Sheikh Mohammed issued tough penalties for fraud – bringing confidence back to Dubai

original source sheikhmohammed.com

The law is effective immidiately and will be published in the official gazette.

more:  www.sheikhmohammed.com
read also: KhaleejTimesOnline   “Anti-fraud Law Made Tougher”
read also Gulf News
Powered by ScribeFire.

Terror suspect studied in Dubai

original source CNN

Tee man charged with attempting to destroy a U.S. airliner on Friday is
the son of prominent Nigerian banker and had been a college student in
Britain before moving to Dubai, according to family and official
sources.
read more

further reports:

Washington Post

New York Times

Powered by ScribeFire.

Dubai – Abu Dhabi Last Minute Agreement

source Zawya

For more than two weeks there was little word from Abu Dhabi, even as fears over Dubai’s debt travails wiped billions of dollars off regional stock markets and bankers warned about the contagion effect.

Yet many investors had bet on the United Arab Emirates’ oil-rich capital being Dubai’s lender of last resort. Abu Dhabi’s silence exacerbated the uncertainty as the clock ticked down on the deadline for Nakheel, Dubai’s troubled real estate developer, to repay its $3.52bn Islamic bond.

It also placed the relationship between the UAE’s most important and competitive city states under the spotlight.

Yesterday’s news that Abu Dhabi is lending $10bn (€6.8bn, £6.2bn) to help dig Dubai out of its immediate hole will help soothe nerves. But the nature of what many bankers interpret as a last-minute agreement will do little to assuage concerns.

In the end, many observers believe Abu Dhabi felt it had little choice but to act as it witnessed the dramatic fall-out from the decision by Dubai World
     
’s parent, to ask for its debt repayments to be delayed.

Now the question on many minds is: what price will Dubai pay for Abu Dhabi’s support? At the very least, experts believe that Abu Dhabi will have oversight on how the $10bn is spent – and the funding is conditional on Dubai World succeeding in negotiating a standstill with its creditors. Some predict wider consequences.

“We believe Abu Dhabi has and will attach political conditions to its financial rescue, including possibly seeking strategic equity stakes in Dubai assets and reining in Dubai’s independence in foreign policy,” says John Sfakianakis, chief economist at BSF-Crédit Agricole Group.

When the UAE central bank subscribed to the first $10bn of a $20bn bond programme issued by Dubai earlier this year, it was seen as thinly veiled intervention from Abu Dhabi. Two Abu Dhabi-controlled banks last month subscribed to a further $5bn. But the capital was apparently kept in the dark about Dubai World’s request for a credit standstill on November 25.

Talks between the two governments and central bank officials began in “earnest” two weeks ago, observers say.

“Lot of loose ends were tied up in the last 48 hours, but the basis of what we have been talking about – the structure and the pieces and the elements – we have been working on for the past two weeks,” says a source close to the Dubai government.

Another source, however, says a senior official with Dubai World was still preparing creditors for the worst on Sunday.

Abu Dhabi has always insisted that it would not allow another member of the UAE to fail. But officials have also made clear there would be no blank cheque and Dubai would have to rein in the excesses that fuelled its problems.

The source close to the Dubai government says: “What I can tell you will happen in the future is: future decisions will be closely co-ordinated with the two governments.”

Powered by ScribeFire.

Outlook in concrete- Dubai World `s obligations and Debts

original source Blogs The National by Wayne Arnold

In response to queries, I’m revisiting an earlier post: “Reports of my debt have been greatly exaggerated,” in which I posted estimates of Dubai World’s real debts after its revelation that it had $59 billion in consolidated liabilities. This terrifying number sparked some to wonder if the treadworn estimates of Dubai Inc.’s $80 billion in debts might actually be higher or that Dubai World’s debts may somehow account for half of the total.

The grand total for Dubai World and its units appears to be $36.49bn, of which $26bn is subject to restructuring.

Strictly speaking, no one knows for sure. Dubai and its subsidiary companies do not publish official debt tallies or debt repayment schedules. But thanks to the diligent work of analysts at EFG-Hermes, Deutsche Bank and Standard & Poor’s, just to name a few, here’s what we know, or at least think we know:

Dubai World has
$59.3bn in consolidated liabilities,
according to its own statements, which includes all debt and non-debt obligations at the conglomerate, its 12 subsidiaries and the 78 other units they own or control.

Of this, the group owes an estimated
$10.52bn in bonds and
$13.3bn in loans, for a total of
$23.82bn, according to Deutsche Bank.

But clearly this leaves out significant portions of the Group’s overall debts, because Dubai World has announced that the restructuring will affect $26bn in debt, $20bn at Dubai World and Limitless, and $6bn at Nakheel.

Deutsche bank has been able to track down only a portion of these.
Dubai World, it estimates, owes
$5.5bn in outstanding loans
EFG-Hermes has put the loan figure at $6.7bn.

Nakheel owes
$5.23bn in bonds and
$1.85bn in loans for a total of debt of
$7.08bn.

Limitless owes
$1.2bn in loans

That only adds up to $13.78bn, leaving $12.22bn in debt unaccounted for.

If we assume that the total debts at Dubai World, Nakheel and Limitless are $26bn and add Deutsche Bank’s estimates for the other Dubai World units, we come up with a total group debt of $36.49bn.

