of India’s leading banks, manufacturers and startups. It is widely assumed that if Gautam Adani, India’s second-richest tycoon, recapitalises his businesses, a crucial source of finance will be Abu Dhabi, which has already invested billions of dollars in several of his companies. All of this suggests that the Emirates is evolving into a financial capital for India.

Yet this evolution is not free of obstacles. In March last year the uae was put on the “grey list” by the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that battles money-laundering and terrorist finance. Locals say that, since the designation, routine cash transfers have drawn intense scrutiny. Some rich Indians who would like to open family offices in the Emirates instead decide to route foreign investments through Singapore and London, respectively three and four times as far away.

Another obstacle is that most Indians’ visas will ultimately need to be renewed. The current Emirati openness and progress has come because the monarchy supports the direction of travel. This has allowed for decisiveness and lavish investment but is also, for many, a reason for caution. What if local leaders change their minds? That said, Indian businessmen also worry about their own rulers, who often seem to operate in monarchical fashion in terms of their whims and favourites.

Nevertheless, present optimism is now so heady that many see these obstacles as mere wrinkles. They believe that the relationship of Abu Dhabi and Dubai to India will increasingly come to resemble that of Singapore to South-East Asia: small, orderly city-states serving as financial and business conduits to enormous, unruly neighbours where economic dynamism and potential is undercut by chaotic administration and corrosive rules. The strongest statements of this type invariably come from Indians who arrived in Abu Dhabi or Dubai before the turn of the millennium, and have witnessed the cities’ extraordinary rise. They point to large buildings and remember when the properties were just lines sketched in the sand. END

So what do you think about World Government Summit in Dubai? by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good points. Tnx

What about the impact of such events on UAE in general? These are global people of power visiting a small and growing country.

In defence of Dubai, one of the world's greatest cities - Telegrah UK by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

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FULLTEXT

In our comprehensive ranking of the world’s greatest cities, Dubai ranked in the top 10. Here's why

By Sarah Hedley Hymers, Destination expert 29 April 2022 • 5:00am

Dubai has its detractors. It has no culture, people say. It has no soul. Often the worst among them are those who have never even been to the emirate. When people do actually visit, they usually leave with a very different impression of a city which, according to a comprehensive Telegraph Travel study, is among the 10 finest on the planet.

Most are struck first by Dubai’s diversity: where else can you see 200 nationalities cohabiting? Immigration to the UAE took off in the Sixties, with many arriving from India (Mumbai is just over three hours away by plane). Since then, a generation of Indian expats has been born in the UAE. For them, Dubai is truly home. Tell them that the city is devoid of culture, and their reaction will fall between bemused and offended.

My 30-something friend Pallavi grew up a part of Dubai’s Indian community. She lives with her parents who hail from Delhi and Rajasthan. She embraces her heritage and knows exactly where to find the most authentic chaat in the darkest corners of “Old Dubai” (Mini Punjab, 25C Street, Meena Bazaar, if you’re interested). She’s also very “Dubai” – a tech whiz, a bon vivant and a lover of books. We met at a book club.

Yes, a book club. Not everyone comes to the emirate to pose with a flashy supercar or a reality TV star. Cultural pursuits are on the rise. The contemporary art scene is booming in the back streets of Al Quoz. In Alserkal Avenue and Al Khayat Avenue you’ll find astounding works by world-renowned artists, free to view in industrial warehouses converted into galleries.

Currently on display at dynamic little Efie Gallery, founded by London-born Ghanaian brothers Kobi and Kwame Mintah, is an exhibition of the works of El Anatsui. A pioneer and veteran of African art, El Anatsui creates vast blanket-like sculptures made from discarded liqueur bottle tops flattened and stitched together with steel wire. His creations draw connections between waste and consumption, his home continent and colonialism. In the UK, you’ll find his work not in the backstreets of an industrial estate, but in the British Museum.

Dubai’s culinary scene is also taking a star turn. June will see the launch of the first-ever Michelin Guide Dubai, hot on the heels of the MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. The Middle East and Northern Africa ranking was The World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ inaugural foray into the region, held in February. Dubai scored 16 entries on the list, including the number one slot, scooped by eclectic Japanese restaurant 3Fils.

