Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Silver Lining For China On Hong Kong


Hong Kong: Endgame Scenarios

The Chinese currency is nowhere close to full convertibility. And so Shenzen can not replace Hong Kong for China. Hong Kong has been and will continue to be indispensable to the Chinese mainland. More than 60% of Foreign Direct Investment that goes into China goes through Hong Kong, and that figure is a low point.

But Hong Kong is not the "Silicon Valley" of hardware. That is Shenzen.

Something is cooking up in the Hong Kong Bay Area that is really interesting from the tech and innovation viewpoint. Shenzen is number one for hardware in the world, and there is this thing called the Internet Of Things hanging on the horizon. There are also robotics and drones: physical things.

Hong Kong is not being destroyed. Hong Kong is being rejuvenated. That is how I look at the current protests.

The quickest way to end the protests is for Xi Jinping to say, okay, you can have a directly elected Chief Executive. It beats me as to why he will not do that.

A successful conclusion to the Hong Kong protests will not end one country, two systems and will take free speech in Hong Kong to a whole new level. And there will be much innovation as a result.

The Hong Kong Bay Area reminds me of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Also, South China Sea would be a great place where to build the ocean cities of tomorrow. Don't build on Mars. Build in the South China Sea. It has six key components: gravity, water, air, food, capital and demand.





Silicon Valley And Dubai
To: The Crown Prince Of Dubai
Elon Musk's Giant Blind Spot: Human Beings

Silicon Valley And Dubai



First of all, what is technically Silicon Valley (it is an actual geography ... it's a valley, I have been) is no longer where innovation is happening. The innovation is happening north of that in San Francisco, a big city where young engineers like to live. And, by now, New York is neck and neck. Because, guess what, San Fran has nothing on New York when it comes to big city living. And Dubai makes New York look like a Third World city.

But look at this Founding Father of Silicon Valley. This guy, the first Prime Minister of India, is the primary pusher behind the establishment of IITs across India. No IITs, no Silicon Valley, pure and simple. Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella look visible now, but Indians have always been the majority of the workhorses in the valley tech companies.


You also need capital. Every VC in California gets their money from the pension funds in New York. It is not like the dollar bill in California is a different color from green. Capital is capital. And Dubai has a ton of it.

Culture is big. In San Fran they have a culture where they celebrate failure. They say, fail fast. Fail better next time. But that culture can be cultivated. In other words, be tolerant.

But the truest form of tolerance is cultural diversity, the number one quality I look for in any city. And there Dubai is number one by a wide margin.

The IITs are still producing super smart graduates. But the visa regime in the US has become very unfriendly. Dubai does great there. And if there is room for improvement, it can be fixed by royal decree. I am sure.

Dubai has capital. Dubai can access the same IITs, and only better. Because Dubai is so much closer to home. People like home. Dubai's cultural diversity is the greatest symbol of tolerance there can be.

What is needed is a city inside a city. And I am going to build that. The world is big. The San Francisco Bay Area, or the Hong Kong Bay Area are not big enough for all the innovation the world needs.

And Dubai has excellent location. You have Africa and you have South Asia nearby, the next two Chinas.

To: The Crown Prince Of Dubai
No Techies In Dubai
Elon Musk's Giant Blind Spot: Human Beings
Dubai's Remarkable Economic Transformation





















Thursday, October 10, 2019

To: The Crown Prince Of Dubai

Crown Prince Fazza.

A month ago I could not have recognized you or your father if I had seen your pictures. But now I have a relationship with Dubai, thanks to my investors Noor Almuna. And I have been reading, looking at pictures and videos. I follow you on Instagram and Twitter.

I have come to realize Dubai, in many ways the number one city in the world today, lacks a tech scene. Dubai Internet City is not it.

I intend to build a city inside a city, more like the finance hub you do have. It would turn Dubai into the Silicon Hub of the planet. I have been enamored with what I have learned about Dubai in recent weeks. I have come to care about Dubai deeply because I care deeply about the dollar a day people on the planet.

MBS of Saudi Arabia put 50B or 100B into Masa's gargantuan Vision Fund. Masa, by all accounts, is a genius. But his forays into WeWork and Uber were ill-founded. MBS' investment might still do just fine with future moves Masa might make with the rest of the money. But that is another topic.