Here’s a schedule of maturies for the Dubai World group debts we know about:
Dec. 14: Nakheel’s $3.52bn sukuk is due, though Dubai World has said it plans to ask creditors for a six-month extension.
March 31, 2010: Limitless due to repay $1.2bn loan
May 13: Nakheel due to pay Dh3.6bn in bonds
[May14: if it wins an extension on its 12/14/09 bonds, Nakheel would have its $3.52bn sukuk to repay this day.]
June 23: Dubai World due to pay $2.1bn loan
Nov. 1: Nakheel due to pay Dh367.35mn loan
Jan. 11, 2011: Nakheel due to pay $1.2bn loan
Jan. 16, 2011: Nakheel due to pay $750mn bond
Feb. 23, 2011: DP World due to pay $6.3bn loan
Feb. 23, 2011: DP World due to pay $200mn loan
March 22, 2011: Ports Customs and Free Zones due to repay $6.8bn loan (unclear whether this is still a Dubai World liability)
April 12, 2011: DP World due to pay $400mn loan
April 12, 2011: DP World due to pay $6.8bn loan
June 20, 2011: Dubai World due to repay $450mn loan
June 24, 2011: Dubai World due to repay $1.95bn loan
July 10, 2011: Ports Customs and Free Zones due to repay $1.003bn loan
Aug. 10, 2011: Dubai Drydocks due to pay $1.7bn loan
Sept. 29, 2011: Ports & Free Zone World due to pay $150.027mn loan
Sept. 29, 2011: Ports & Free Zone World due to pay $853mn loan
Sept. 30, 2011: Dubai Drydocks due to repay $2.2bn loan
Oct. 21, 2011: Dubai Drydocks due to repay $1.7bn loan

D-day for Nakheel Dubai – December 28 is the final cut off point

original published by Reuters

DUBAI (Reuters) – Heavy rain pounded Dubai on Sunday adding to the gloom of the emirate’s debt woes a day before the deadline of the $3.52 billion bond by state-owned developer Nakheel, with no word on how it will be handled.

Dubai’s stock market did soar for a second consecutive session on Sunday as traders reacted to a surge in Nakheel’s bond price last week on mounting speculation it will repay.

The Islamic bonds, or sukuk, had been trading around 110 cents to the dollar before the government shocked investors on November 25 with a request for a six-month standstill on the debt of state-linked Dubai World.

The announcement sent the sukuk down to mid-40 lows, but closed on Friday at about 54 cents to the dollar.

Fund managers and bankers regard Monday’s outcome as the litmus test for Dubai World’s planned $26 billion restructuring and Dubai as a whole for resolving its debt burden.

But the odds of Nakheel, the developer of palm-shaped islands, repaying are low.

“It’s very hopeful people (speculating),” says a Dubai-based fund manager. “It seems very strange that if Dubai World intended to pay they would have gone through the last two weeks of pain.”

A sudden u-turn and repayment would placate disappointed and confused investors in the immediate term. Dubai’s handling of the situation has tarnished its reputation.

Dubai’s finance chief on Thursday tried to reassure investors saying its actions were more important than its public image. But, Dubai World has few options.

“The key thing is the lack of clarity,” said Nish Popat, ING’s head of fixed income in the Middle East. “What’s needed more than anything else is some sort of information to understand what the plans are going forward and how they are progressing.”

Reflecting rising repayment hopes, five-year credit default swaps for Dubai fell more than 30 basis points on Friday to 533 basis points, according to CDS monitor CMA DataVision, compared with a peak of almost 700 bps at the end of November.

The level is still high given the CDS was quoted at about 300 bps before the November 25 announcement.

“The CDS spreads are better, and news of a hedge fund buying into Nakheel – this is all positive … even if you buy Nakheel at 50, and they pay out 70, you’re still making good money,” said a banker from a Dubai government-controlled lender.

If Nakheel does not pay on Monday, it would technically be in default, but it would still give its restructuring team a two-week grace period to reach an agreement with creditors.

December 28 is the final cut off point. After that a cross default clause in its original prospectus will be triggered that covers Nakheel and its guarantor Dubai World, adding to the overall debt burden.

Regional markets have been struggling for weeks under the issue.

“Prices are so distorted right now,” said Haissam Arabi chief executive at Gulfmena Alternative Investments. “Tomorrow is a big day, until we get some clarity (about Dubai’s debt) there will be no real trend. The main catalyst we are waiting for is Nakheel news.”

STRIKING A DEAL

Analysts have speculated Nakheel could repay its bond at 70 cents to a dollar and issue new debt for the remainder.

“Such an outcome would be beneficial for both parties involved,” EFG Hermes analyst Fahd Iqbal

Emaar Dubai – no economic sense in merging with Dubai Holding

original source Financial Times

Dubai Holding, the conglomerate owned by the emirate’s ruler, received a blow yesterday when Emaar Properties blocked a proposed merger with its real estate arms. Emaar’s decision appeared to be a bid to protect itself from the continuing fallout of Dubai’s debt problems.

Debt problems for Dubai may swell

original source Bloomberg

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) — Debt restructuring by Dubai state-run companies may almost double to $46.7 billion as more of the emirate’s businesses could need help making payments, Morgan Stanley said.

Dubai Holding LLC, Dubai Holding Commercial Operations Group LLC, Borse Dubai Ltd. and Dubai Sukuk Center Ltd. may join Dubai World in restructuring debt, Morgan Stanley analysts Mohamed W. Jaber and Paolo Batori wrote in a report. Government- controlled Dubai World said last week that it’s in talks to renegotiate $26 billion of loans.