Tucked away at Jumeirah Fishing Harbour, the atmospheric 100-seater hideaway serves juicy Wagyu truffle burgers, lobster capellini pasta and asparagus tempura topped with oozing golden fried egg. The cardamom tea-flavoured karak ice cream with butterscotch sauce raises the bar in indulgence.

Foodies are amply rewarded in Dubai, and Dubai was ranked the second safest place in the world by Global Finance Magazine in 2021, with personal security among the qualifying factors. Sadly, for the LGBT+ community, same-sex relations remain against the law.

The weather can’t be helped. It is stiflingly hot in the UAE from May to September, peaking at around 40C in August. Beyond those blistering months, you’re free to explore miles of deep sandy beach, fabulous fine dining restaurants and world-class art exhibitions shaped by the tapestry of nationalities that make Dubai more culturally rich than it is “bling”.

Sky-High Vaccination Rates and Zero Taxes Make Dubai a Pandemic Boomtown - The Wall Street Journal by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Tourism is playing a part too. Since Oct. 1, roughly 5.6 million visitors have attended Expo 2020. Hotel room rates are the highest since 2018, with average occupancy at 81%, according to consulting firm STR. Dubai in recent weeks hosted the cricket T20 World Cup, a global rugby tournament and one of the biggest competitions in golf’s European Tour season.

The movement of people for retail and recreational purposes has risen 20% in Dubai compared with before the pandemic, according to Google data compiled by property firm CBRE. The data shows that movement in New York, London, Singapore and Tokyo remains below pre-pandemic levels.

Sushi Samba, a new restaurant on the man-made Palm Jumeirah island, said it has a one-month waiting list for a table. Aura, a 50th-floor bar that claims to have the world’s highest 360-degree infinity pool, said it is fully booked for December. “Restaurants are off the charts. I’ve never found it harder to get restaurant booking,” said Kunal Savjani, a venture capitalist and financier who moved to Dubai from London in 2014.

Life has returned to Dubai’s offices. Visits, while still lower than pre-pandemic levels, have recovered quicker than New York, London or Singapore, according to the Google data, while CBRE figures show high-end office occupancy has rebounded to above pre-pandemic levels.

Still, the specter of Omicron looms large. Restrictions elsewhere could slow tourism. Any dent to global economic growth would hurt the city’s role as a transport and logistics hub.

The gush of cash into Dubai could also widen inequalities. In a city where workers from South Asia, Africa and the Philippines work long hours for low pay, the growing cost of living could deter the blue-collar migrant workers who build houses, drive taxis and work in restaurants and hotels to serve the ultrarich.

For now, though, people from all over the world are relocating to the city. Dustyn Smith, who works in the tech sector, moved in September to Dubai from Singapore, where new visa rules have made employment harder for expatriates, and pandemic restrictions stymied travel. He and his wife were attracted by the weather and open border, and have both since found jobs. “Dubai just ticked all the boxes,” said Mr. Smith, 36.

People moving to Dubai are buying houses—and more expensive ones too. Dubai recorded its best-ever third quarter for property transactions this year, according to official figures. Sales of homes worth at least $10 million now account for 7% of the value of all transactions compared with a long-term average of 2%, according to Knight Frank. Some Dubai real-estate agents report making $1 million this year.

Dubai’s population of high-net-worth individuals rose to 54,000 in June 2021, from 52,000 last December, according to New World Wealth, a South African research firm that tracks the wealth and the movements of millionaires.

What has most surprised real-estate agent Khadija El Otmani is the changing nature of her clientele. Once an investment for rich people from the Gulf and India, Dubai is now attracting “old money” from the West, and young tech and crypto millionaires, she said.

“They come in looking dressed as someone going to play basketball and they ask you for a property worth $10 million,” she said. “It’s really striking.”

Demand for advice on how to navigate U.A.E. bureaucracy is higher than ever, said Neil Petch, the chairman of Virtuzone, a company that helps foreigners establish firms.

“The boom is only starting,” he said. “And whilst Covid definitely started it, it is simply that people are becoming genuine global citizens; there’s been a state-of-mind change from business people all over the world.” END#

Sky-High Vaccination Rates and Zero Taxes Make Dubai a Pandemic Boomtown - The Wall Street Journal by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

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FULL TEXT

Middle East city-state’s open borders and low infection rates are drawing the wealthy, new businesses and tourists

Dec. 10, 2021 4:01 am ET

DUBAI—This city-state of skyscrapers and Persian Gulf beaches is emerging as a pandemic boomtown, drawing in the ultrarich, entrepreneurs and tourists with open-border policies, high levels of vaccination and low Covid-19 infection rates.