I gather your net worth is in the range of 400M. I want you to consider making a big bang investment of 100M into my idea. I give us six months to explore the possibility. I am set to visit Dubai in a few weeks. I am scheduled to meet a namesake of your father and a member of the royal family, Sheikh Muhammad of Noor Almuna. It will be a pleasure to meet you, if possible. If not, perhaps sometime in 2020. I will most definitely be in town with my parents for Expo 2020.

I see Dubai becoming a major hub of operations for me in the coming years.

I am a very political person, and I have my thoughts about political systems, be they in the US, China, or the Middle East. Be they India, Africa or the Swiss Alps. I have my thoughts. And I have readily shared them at my blog. But I have also very open-mindedly looked at your father's indispensable leadership to where Dubai is today. I just don't see the Mayor of NYC doing what your father has done. And that makes me ponder. What gives?

Remarkable as your father's achievements have been, I suggest your father's ceiling has to be your floor. And Dubai needs to be taken to new heights. The rest of the Gulf is now scrambling to "diversify" just like Dubai. That is not bad news for Dubai. That simply means Dubai now needs to move up the food chain. Moving up the economic food chain is a readily available option for every major economy, be it the US or China, Dubai or India/Pakistan.

I can not publicly talk about everything I have in mind. But I hope to share privately in much greater detail. I hope to have a full-fledged presentation in something like six months.

I intend to turn Dubai into a Silicon Hub that will accelerate Africa's and South Asia's marches to becoming the next two Chinas. To that end I'd like to build a city inside the city of Dubai. That piece of real estate will primarily house my tech startup that will firmly rest on the Blockchain, will draw the best engineering talent from Bangalore to Mumbai to San Francisco to New York and Berlin, and will go to the bottom two billion with identity, and the basic financial services. I see that a trillion-dollar opportunity.

That city inside a city will also be an experiment both in corporate culture and city culture. What is the best city culture for tech and innovation? I don't think San Francisco and New York have the answer. Because the answer is still out there.

I look forward to meeting you, in a few weeks, or a few months. I will have my presentation ready.


No Techies In Dubai
The Dubai Magic (4)
Elon Musk's Giant Blind Spot: Human Beings
Dubai's Remarkable Economic Transformation
Softbank's Problem: Vision, Not Money
The Dubai Sheikh Is A Business School Case Study
Masa, MBS, And The Broader Investment Climate





Juwan Lee: Fintech in Greater Bay Area: No Wait State a great effort of this region in South China to challenge San Francisco Bay Area, Tokyo and New York as the world’s leading and most quickly developing business, financial and technological clusters...... GBA (the region was previously referred to as the Pearl River Delta) includes Hong Kong, Macao and nine cities in South China’s Guangdong province — Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, and the whole of Huizhou and Zhaoqing. ...... Being home to 70 million people, it produces 37% of the country’s exports and 12% of the gross domestic product. ....... the grandiose 55 kilometer Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao bridge, the longest sea-crossing on earth ...... the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link ..... the special economic zone of Shenzhen holds absolutely distinguished manufacturing and high-tech capabilities, processes supply chain integration ....... combine the best of the banking talents in Hong Kong and the best of tech talents in Shenzhen...... Earlier this year the internet giant Tencent Holdings announced that it would share its technologies (AI, blockchain, payment and cloud computing) with the HKSTP startups, boosting innovation and promoting the growth of financial technology in the city.


Wednesday, October 09, 2019

No Techies In Dubai


I just realized perhaps there are no techies in Dubai. Big brands like Microsoft managed to snag 50 years of free rent from the city, but they have not kept a major tech presence.

There are engineers in the city, of course. There must be a ton of civil engineers, electrical engineers.

But I don't see some hardcore tech team building the next big thing.

I am going to change that. I think Dubai is going to be my second base after NY/NJ. Not right away, but down the line for sure.

Dubai has an amazing location. It is so close to Africa and South Asia. I had a college friend who, given the choice between New York and London, she chose London. Because she was from Eastern Europe. And there's just something about home.

Dubai has an amazing infrastructure. It is quite literally number one. In my book, the most appealing aspect of any city for me is its cultural diversity. And I don't mean restaurants. I mean people. There Dubai is number one. That is a major clincher for me. I am sold.