It’s likely that other state companies will “announce debt restructuring plans over the near term,” Jaber and Batori wrote. “We believe that a haircut on the external debt at risk in the area of 40-50 percent is necessary to have a notable long-term favorable impact on public debt dynamics.”

Islamic bonds issued by Nakheel PJSC, Dubai World’s property unit, that mature Dec. 14 fell to 51.5 cents on the dollar from 53 cents yesterday, heading for the lowest closing price on record, according to Citigroup Inc. prices.

read more….

Dubai Index slumps again

original source Bloomberg
Dec. 8 , 2009 — Dubai shares tumbled, erasing almost all of this year’s gains, on investor concern that Dubai World is struggling to restructure debt.

Emaar Properties PJSC, the United Arab Emirates’ biggest real-estate developer, slumped 9.8 percent and Emirates NBD PJSC retreated to the lowest since Sept. 3. The DFM General Index plunged 6.1 percent to 1,638.05. The measure, which closed at the lowest since July 13, has tumbled 22 percent since Dubai said on Nov. 25 that it was seeking a “standstill” agreement on Dubai World’s debt.

Dubai Holding seen at risk

original source Zawya / Financial TimesThursday, Dec 03, 2009
Thursday, Dec 03, 2009

Thursday, Dec 03, 2009

With Dubai World cut adrift from implicit government support, there are concerns about potential defaults by other state-related entities. The name mentioned most by bankers and investors in the region is that of Dubai Holding, the personal investment vehicle of the ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.

“Dubai’s actions have introduced the risk that restructuring of other corporates could follow,” Barclays Capital said in a report this week. “We would focus on those with weak fundamentals and upcoming maturities and we view Dubai Holding as being most at risk.”

Dubai Holding’s Commercial Operations Group’s debt was yesterday downgraded to below investment grade by Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency, along with four other government related companies. The cost of insuring $10m (€6.7m, £6m) for five years against default ballooned to $1.1435m a year on Tuesday, making it the riskiest Dubai corporate bond according to the market.

A Dubai Holding spokesman yesterday said: “I am very doubtful that we will face any problems paying the debt. Dubai Holding is confident that it is on track with all payments.”

Formed in 2004, its investment arms led the emirate’s international buying spree to recycle funds generated by developing swaths of Dubai desert. The group leveraged profits to build debts of $10bn, with maturities in 2010 of $2bn, according to Barclays Capital.

Bankers say because of its connection to the ruler the conglomerate enjoys stronger political standing than Dubai World

It appears to have a stronger financial position. Analysts say it has a greater ability to service its debts thanks to a number of cash-generating businesses. It is believed to have received cash injections from the government in recent months. The company has never confirmed this.

Still, bankers say its investment arms, Dubai International Capital and Dubai Group could face more financial problems than its commercial wing, which spans hospitality, business parks and real estate. “Dubai Holding is not going to acknowledge problems right now. But there is a contagion effect in every Dubai entity , this is just the beginning,” a senior banker said.

Dubai International Capital is believed to be looking to sell assets but has enough money ringfenced by the holding company to keep afloat its buy-out businesses in Europe and the Middle East, according to those familiar with the company. These people say its public equities portfolio, which includes stakes in EADS, Sony and ICICI Bank in India, may be sold. DIC is also winding down its emerging markets private equity unit, Middle East venture capital portfolio and interests in other private equity funds.

Dubai HoldingDubai ’s commercial arm includes profitable businesses, such as flagship hotels company Jumeirah Group. The group has slimmed down faster than the troubled Dubai World conglomerate. DICand Dubai Group, for example, have merged their back-office operations and Dubai Holdings’ developers have merged and been folded into Dubai ’s leading developer, Emaar Properties, much to the alarm of minority shareholders who fear dilution and say they are being forced to bail out other companies.

The restructuring already under way at Dubai Holding is so deep that analysts are raising the possibility that, like Dubai World
, it could be broken up and its best businesses – notably Jumeirah – moved into other parts of Dubai Inc., such as Investment Corporation of Dubai , which is emerging as the emirate’s “good bank” of assets.

Dubai is down, but fighting for its place in the sun

original source Wall Street Journal

Dubai 2 December 2009

Finally, a chink of light. Dubai World has belatedly provided some of details on its planned debt restructuring.

But for investors the situation still resembles a darkened room, where the outlines of the furniture are now visible but little else. And for Dubai itself, there is more than just the future of $26 billion of debt at stake. The emirate’s credibility as a financial center and its ability to continue financing good businesses, such as ports operator DP World, will hinge on its handling of the crisis.

Tuesday brought some good news. The $26 billion of debt affected is less than the $60 billion feared last week. Even so, questions linger. The restructuring process will include Dubai World itself and property developers Nakheel World and Limitless World. Analysts at Barclays Capital have identified $8.5 billion of debt at Nakheel, $5.5 billion at Dubai World and $1.2 billion at Limitless. That still leaves $10 billion unaccounted for. It may be in bilateral bank loans where there is no public disclosure. But it still leaves creditors unsure of their position.

It is also encouraging that Dubai World intends to adopt a policy of regular communication, though again the process lacks detail. For example, it is unclear whether the six-month standstill requested from creditors is voluntary or enforced. Given the looming Nakheel maturity — just two weeks away — it will be a challenge to secure creditor agreement in advance. If some lenders reject a stand-still it could trigger another bout of uncertainty and bondholders are organizing themselves for battle: a group holding 25% of the Nakheel bonds has hired Ashurst as a legal adviser.