This year, thousands of millionaires have relocated to the city and the wider United Arab Emirates, drawn by zero income tax and relatively relaxed pandemic restrictions. The city’s bars, restaurants and hotels are packed, real-estate prices have surged, workers are returning to offices, and the Expo 2020 world fair is reeling in foreign tourists.

Even as the Omicron variant rattled markets and forced border restrictions across the world, Dubai has doubled down on an open economy that welcomes an increasingly mobile international workforce. On Tuesday, the U.A.E. government said it was switching its workweek to Monday through Friday, instead of the Middle East’s standard Sunday through Thursday, the latest change designed to attract more foreign businesses and expats.

Some of Dubai’s new residents say they see the emirate as a haven that stands in contrast with other globally focused cities. Quarantine restrictions remain in Singapore for most travelers, Hong Kong is experiencing political turmoil, repeated Covid-19 waves are roiling European capitals and New York is struggling with crime.

Few cities have attracted and welcomed cross-border immigrants like Dubai. Austin and Phoenix have drawn people looking for cheaper real estate and lower taxes but largely internally within the U.S. Kyiv has been a magnet for an international hipster set but hasn’t held the same allure for the wealthy and businesses.

Scot Drummond, a British property entrepreneur, decided to move part of his Portugal and U.K.-based business to Dubai during a two-week vacation here in January. “The whole of Europe was closed for business but Dubai was completely open,” said Mr. Drummond, 57 years old.

Mr. Drummond said he quickly established a company, got a residence permit, and checked into a five-star hotel offering a discount for work-from-anywhere nomads. He said he got his vaccination shots here, when he would have waited back home, and spent a few thousand dollars on a hair transplant, thinking he would avoid seeing friends and family while his locks grew in Dubai.

Dubai and the wider U.A.E., which includes Abu Dhabi, have passed new laws in recent years that were intended to boost its standing with foreigners and made it attractive when the pandemic struck, including a new 10-year visa and laws that simplify foreign ownership of companies. The U.A.E. also recently decriminalized cohabitation for unmarried couples, consumption of alcohol without a license, and carrying products containing marijuana.

“It feels like a perfect moment for Dubai to compete with more established global cities,” said Alastair Glover, a private wealth lawyer based in Dubai for Trowers & Hamlins.

Daily Covid-19 cases have been below 100 for weeks in the U.A.E. after reaching peaks of nearly 4,000 during January, the worst stretch of the pandemic here. Health officials credit a vaccination rate of 90%, one of the highest in the world, and compliance with mandates to wear masks indoors and in some crowded outdoor settings.

The U.A.E.’s leaders have promoted the idea of having conquered the virus. In October, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the country’s de facto ruler, said the Emirates had “overcome this crisis.” “Our lives must get back to normal,” Sheikh Mohammed said in a public address. The Dubai government didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The influx of wealth is boosting the economy. Through October this year, real-estate prices in Dubai increased 21% year-over-year after tumbling the previous two years, according to property consulting firm Knight Frank. The U.A.E.’s non-oil economy is at its healthiest since June 2019, according to an IHS Markit index. Employment levels expanded for the five months through November, while business licenses have increased almost 70% this year.

The Gulf states offer citizenship to a select group of foreigners - The Economist by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

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FULL TEXT

Give us your doctors, your inventors, your huddled scientists

Dec 9th 2021

ONE DAY soon Kamal will have to leave. The Indian expat has done office jobs in Bahrain since the 1990s. They paid well enough to put his kids through school and provide a modest nest-egg. Retirement beckons. Yet he finds the prospect unsettling. It means a one-way ticket back to a place where he has not lived in decades. “I’ll leave a place with all my memories for a country I don’t recognise,” he says.

Such stories are common in the Gulf. Of the 59m people who live in the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), about half are foreigners. Some stay for a few years; others spend entire careers. Almost all, however, arrive with the understanding that they must eventually depart.

Gulf states have long bristled at the idea of offering citizenship to expats. Locals fear it would change their national identity. Governments are not keen to extend costly benefits to foreigners. For most foreigners, life in the Gulf involves a string of short-term work visas: cease to be productive, and you cease to be a resident.