I intend to build Dubai's first major tech team that is primarily based in Dubai and goes on to build a world-changing company. Port Silicon.

I was talking about the three buckets yesterday (or maybe two days ago). Dubai has a ton of two: human capital and financial capital. The third bucket you build.

Dubai's Remarkable Economic Transformation
The Dubai Magic (1)
The Dubai Magic (2)
The Dubai Magic (3)
The Dubai Magic (4)
Elon Musk's Giant Blind Spot: Human Beings

That Microsoft sign looks sad, if you ask me.

Silicon Hub might be a better name than Port Dubai. When you have the world's number one airport, you are a hub, not a port.

Dubai, you had me at hello.





The Dubai Magic (4)

Dubai's Remarkable Economic Transformation
The Dubai Magic (1)
The Dubai Magic (2)
The Dubai Magic (3)

How Dubai Became Dubai how St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai have become “crucibles of non-Western modernity.” ........

Dubai’s transformation from outlandish idea to an economic powerhouse of the Middle East.

......... The world became acquainted with Dubai only a few years ago. ..... was presented to Westerners as many things:

Rich, strange, tacky, threatening.

....... a “skyline on crack” .....

With 96 percent of its population foreign born, Dubai makes even New York City’s diversity — 37 percent of New Yorkers are immigrants — seem mundane.

....... Dubai is a city where “everyone and everything in it — its luxuries, laborers, architects, accents, even its aspirations — was flown in from someplace else.” ...... Dubai was touted as a new phenomenon, but it is actually just the most recent iteration of a far older one. For 300 years, instant cities modeled on the West have been built in the developing world in audacious attempts to wrench a lagging region into the modern world. While the rise of these global crossroads cities was once checked by the speed of ocean liners and locomotives, today their growth is powered by intercontinental jets that can move a passenger from any major city in the world to any other in a single day. So

while the city of Dubai is new, the idea of Dubai is not. It’s just that in the age of jet-powered globalization, the idea can achieve liftoff as never before

.......... As the locomotive built Daniel Burnham’s Chicago, the jetliner built [United Arab Emirates Prime Minister] Sheikh Mohammed’s Dubai. In 1974, Sheikh Rashid tasked the young Mohammed with overseeing the growth of Dubai International Airport. In the 1980s, Mohammed tapped British Airways veteran Maurice Flanagan to launch Emirates airline, which would become an archetype of the Dubai model: A state-owned company managed by Western experts that would thrive in open international competition. ............ Saudis and Iranians came to shop and enjoy the libertine nightlife banned in their native theocracies. Entrepreneurial Russians arrived to empty Dubai’s store shelves and resell the items back home during the chaos of the Soviet collapse and post-Soviet free fall. ...........

most of the world’s population lives within a reasonable flying time of the city-state.

...... the United States taxes foreign-earned incomes above $91,500 .......

(As the UAE has no antidiscrimination law, by company policy, Emirates prefers not to hire male flight attendants.)

........ Dubai was a common refueling stop for hijacked jets, and Sheikh Mohammed became one of the world’s most experienced hostage negotiators. ....... In dealings with fearsome groups including the (pre-Oslo) Palestine Liberation Organization, Japanese Red Army and Baader-Meinhof Gang, an underground cell of West German radicals,