Dubai’s strategy relies on ringfencing certain key businesses from the general restructuring — possible because of the lack of cross guarantees in the Dubai World group. For example, Ports & Free Zone World, which includes port operator DP World and P&O Ferries, is now clearly excluded from the process. But the initial lack of clarity on this issue has already cost Dubai Inc. a swathe of ratings downgrades. Of Moody’s six ratings on Dubai companies, four are now junk.

The history of debt restructurings suggests that investors will not be scared off Dubai forever. Russia, for example, returned as an oil-fuelled darling of international investors even after its sovereign default in 1998 and amid continuing corporate governance and transparency problems.

If Dubai handles the painful process sensibly, it will emerge chastened from the experience, but not necessarily a spent force. The infrastructure built during the bubble will not vanish. The emirate now has to prove its status as one of the most western-friendly places to do business in a region still attractive for its massive oil wealth. If it can do so, Dubai will be down, not out.

Write to Richard Barley at richard.barley@dowjones.com

Debt Crisis Dubai World – Why is Dubai still causing concern ?

original source Guardian UK

Why is Dubai still causing concern?

Yesterday was the first day investors were able to trade in many Middle East markets since news broke on Wednesday that Dubai World, one of the region’s largest property companies, was unable to pay its debts. Many suspect the news was released before the holiday, Eid, to limit the global reaction; instead investors panicked even more due to a lack of information. Their worst fears were confirmed yesterday when the Dubai government finally issued a statement but refused to stand behind the company.

What about western markets?

European and US stockmarkets have calmed down since last week, but the episode has reignited fears that our financial system is not through the worst. British banks such as HSBC, Standard Chartered, RBS and Lloyds are most exposed, although they have told City regulators that their losses are manageable. Other countries with large international debts such as Greece, Ukraine and the UK have seen investors take fright, sparking fresh fears that the next phase of the crisis will move from companies to countries.

Has Dubai gone bust?

Technically, the crisis at Dubai World is a purely commercial matter, and should not count as a national or sovereign debt default. But the company is so intimately tied to the emirate and its ruling family that the government would have tried everything possible to protect it before resorting to this.

What help is Dubai getting from other Arab states?

Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s larger neighbour, yesterday offered to provide emergency funding for local and foreign banks, but pointedly declined to provide specific guarantees to Dubai World. What support is offered is likely to come with strings attached.

Will the IMF need to get involved?

Rumours swirled over the weekend that the International Monetary Fund was preparing an emergency bailout. This was downplayed in Washington, but officials called on local central banks to intervene and said they were monitoring the situation carefully.

Has the crisis been overblown?

The recovery in international markets has led some market commentators to argue that the Dubai World default was an isolated incident. However, both western banks and local politicians have a strong incentive to underestimate the losses. Independent analysts who have studied Dubai’s debt problem such as UBS and EFG-Hermes, a local investment bank, estimate it is much larger than the official $80bn – possibly rising to $120bn-$150bn.

Will it come closer to home?

Jitters over the creditworthiness of countries such as Greece could become self-fulfilling if they are unable to finance their debts using international investors. This would put enormous pressure on the eurozone, which may be forced to bail out weaker members or see the future of the single currency put in jeopardy. Countries outside the euro, such as the UK, may also see the cost of borrowing increase if the cost of insuring their debt continues to rise. But the more immediate worry is the exposure of British banks, which make up four of the six banks most heavily involved in Dubai World.

Shocking – Dubai`s main investment fund seeks debt payment delay

original source BBC

The government-owned investment company behind Dubai’s rapid development drive has asked its creditors for a six-month delay on repaying its debts.

Dubai World, which has total debts of $59bn (£35bn), is asking creditors if it can postpone its forthcoming payments until May next year.

Dubai World has also appointed global accountancy group Deloitte to help with its financial restructuring.

The company has been hit hard by the global credit crunch and recession.

‘Shocking’

The Dubai government said in a statement that the request to delay debt repayments also applied to property developer Nakheel, a Dubai World subsidiary.

“It’s shocking because for the past few months the news coming out has given investors comfort that Dubai would most probably be able to meet its debt obligations,” said analyst Shakeel Sarwar, of SICO Investment Bank.

Dubai is one of the seven self-governing emirates or states that make up the United Arab Emirates.

Analysts say the Dubai government has paid the price for a flamboyant economic model centred on foreign capital and giant construction projects.

Some have speculated it is likely to turn to the more economically conservative Abu Dhabi emirate to bail it out.

The Dubai World announcement was made on the eve of the Eid al-Adha Muslim festival, which will see many government agencies and companies close in Dubai until 6 December.

see also: Bloomberg Reuters WallStreetJournal

Update : Dubai bonds gained after Sheikh Mohammed reduced of the power of some top executives

original Source Bloomberg

Dubai bonds gained after ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum reduced the power of some top executives as he tries to improve investor confidence in the emirate burdened by $80 billion of debt.

Dubai’s five-year Islamic bond, or sukuk, maturing in 2014 rose 0.11 cent to a three-day high of 100.63 cents on the dollar at 7:11 p.m. in Dubai, pushing the yield down to 6.243 percent, Bloomberg data show.

Sheikh Mohammed fired Omar Bin Sulaiman, the governor of the Dubai International Financial Centre, on Nov. 20 who had led efforts to transform Dubai into a Middle East finance hub. A day earlier, he removed three executives from Investment Corporation of Dubai, the state-holding company at the forefront of a debt-financed construction drive that collapsed last year.