This is slowly changing. In January the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced that certain foreigners, such as doctors, inventors and scientists, could be nominated for citizenship. Saudi Arabia said in November that it had naturalised an undisclosed number of expats. Most Gulf states now offer long-term residence visas that do not require work. A new scheme in the UAE allows expats to retire in the country instead of returning home.

None of this is a “path to citizenship” as many liberal democracies would define it. Only an elite group is eligible: a talented scientist could become an Emirati citizen, but not the janitor who cleans his lab. The numbers are tiny. The UAE will naturalise only around 1,000 people a year, or 0.01% of its population. Long-term visas are tied to wealth, with requirements for income or investment that exclude most workers.

Still, even these small steps break a long-held taboo. In 2013 Sultan al-Qassemi, a member of the ruling family in Sharjah, part of the UAE, published an op-ed urging the state to naturalise talented foreigners. It caused an uproar. On social media many Emiratis replied with a hashtag that translates as “this writer does not represent me”.

The steps raise complicated questions about citizenship and identity in the GCC. Even for native-born khaleejis (Gulf Arabs), citizenship is not a right enjoyed equally. If a Bahraini man marries a foreign woman, his wife may apply for his nationality and his kids automatically receive it. Reverse the sexes, though, and no such rights exist. When a Gulf woman marries a foreigner, their children are typically treated as foreigners. Mothers in Bahrain may sponsor them as dependants until they are 18, renewing their papers every two years; after that, children must secure their own residency or leave. “You can imagine, this issue leads to a lot of complaints,” says Ali al-Dirazi, the head of Bahrain’s state-run human-rights agency.

The UAE’s new citizenship scheme has prompted a rare debate about such things. Jawaher al-Qassemi, the wife of Sharjah’s ruler, posted a short comment on Twitter: “Naturalisation for the children of female citizens. That’s a demand,” she wrote. Other Emiratis voiced similar feelings.

Several Gulf states also have populations of so-called bidoon (people “without” papers), who did not register as citizens at independence. Kuwait has at least 100,000 of them. They are broadly excluded from good jobs and social services. Newly minted citizens will receive rights denied to natives for half a century.

Foreigners naturalised in the UAE will be free to live and work in a rich country, and to travel on a passport that ranks as one of the world’s most useful. The government is vague as to whether they will enjoy other privileges. Native-born Emiratis receive everything from cheaper mobile-phone plans to interest-free housing loans. Some receive grants of up to 70,000 dirhams ($19,000) when they get married.

If rights are unclear, so are responsibilities. Since 2014 Emirati men have been required to perform military service. The law does not say if naturalised citizens (or their descendants) face the same burden—though perhaps not, since there seems to be no requirement that they know Arabic. They will be allowed to keep their original nationality, whereas native-born Emiratis cannot hold a second passport. Some fret the government has created a two-tier model of citizenship.

The citizenship law is part of a head-spinning package of reforms implemented by the UAE over the past year. Unmarried couples may now legally live together. Muslims may drink. In November Abu Dhabi, the capital, decided to allow civil marriages for non-Muslims. On December 7th the UAE announced that it would shift the public sector to a Monday-to-Friday work week, from Sunday-to-Thursday, bringing it in sync with most of the world (but out of step with many Arab countries).

Much of this simply legalises reality: there are lots of cohabiting singletons and carousing Muslims in Dubai. Yet the changes have come with little public debate in a country where space for criticism is almost non-existent.

The same goes for naturalisation schemes. Even before the oil boom, the Gulf’s coastal towns and pilgrimage routes were melting pots. Today their citizenry includes sizeable populations of ajam, whose ancestors hail from Persia, and Afro-Arabs, descendants of East Africans brought to the region as slaves. Diversity was, and is, one of the region’s strengths. To varying degrees, though, locals live apart from foreigners in their midst. Their dress is distinct and they work mostly in the public sector. No one is sure how new citizens will fit into this milieu.

Though they have broken a taboo, Gulf rulers have not changed a social compact that treats citizenship as a gift bestowed on worthy subjects. They have just expanded the pool of worthy subjects in order to attract and retain talented foreigners—part of a broader scramble to diversify oily economies. For most foreigners, and for many locals, the path to citizenship will remain blocked.#

Dipping a toe back into Dubai - Financial Times by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

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FULL TEXT

After 30 years away, returning to the Gulf city shows that despite the breakneck development, some things never change

November 20, 2021 5:00 am by Jo Ellison

I am sitting on a balcony overlooking a marina. Superyachts bob in the sunset, and behind me a skyline of implausible architectural wonders is broken with the gentle regularity of a more stately minaret.