Mohammed never lost a passenger

. ........... The young sheikh’s triumphs barely made the international news, but they foreshadowed a development strategy that would serve his city well: Dubai would be an island of stability in a wealthy but volatile region, headed by a businessman/autocrat who thrived on high-stakes negotiations. To achieve liftoff, Dubai just needed a spark. That spark would be the most devastating hijacking of them all: 9/11. .............. Though only a sole Emirati was among the 9/11 hijackers, Dubai was crucial to the attacks. Since Dubai is the air hub of the Middle East, the majority of the perpetrators entered the United States via Dubai. And because Dubai is the financial hub of the Gulf, the money that funded the plot flowed through its banks. Moreover, in the run-up to the attacks, the Emirati elite had protected al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, if, perhaps, unwittingly. In 1999, the CIA abandoned an opportunity to execute bin Laden on a hunting trip because they believed Emirati royalty were leading the expedition. A cruise missile attack “might have wiped out half of the UAE royal family,” CIA chief George Tenet later testified. ......... the Americans, for whom Dubai serves as the largest overseas naval port ......... Hardly dyed-in-the-wool jihadis, the Emirati royals likely saw bin Laden as an eccentric buddy — part of their social milieu of Gulf Arab millionaire heirs but with an added frisson of radical chic. .......... the 9/11 attacks .... it was a boon, setting off massive growth that was only halted by the global financial crisis. ......... The anti-money-laundering provisions of the Patriot Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, made investing in the United States less appealing to wealthy Gulf Arabs. Saudis alone are estimated to have pulled over $300 billion in assets out of the United States. At the same time, the instability in the Middle East set off by the attacks and the subsequent American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq helped raise the price of oil, which already had been creeping upward in response to increasing demand in developing economies like China and India. Thus, 9/11 both showered oil profits on the Gulf and ensured that those profits would be invested close to home. As the regional financial center, Dubai was the logical place to invest locally.

Sheikh Mohammed moved quickly to turn the increasing capital flows into a gusher

.......... In 2002, Mohammed issued a land reform decree allowing foreigners to own real estate in Dubai — a first in any Gulf state. ....... Loaded Lebanese afraid of another civil war back home, Indian nouveaux riches seeking respite from the poverty at their doorsteps, and Russian oligarchs banking assets stripped from operations in their decaying motherland all poured cash into Dubai properties. ................ What Miami had long been for the elite of Latin America — a place to park wealth too risky to keep back home — Dubai became for the magnates and kleptocrats of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the former Soviet Union. ....... The apotheosis of this trend would come in 2009, when the dictator of Azerbaijan amassed nine waterfront mansions during a two-week, $44 million buying spree — all purchased in the name of his 11-year-old son. ......... the global real estate consulting firm Jones Lang LaSalle touted Dubai, along with Dublin and Las Vegas, as its “World Winning City” for 2002. .........

All three cities experienced massive booms, but Dubai’s was the most explosive. ........ Dubai was a real-life SimCity, a fantastical metropolis that looked as if it had magically leapt from an architect’s laptop running the latest computer-assisted design software out onto the pristine desert.

........... Housing developments sprouted up along the beachfront, and office towers rose along the city’s massive freeway spine, Sheikh Zayed Road, in the most outlandish shapes: An enormous golf tee, a silvery sandworm, even a proposed spherical “Dubai Death Star.” Architecture firms struggled to keep up with demand, importing new employees so fast that they could scarcely find desks for them all. ....... Between 2002 and 2008, the city’s population doubled and its urbanized footprint quadrupled — in part from speculation-driven land-reclamation projects reminiscent of the 19th-century Bombay boom, albeit in outlandish shapes of palm trees and maps of the world.

In 2008, Dubai experienced as much property development as Shanghai, a city with 13 times its population.

........ Through a parallel strategy designed to lure multinational companies, Sheikh Mohammed successfully turned Dubai into the global business hub of the Middle East. In the early 1980s, Mohammed had breathed new life into the languishing Jebel Ali port by declaring it Dubai’s first “free zone.” The term was something of a misnomer. Free zones in many countries were simply areas where companies were exempt from taxation. But in Dubai, there were no corporate or income taxes to begin with; the government was funded largely with the profits of state-owned enterprises, oil revenues and sin taxes on alcohol. Jebel Ali Free Zone was more like a Special Economic Zone in Deng Xiaoping’s China, where separate laws applied within the SEZ than beyond the gates. Beyond the borders of Jebel Ali, strict, traditional Shariah law would still govern business relations (under Shariah, for instance, those who can’t pay their debts are imprisoned). But inside the new free zone, business could be done much as it was done in the West, according to a specially crafted civil legal code geared specifically toward port businesses. Jebel Ali thrived under the new regime, becoming one of the busiest ports on the planet. Today, it processes over 10 million shipping containers annually. ............ With the success of Jebel Ali, Sheikh Mohammed began carving other free zones out of the desert, each specifically designed to woo an industry he felt would benefit Dubai. ........ Being a single city governed under multiple legal regimes would come to define Dubai. Global cities have always struggled with how to apply laws to their diverse assemblages of people. Through its patchwork of free zones, Dubai had come up with a new answer. While in the foreign concessions of Shanghai, different people were bound by different legal codes based on their nationality, in Dubai the same people would be governed by different legal codes depending on where they were within the city. .........