“You might not understand completely what changes have happened and why, but you get the impression things are being done in a constructive way,” said Norval Loftus, the head of convertible bonds and sukuk at the Matrix Group Ltd. in London, which manages $2.5 billion of investments.

Investment Corporation of Dubai has stakes in more than 30 companies including Emirates Airline and Emirates NBD, the Persian Gulf’s biggest bank.

Dubailand

The executives removed from the board include Mohammad al-Gergawi, chairman of Dubai Holding, which owns developers including Dubai Properties LLC, Sama Dubai LLC and Tatweer LLC. Tatweer has put on hold a project to build “Dubailand,” a Disneyland-style leisure park that would be three times the size of Manhattan.

Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, chairman of Dubai World, a state-run holding company that has about $59 billion of debt and other liabilities, was also removed. Dubai World controls property developer Nakheel PJSC, which has had to cancel plans for a new waterfront development the size of Hong Kong Island. Nakheel has to repay a $3.52 billion bond maturing in December.

The third executive deposed from the board is Mohammed Ali Alabbar, chairman of Emaar Properties PJSC, the largest developer in the U.A.E., which is building the world’s tallest tower.

‘Calculated Move’

“This is a very deliberate and calculated move that goes hand in hand with other efforts being made by the Government of Dubai to restore its credibility in the market,” said Chavan Bhogaita, head of credit research at National Bank of Abu Dhabi PJSC, the U.A.E.’s second- largest lender by assets. The emirate wants “to be seen to be taking proactive action to address the serious issues that have affected Dubai Inc. entities,” he said.

The ruler earlier this month took direct control over the emirate’s planning and supervisory agency. While Sheikh Mohammed is exerting control over the web of state-owned companies that he used to accelerate diversification away from oil, the deposed executives will keep their corporate positions. Bin Sulaiman stays as vice chairman of the U.A.E. central bank.

The Dubai government is in the final stages of preparing the second half of the bond issue, Alabbar said on Nov. 20. Investors will buy a “reasonable chunk” of the bond, he said. The bonds will be issued before the end of the year, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, chairman of the emirate’s Supreme Fiscal Committee, said on Nov. 16.

“These developments are positive and in line with a strategy to provide the investor community more comforts,” said Jamil Hallak, head of credit trading at Standard Chartered bank in Dubai.

To contact the reporter on this story: Haris Anwar in Dubai on Hanwar2@bloomberg.net

Dubai property prices may drop as much as 30 percent more

original source Bloomberg

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) — Dubai home prices may take at least a decade to recover and increasing supply and a shrinking population will leave 25 percent of the sheikdom’s houses empty next year, according to UBS.

Prices may drop as much as 30 percent more, UBS analyst Saud Masud said in a note today. They have already fallen by more than 50 percent from the peak last year, making Dubai the worst-hit market in the global real estate slump.

Dubai’s construction boom petered out in the third quarter of last year after banks tightened lending and speculators left the market. UBS’s research contrasts with a Deutsche Bank report this month that said the market is “bottoming out” with slowing price declines and an increase in transactions. Masud said the market will probably reach its bottom in 2011.

Consolidation in the industry will result in asset writedowns, limiting the benefits of a possible merger of Emaar Properties LLC and three state-owned companies, UBS said. Emaar, the United Arab Emirates biggest real-estate developer, is in talks to join with state-controlled competitors Dubai Properties LLC, Sama Dubai LLC and Tatweer LLC.

Dubai’s population, which is 90 percent expatriate, may drop by 8 percent this year and another 2 percent in 2010, Masud said. Nearly half the workforce is employed in real estate or construction.

Banks in the United Arab Emirates have understated their non-performing loans and the total may grow to around five times the 27.8 billion dirhams ($7.57 billion) reported by the central bank in September, the Dubai-based analyst wrote.

Bank lending tied to real estate may be 35 to 40 percent of the total when including personal loans used for property investment. Central bank regulations cap real estate lending at 20 percent of a bank’s total. The loans could be 350 billion dirhams to 400 billion dirhams, almost double the stated 204 billion dirhams, UBS said.

Provisions for bad loans may grow to more than five times their current levels over the next 12 to 18 months, Masud wrote. Net provisions stood at 29 billion dirhams by the end of October, central bank data shows.

“We expect to see greater consolidation, higher provisions for non-performing loans, an increase in investor delinquencies and relatively lower end user demand for residential and commercial property,” Masud wrote.

Banks will face pressure to provide liquidity and late payments will probably present a continuing risk for contractors and subcontractors, he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Zainab Fattah in Dubai on zfattah@bloomberg.net

Dubai developers Cirrus and Kaizen disappear – Investors worried

original source Construction Week Online Dubai, 14 November 2009

Confusion has broken out over the whereabouts of international real estate firms Cirrus Developments and Kaizen Developments.

Both developers are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of developments in Dubai and across the region, including Cirrus’ Aquarius Gate in the Waterfront area, and Kaizen’s Equinox Residences at Palm Jebel Ali.

Websites for the companies are no longer active, while phone numbers listed on their brochures have not connected.

Cirrus Developments had been developing Celestial Heights – a mixed-use project of three towers, in the Downtown Jebel Ali master development, but the project is now being looked after by a firm called Catalyst Project Consultants, Construction Week has learned.

“Cirrus was part of phase one of Celestial Heights, then the owners appointed Catalyst,” Catalyst Project Consultants’ director Israr Ahmed told CW.

“Cirrus have downsized and moved offices, but they handed over all work related to the project over a two month period.”