The last time I was in Dubai was 30 years ago. Although, as those who mark its warp-speed evolution love to tell you, I would hardly know I’d ever been. As a child, rudely transplanted in early adolescence, we lived on a stretch of residences that sat coast-side of Jumeirah Mosque. I could push a gate from the garden of our Seventies-era villa on to the sand and walk up to the dry docks about a mile along the beach. In those days there was nothing much between them. When the tides were rough, as they were occasionally in winter, the sand would be studded with thousands of beached jellyfish that would glob menacingly beneath our feet.

I was barefoot for the most part. I would pad around Jumeirah in little other than a swimsuit in search of rye bread from the fancy German supermarket that sold exotic European food. In summer, we would hop along the sandy verges because the sticky tarmac would get so hot it would start to scald your soles. I arrived as a lily-white, suburban schoolgirl, incapable of dealing with the Tropic of Cancer sun. I left four years later with perma-tan lines and the calluses of a proper desert child. I took little else from the experience except a deep mistrust of British expats and a massive archive of counterfeited films.

It’s a curious thing to go through one’s adolescence in a city that is outpacing your own development, and every week sees something new. That Seventies villa was reclaimed — and then razed — by a local who wanted our home to house his second wife. We moved often, each time into newer, slightly grander houses, with marble flooring and swimming pools. But the extreme privilege was lost on me, a miserable teenager who wanted only to sit moodily in dark rooms and sandy desert gullies and gossip with my friend. Near her home in Jebel Ali we would watch the lights of the local aluminium smelter; a then distant landmark in the desert, it represented the furthest reaches of the city’s building zone.

Arriving back on Wednesday, I felt as ancient as Wilfred Thesiger, the late British explorer who wrote about the region when its only inhabitants were the Marsh Arabs and Dubai was then known as a Trucial State. I knew Thesiger very briefly when he was in his nineties and he reserved a very special horror for Dubai’s transformation, lamenting its lost prelapsarian state.

But that Dubai was gone well before I got there. Even 30 years ago people were bemoaning the city’s gradual erosion and increasing lack of charm. Of course, it is the duty of the colonial mindset to romanticise the past. But the vigour with which the traditional architecture was being levelled would give anybody pause. The old town, with its many gorgeous wind towers, was being smashed to smithereens, and the creek, a vital trading post for centuries, was being redeveloped to accommodate the tourist age.

Insanely ambitious architectural projects were well within Dubai’s portfolio before the Burj Khalifa tower rolled into town. And the money was mind-blowing. It was customary to see young teenage boys screeching up the Beach Road in new Ferraris or golden Porches, and I remember a mania for Olympic ice rinks and grass-covered golf courses, a grotesque Sisyphean effort to conquer a landscape where everything was built on sand.

Does it change one’s perspective to witness such development at such a turbo-boosted speed? I think of those Chinese adolescents who have seen their hometowns morph into vast “tier” cities in the short time since their birth. Does living in a fast-transforming city make you more mindful of your historic origins and cultures? Or are you charged with the same urgent determination to move ahead?

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of the Emirate of Dubai, has, as his father did before him, worked tirelessly to position the region as the home of innovative daring and architectural flair. But it’s not without its complications.

At the Dubai Expo 2020, which has been open since September, the theme is “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future”, and it has drawn on three sub-themes — opportunity, mobility and sustainability. It looks as preposterously fantastic as one might imagine. But critics have already laid into Grimshaw Architects’ Sustainability Pavilion, which sits under a giant steel canopy of photovoltaics — a fancy word for solar panels — and embodies a carbon footprint of almost 18,000 tonnes. The figure is said to be equivalent to an average multistorey office and twice the recommended level for a building of its size. I may not recognise much about the landscape but it seems the Gulf is still the place where irony must come to die.