In Shanghai, extraterritoriality meant that no matter where you were in the treaty port, you were, in a legal sense, always back home; in Dubai, the free zones made traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood, in a legal sense, like moving from country to country.

........ The Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) free zone, opened in 2002, is physically set on a block of desert off of Sheikh Zayed Road. The DIFC complex, designed by San Francisco architecture firm Gensler as a massive horseshoe-shaped office building wrapped around a central 12-story arch, soon filled up with the giants of global banking, including Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered and Credit Suisse. As with the architectural blueprints, the intellectual blueprints for the DIFC had been drawn up for the monarch by an American firm — consulting behemoth McKinsey — which advised the Dubai government to create a financial district governed by Western-style business regulations. It fell to veteran finance regulator Errol Hoopmann, who was hired away from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in 2003, to write the legal code. “The whole concept here was to vacate 110 acres of [land of UAE] laws, just empty it of civil and commercial laws,” Hoopmann explained in his Australian accent, wearing a pinstriped suit in his office atop the arch. “And then we had to write our own laws to fill up that vacuum. And those laws are based on mainly UK [regulations] —

though there’s an awful lot of Australian because I wrote it.”

.........Hoopmann called the DIFC “a state within a state… We compare it to the Vatican.” ........ Like a state, the DIFC has its own court system, presided over by an imported British judge, to enforce its laws. The DIFC even has its own official currency — the U.S. dollar rather than the UAE dirham — and its own official language. “English is the official language, in a sense, of the country we’ve got here,” Hoopmann said. ........ Beyond the 110 acres of the DIFC lies the realm of debtors’ prisons — about 40 percent of Dubai’s prisoners are in jail on debt charges — but inside, business can be done as it’s done in New York, with dollars and English and lawsuits. .......... In 1999, saltwater-inundated lowlands along Sheikh Zayed Road were drained and set aside to become two contiguous free zones, Internet City and Media City. ....... To entice companies to locate in Internet City and Media City, Dubai’s authorities exempted the contiguous free zones from the UAE’s strict Internet censorship policy. In the twin zones, the government promised, the Internet would be fully searchable (except for sites based in Israel, which would remain blocked). .......... unlike other authoritarian countries, notably China, the UAE is completely transparent about its Internet censorship. In the UAE, censored sites are blocked not with the message “The connection has been reset” but with “We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” ......... prohibits, among other sites, web pages with instructions for computer hacking and bomb making and sites that offer Internet gambling and Internet dating, which, according to the regulations, “contradicts with the ethics and morals of the UAE.” ......... the Washington State–based software giant could lease space rent-free for 50 years .......... Internet City hosts the Middle East headquarters of not only Microsoft but Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Canon ......... despite its big corporate names, Dubai has only been able to lure the finance and marketing departments of the tech companies. Assurance of free thought in one designated neighborhood has not been enough to woo the creative research and development and programming departments, which remain clustered in the more liberal nearby nations of India and Israel. .........

Internet City, for all its successes, is still hamstrung by the lack of intellectual freedom in the wider city-state of Dubai.

........... The city-state was an ideal place from which to cover the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Journalists could hop on a plane for a short flight into the war zones, do their reporting, and then return to their office in rich, peaceful, stable Dubai. ......... To Sheikh Mohammed, part of the allure of building Media City was free publicity. Bringing major bureaus to the city helped make Dubai a global household name as locally based journalists ended up covering fluffy stories in the city-state that they would never have covered farther afield. Dubai’s over-the-top real estate projects — a shopping mall with an enormous indoor ski slope, giant man-made islands shaped like palm trees — became world famous. Many Dubai developments seem to have been conceived with just such stories in mind. ............ In 2007, at the request of fellow regional autocrat, Pakistani strongman General Pervez Musharraf, Dubai shut down two independent Pakistani media outlets that were reporting on unrest in their home country from Media City. .........

in 2011, Google’s Middle East marketing director, Wael Ghonim, openly organized revolutionary protests in his native Egypt via uncensored Facebook from his Internet City office.