Ahmed also said that Catalyst was “not at all” related to Cirrus Developments but it did have links to Kaizen Developments whose logo featured on early Celestial Heights marketing materials.

The last number he had for Cirrus could not be connected.

Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera) confirmed to CW that a developer by the name of Kaizen One Investment Limited was an approved developer, but the phone number it had registered for Kaizen now belongs to a general trading company.

Significantly, the registered website that Rera had for Kaizen One Investment Limited was www.cirrusdevelopments.com, which is now defunct.

Construction Week eventually managed to reach Cirrus Developments’ brokerage number where a receptionist said: “Due to the [financial] crisis, we have suspended the brokerage”, but insisted that despite not appearing on Rera’s list of approved developers, the development side of the company was still in operation.

Both public relations firms which represented Kaizen and Cirrus in the past confirmed that they were no longer their clients.

Kaizen Developments is unreachable.

Do you work for Kaizen or Cirrus? Have you invested in their projects or have you worked on their projects? Please contact constructionweek online

Jumeirah Lake Towers – One more Dubai Property Disaster – Homes promised in 2007 won`t be ready before 2011

original source Zawya
Dubai: Investors who paid as much as Dh1.7 million for apartments in a residential tower said they are no closer to moving in though the project should have been completed two years back.

Three 40-storey buildings at Jumeirah Lake Towers two residential towers and a business tower — were due to be completed in 2007, but buyers have now been told that the buildings won’t be ready before 2011.

They claimed that the developer Al Attar Properties altered the original plans from two-bedroom apartments to one-bedroom plus a study and changed the views they wanted. An official from Al Attar Propertiessaid the delays have been due to problems with regulations and reassured investors that construction work would begin “in four weeks’ time”.

Mohammad Makram, an Egyptian national, said he is one of 60 investors affected and is currently forced to rent as well as pay off a bank loan that he took for the apartment.

He bought a Dh1 million freehold two-bedroom apartment in 2007 and was originally told it would be completed at the end of that year.

Sherif Atef, an Egyptian expat, who spent Dh1.7 million on a two-bedroom apartment in the Vista Del Lago tower, said: “It’s been so frustrating since I bought the apartment in August 2008. I don’t think we’ll see the money again.”

“We have taken independent experts to the area and they said that there is no way a 40-storey building will be ready by 2011 and that’s even if they start work right away,” Makram said.

He added that the group decided to wait for a change in the law in the new year before moving court. “My life has been on hold for two years. I had been planning to get married but that’ll be delayed as I don’t know where we may be living,” he said.

Many investors have been de-manding their money back but Al Attar Properties has been refusing, Makram added.

 

Absoulte unhappy Nakheel Propery Buyers – Dubai Jebel Ali Palm complaints investigated

original source The National

The Dubai Land Department (DLD) will investigate complaints over the stalled Nakheel Palm Jebel Ali project after about 125 disgruntled property buyers petitioned the authority.

Nakheel has offered investors alternative homes in other projects that are either completed or already under construction, including at International City, Jumeirah Heights and Al Furjan.

“After patiently waiting for seven years and putting all of our hard-earned money into this project, we are being given the option to transfer to inferior properties which are not in the same league as those promised to us,” the investors said in a letter to the DLD. “This is not what was sold to us.” An official said the department would compile a report on the situation.

Palm Jebel Ali, the second part of the Palm island trilogy, was launched by Nakheel in 2003 and was designed to accommodate up to 250,000 people and add 70km of beachfront to Dubai. Work came to a standstill on the vast artificial island development after property prices started to tumble last year.
read the rest of the Report The National

Japanese construction companies are facing very serious debt problems as Dubai can’t pay

original source The National

Japanese builders are owed billions of dollars on projects that include the Dubai Metro and Palm Island, according to a top diplomat and leading contractors from the country,
Japanese builders have played a pivotal role in Dubai’s construction boom, spearheading work on the Dh28 billion (US$7.6bn) Metro and helping to build Nakheel’s palm-shaped islands off the emirate’s coast.

But as the global financial crisis brought many projects to a standstill, an increasing number of foreign companies, especially builders, have reported payment problems mainly linked to Dubai developers.

“Some Japanese construction companies are facing very serious debt problems as Dubai can’t pay,” said Seiichi Otsuka, the Japanese consul general in Dubai. “Some companies engaged with the construction of the Metro are facing some payment issues.” He said companies were also owed money by Nakheel.
read the rest of this article…The National

Sheikh Mohammed Ruler of Dubai has told the emirates`s critics to ” Shut Up”

original source 7Days

Dubai Ruler tells critics to ‘do their homework’ as he stresses unity and confidence in the future

The Ruler of Dubai has told the emirate’s critics to ‘shut up’.

HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum yesterday broke away from a pre-prepared speech in Arabic on the Dubai economy to make his point in English.

His remark was directed at people who have tried to suggest there is a wedge between the emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi after Dubai drew a $10 billion emergency loan from the UAE central bank.

But Sheikh Mohammed said these people “should really do their homework” about his country.

“I just want to tell these people who nag about Dubai and Abu Dhabi to shut up,” he told the MENA and Frontiers Conference in Dubai, organised by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Sheikh Mohammed, who is also the prime minister and vice president of the UAE, stressed the close ties between Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

“Dubai and Abu Dhabi are one,” he said, adding: “I assure you that we’ll be there for each other when we need it.”

The comments were clearly aimed at dispelling perceptions of a rivalry between the two emirates.