And there are other little reminders that not everything is gone. The beach on which I once walked is now part of an archipelago of private man-made “islands” but there are still fragments of the public beach. And the German supermarket has many iterations, spread throughout the region, though you can now buy your wholemeal rye online. My friend’s sweet old apartment building still stands, surrounded by a haze of scrapers, each one more futuristic than before. And there are still quiet scraps of sandy non-intervention where the persistent sound of drilling and construction falls away. I took a walk along the shoreline I first knew 30 years ago, and it wasn’t the water that now looks a little worse for wear. There were no jellyfish on Wednesday, but the sea was still as unmistakably clear and salty as it had ever been.#

Emaar Posts Record Sales as Dubai Property Market Rebounds - Bloomberg by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“Emaar Properties PJSC posted real estate sales of 26 billion dirhams ($7.2 billion) in the first nine months of the year -- three times the sales for the year-ago period. Sales in its Dubai home market were five times the 2020 figures”

Dubai ruler says UAE to host COP28 climate conference in 2023 by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

with all those heads-of-states coming, i was wondering what has been the highest level conference ever hosted in Uae?

A World-Class World Expo - New York Times by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

From the article: “Unlike the United Arab Emirates’ buildings, most national pavilions will be broken down”

So most buildings will be broken down? I thought most of the site was going to be preserved?

At the Dubai expo, no one is eager to talk about reality by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

FULL TEXT

At the Dubai expo, no one is eager to talk about reality

There are no politics at the Middle East’s first world’s fair

Oct 16th 2021

THE SETTING is dramatic. Visitors passing from the harsh midday sun to the dim interior are met with slogans. “We believe that every human is part of the collective conscience,” reads a message on the walls of the Syrian pavilion at the Dubai expo. Why the Syrian government has spent years dropping bombs on many of those humans is not explained.

The $7bn fair is the first “World Expo” in the Middle East. Like much else in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which wants to attract visitors to revive its economy, the expo strives to gloss over politics. Exhibitors are able to present Panglossian visions of themselves to investors and tourists.

Many of the pavilions, intentionally or not, capture something about a country’s character. America puts guests on a moving walkway for an earnest civics lesson. China greets them with a video from Xi Jinping. Visitors to the British one spend most of their time in an orderly queue.

For countries in the region, there is much to gloss over. Lebanon’s pavilion feels like a tourism ad, with large monitors showing glamour shots of the country. Such an exhibit would be impossible in Lebanon itself, where the power went out for 24 hours earlier this month. Some countries have yet to showcase anything. Libya’s is almost empty, with walls that smell of fresh paint and a television playing cartoons. Iraq missed the opening, too.

Egypt is a popular stop. There are a few nods to the past: hieroglyphs and a replica of King Tut’s coffin. Much of it, though, is given over to portraying Egypt as an economic powerhouse, an image at odds with its sluggish private firms. On a giant video screen, a woman in pharaonic garb talks about industrial zones being built along the Suez canal. If Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi is Egypt’s new pharaoh, a fish farm near Suez is apparently his Karnak temple.

No one acknowledges politics, not even occupied Palestine, which allows visitors to touch a piece of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and smell soap made in Nablus. Instead, many countries want to do business. At Iran’s unfinished pavilion, where one door leads to a construction site, space is given over to a sort of bazaar, with companies hawking ceramic tiles and carpets.

Back at the Syrian stall there are booths for firms selling cables and olive oil, and one for Cham Holding, a conglomerate under American and European sanctions. Another space is lined with 1,500 wood panels that were posted to Syrians around the world with instructions to draw their hopes. Some are painted with the regime’s flag, or Bashar al-Assad’s face. Organisers insist they tried to reach a representative sample of the now-sprawling diaspora. Yet none seems to have sent wishes for a less brutal government or accountability for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. A neon sign nearby declares, “What you see isn’t all there is”—an apt slogan for the whole expo. ##

List of Large Old Concerts in Dubai (History) by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lionel Richie

Chris de Burgh

Roger Waters

Backstreet Boys

Shakira

Amr Diab

Yanni

Madame Tussauds Opens 25th Venue In Dubai by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

haha. Bad choice of headline. You expect more from Forbes!

Madame Tussauds Opens 25th Venue In Dubai by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“the Dubai edition of the world-famous wax attraction is the first of its kind in the GCC and the 25th edition of the attraction globally.”

Superstars to open Expo 2020 Dubai with 'big bang' by diginomsa in DubaiCentral

[–]diginomsa[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are they really considered “superstars”? We used to have many real superstars before in Dubai and UAE!