Dubai 2021
Dubai Economic Report 2018

The Dubai Magic (3)

Dubai's Remarkable Economic Transformation
The Dubai Magic (1)
The Dubai Magic (2)

Dubai – the future business capital of the world? Dubai has emerged as a leading global hub for financial services, logistics, hospitality and trade ....... A major event planned for 2020 is a six-month-long exhibition of trade, innovation and products from around the world. Expo 2020 Dubai, is expected to attract 25 million visitors to the city, with 70% of visitors coming from outside the UAE. ........ “Human ingenuity” has always been key to Dubai’s success. ....... Dubai has consistently recognised that embracing exciting new developments and opportunities is essential in creating a strong dynamic centre. ........ 3000 BC The first human settlement in Dubai ........ 1930 Dubai becomes a successful port, with a population of nearly 20,000, and is already popular with expats ......... 1966 Oil is discovered in the Dubai region, with revenue from oil exports is used to finance major investment in transport links and establish schools, hospitals and telecommunications networks ......... 1971 Dubai, along with Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Fujayrah, Sharjah and Umm al Quwain gain independence from Great Britain and form the United Arab Emirates. Dubai International Airport officially opens ...... 1999 The world’s only seven-star hotel, Burj Al-Arab opens .......... 2017/18 Dubai becomes one of the world’s top five centres for trade, logistics, finance and tourism, and the Capital of Islamic Economy ......... A background of economic and political stability has provided the foundation for Dubai’s continued progress as a leading centre for trade, logistics, finance and tourism. Its future is looking bright, as it moves away from the region’s dependency on oil to a more diverse economic make-up. ........ the transformation of the economy accelerated as oil surged to a record $147 a barrel in 2008, but continued in the aftermath of the financial crisis when oil plummeted to a low of $26 in 2016. .........

its aim to become the “most business-friendly city in the world”

........ Boosting its position as a leading financial centre .......... plans to accelerate the transition towards a knowledge economy by allocating 8% of the total government spend to develop performance and establish a culture of excellence and innovation, particularly in cutting-edge technology such as nanotechnology and the Internet of Things......... technology is expected to increasingly impact the workplace with more flexible working patterns and collaboration......... Dubai is bringing businesses closer to the world’s fastest-emerging markets



Dubai culture and lifestyle: what to expect Modern Dubai is a multicultural and diverse city, that has developed rapidly since its origins as a fishing and trading port in the early 1900s.......... By the 1930s, Dubai’s popularity was growing, with immigrants making up around one-quarter of the population. ......... 2021 Dubai Plan, which focuses on six key areas: its people, society, experience, place, economy and government – to make Dubai the best city it can be. .........

Today’s Dubai is a fusion of more than 200 nationalities – with Emiratis making up only around 10% of the population of 9.5 million. Individuals pay no income, property or capital gains tax, which makes it an attractive financial proposition for many expats.

....... The hottest months are between June and September, when temperatures average 45C. A cooler 24-25C is usual in January and February....... "When it comes to socialising, such as experiencing the local nightlife, there is little difference to Europe." ......... “It’s an extremely safe place, with a zero-tolerance approach to bad behavior and crime. As long as you stay respectful to the city and its modern, Middle Eastern traditions, this is one of the best places to live.” ......... “The culture today has a deep respect for religion, time with family, and intangible heritage like poetry, storytelling and falconry; it can be tricky to navigate on your own. At the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding in Dubai you can learn about local customs at special events. Modest dress and a few words in Arabic open a lot of doors and make it easier for others to approach you.”........ “However, if you have legal problems – consumer rights issues or tenancy disputes – there may seem to be very little redress.” ........ The court system operates in Arabic ..... Understanding the laws – most of which are in Arabic – and finding a good lawyer and/or translator is essential for those involved in a court case. ....... “It’s easy to spend all your earnings. .......... Most apartment blocks and compounds popular with expatriates have gyms and swimming pools exclusively for residents. ........

The working week in Dubai runs from Sunday to Thursday

....... Dubai is seen as the top city in which to live in the Middle East and North Africa. ......... Expats need to be aware of Dubai’s cultural and religious norms – and an increasing cost of living – but they will be rewarded with a diverse and welcoming place to live and work.