There have been accusations around the globe that Abu Dhabi has become jealous of Dubai’s success in recent years as it tries to diversify its economy away from a dependence on oil.

But yesterday, in rare public comments on the subject, Sheikh Mohammed stressed the tribal bonds and blood relations between the emirates’ rulers.

“We, our fathers, grandfathers have fought for the Arabian Peninsula,” Sheikh Mohammed said. “We are very, very proud of our country, very proud of our people… And our people (are) very proud of us.”

The ruler also confronted critics who say Dubai was slow to react to the global financial crisis.

He said the government “preferred to wait rather than rushing” so it could restructure state-owned companies. And Sheikh Mohammed said he
was confident the worst of the crisis was over.

“As the global economy stabilises, Dubai today is well placed to exploit its inherent strength,” he said.

“The slowdown will never dampen the mettle of children of Dubai to steam forward in the drive toward development,’’ he added.

Dubai faces a debt of about $80 billion. As well as the $10 billion loan, it expects to raise an additional $10 billion in financing before the end of the year.

more Maktoob.com

Dubai – Sheikh Mohammed`s speech at Bank of America Merill Lynch investment conference

original source SheikhMohammed

Follow the link to read an edited translation of the speech of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum Ruler of Dubai at an investment conference organized by the Bank of America Merill Lynch in Dubai.
Link

Video of the speech

Dubai Court Case Shahram Zadeh against Al Fajer Properties

Al Fajer Properties Dubai 2009 , Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum

source

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — In this Gulf city-state, two things have long been untouchable: business interests and the ruling family. However, an attempt to sue a member of the family over an alleged financial swindle is a sign of how much the economic crisis has rattled business as usual here.

Shahram Abdullah Zadeh accuses the brother-in-law , sheikh Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum, of Dubai’s emir illegally of taking over his real-estate firm Al Fajer Properties and having him detained by police to help the swindle.

Zadeh, a 37-year-old Iranian national who has lived in Dubai all his life, brought a civil case against the brother-in-law and his son Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum to get his firm Al Fajer Properties back, a rare move. Even more surprising, shrahm Zadeh tried to raise criminal charges, but that step went nowhere because prosecutors rejected it.

The case has raised questions about whether Dubai really is what it claims to be: A boomtown where international businessmen can safely invest and turn a profit; or rather, a nest of cronyism and connections where royal blood can still trump entrepreneurial effort.

Such questions were largely ignored by everyone – businessmen and politicians alike – as long as the cash was rolling in during Dubai’s stunning expansion over the past decade. But now the emirate has hit the skids in the world financial crisis.

“During the boom, Dubai’s shortcomings were glossed over, but now that the economy is struggling, it’s becoming a different story,” said Christopher Davidson, an author of two books on the United Arab Emirates and a lecturer at Durham University in Britain.

Dubai’s emir, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, led the emirate’s vast financial ambitions. But business ran far ahead of the effort to modernize legislation in what remains a traditional Arab monarchy, where the ruler and his family hold final say.

Now the government has been trying to rein in some fast-and-loose business practices. About a dozen former executives are in custody for various investigations. Some have close ties to the government, but none of those in custody are related to the ruling family.

Zadeh’s case goes farther – breaking to taboo of questioning Dubai’s leadership. Zadeh says he’s a victim of a system in which the rulers can manipulate police and the courts to protect their business.

“If Dubai cannot provide security for foreign investors, they might as well switch off all the lights,” he said.

Attempts over the past weeks by The Associated Press to contact the brother-in-law, Sheikh Hasher Maktoum bin Juma’a Al Maktoum, were unsuccessful. Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoumand his company attorneys did not return repeated phone calls or respond to interview requests.

In the first session of Zadeh’s civil case, Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum and his lawyers failed to appear. In the second a week ago, his lawyer asked the court for more time to study the allegations. The case is to resume May 4.

Zadeh and the Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Al Maktoum went into business in 2004. Foreigners are allowed to deal in property only after finding an Emirati sponsor to officially register a company. The usual practice is for the Emirati sponsor to give his signature for an annual fee or profit share. Several members of the sprawling ruling family are involved in such deals.

Zadeh set up a firm, Al Fajer Properties, and was chief executive while Sheikh  Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum held the trade license. The firm was profitable and is now worth about $2 billion, according to Zadeh. But the partnership soured over delays in building a commercial tower, Juemirah Business Centre.

Zadeh said in an affidavit to Dubai’s attorney general that he was arrested in February 2008 and held for 60 days. He says he was never charged with any crime but was questioned over his business – including the combination of his safe.

While Zadeh was in detention, Sheikh Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum took over the company Al Fajer Properties by appointing his son Sheik Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum as chief executive, ousting Zadeh, according to Zadeh’s filing. When he was released, Zadeh says he found his office safe had been cleaned of documents showing he was the owner of Al Fajer Properties and Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoums partner.

Zadeh also says police tried to push him to sign a document saying he had no connection to Al Fajer Properties. He submitted to the court

Al Fajer documents listing him as CEO and transactions that his lawyers contend show he was the sole investor. The Associated Press was given a copy.

Sheikh Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum  “thought he could do it all because he’s a Sheik,” Zadeh said.

Police refused to comment on whether Zadeh was detained. Shahram Zadeh says they continue to hold his passport and so far he has had little luck pushing his claims.

He submitted a criminal complaint but the attorney general refused to investigate, giving no reason.

Zadeh then filed a complaint directly to Dubai’s emir, who holds what is called the Ruler’s Court. Residents can bring to the emir what they believe are injustices unaddressed by the courts – from disputes over money to wrongful deaths.

Zadeh says he has received no response.

see also: Terahn Times

More: Al Fajer Properties Dubai – Jumeirah Business Centre – Ebony Ivory Towers Dubai

Apartment blocks in Dubai are suffering from a lack of confidence in the property market

source TheNational
Homeowners say its absence creates legal ambiguity and developers complain that without it they are essentially forced to provide extra services for householders.

Both, however, seem to agree that their dilemmas and Dubai’s lacklustre property market could be smoothed over by the emirate’s strata law.

Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency, or Rera, which took a lead role in shaping its regulations, has for the past several months been largely silent on the issue. Officials there did not respond to questions on the issue. And in the interim, developers, homeowners and property management firms warn, the result is wavering confidence and continued confusion in the market.

“Everyone’s frustrated,” said Adrian Quinn, chairman of Essential Community Management, a property management firm that has been waiting years and invested a total Dh8 million ($US2.2m) for the day when the law would allow it to bid for rights to manage freehold properties in Dubai.
read the full report The National

Dubai residents say their water and electricity bills as much as doubled in September

A group has even formed on the social networking site Facebook called “My Dewa bill increased in September 09 by a crazy amount for no reason!”

One member claimed the bill for his three-bedroom flat in Al Barsha was Dh8,000. As of yesterday, the group had 144 members. Other Dubai-based websites have jumped on the bandwagon and are running similar discussions about what is causing the bills to shoot up.

read the full report original source The National

Mr. FIX IT in Dubai

It`s said… this is a true story …..about a so called “Mr. Fix It” brought to you over a search…
original published by Prakash Subbanao.
Click on the Link and enjoy reading !

Dubai Nakheel Palm Jebel Ali Home Buyers stay united

People who bought waterfront villas on Palm Jebel Ali, where prices have tumbled by about 45 per cent from their peak in the third quarter of last year, are now being asked to transfer their investments to projects that include Al Furjan and Jumeirah Heights, which are both under construction.

But the move has been criticised by investors, who expected to move into their new homes last year.

“Nakheel has called investors and given them this option,” said Saqib Iqbal, who bought a villa in the development in 2006.

“But most investors would like them to complete Palm Jebel Ali. People have paid premiums on top of what they paid originally, it’s a disaster to be asked to move somewhere else.”

Palm Jebel Ali was the second artificial island project to be launched by Nakheel and was designed to accommodate up to 250,000 people and add 70km of beachfront to the emirate.
“Further work on Palm Jebel Ali has been delayed until market conditions allow recommencement of these phases of the development, and customers are being given a range of options within the wider Nakheel portfolio to transfer their investment,” said Nakheel.

In an letter sent to Marwan bin Ghalita, the chief executive of the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA), investors said: “This is not what was sold to us. The apartments being offered are much smaller, with no beachfront or private pool, and are at a much higher price.”

The investors, most of whom have paid 30 per cent towards their purchase, have called on Nakheel to instead resume construction of Palm Jebel Ali, register their plots with the Dubai Land Department and officially agree to link further payments with construction milestones.

original source The National read the full article…….

Dubai – More than a half million bounced cheques between January and May 2009

Bounced cheques are regarded legally as fraud, a criminal offence punishable by jail in Dubai and the UAE.

With more than a half-million cheques bounced between January and May of this year alone, the cases have been putting an increasing strain on the legal system.

But now the hard walls of debtors’ prison are beginning to crack.

No longer will home buyers in Dubai who cancel postdated cheques because of a developer’s missed deadlines or broken promises automatically face jail.

Instead of being investigated by police or prosecuted, delinquent tenants and homeowners will be referred to a new judicial committee that will make a binding judgment on whether they should be held to payment. It will also deal with developers who run into financial difficulties and cannot pay their investors.
read the full aricle in The National original source

Dubai Prosecutors will hunt former senior executive of Istithmar World

Dubai, 05 November 2009
An Interpol Red Notice could be issued for the arrest and possible extradition of Chris Turner, who was sentenced in absentia to five years in jail for embezzling AED4.9 million ($1.3m), UAE daily The National reported on Thursday.

The former risk assessment manager for the investment arm of Dubai World was also ordered by Dubai Criminal Court to pay $2.7m in fines and restitution.

Turner, speaking to newswire Zawya Dow Jones from a location outside the UAE, said: “I’m innocent of the charges and I’m not in the country. I’m reviewing my legal options.”

“This is a matter for the appropriate authorities,” said a spokesman at Istithmar World in an emailed statement to the newswire.

But prosecutors in the UAE said they would hunt for him.

source Arabian Business here read the full article

Shareholders’ equity of the top 150 Arab banks is just 170 billion dollars – Gulf Banks cannot finance huge projects alone

source Zawya

Nov 02, 2009 (AFP) – Gulf and Arab banks are unable to finance huge projects in the oil-rich Gulf region and fill a credit gap created by the withdrawal of foreign banks amid the global financial crisis, bankers said on Monday.

“The total shareholders’ equity of the top 150 Arab banks is just 170 billion dollars,” Shaikha al-Bahar, deputy chief executive of National Bank of Kuwait, told the Kuwait Financial Forum.

“These banks are not capable of financing huge projects. We have limitations,” said Bahar, adding that the cost of projects in Gulf states over the next several years is estimated at more than 2.1 trillion dollars.

The global financial crisis has resulted in a major credit squeeze, forcing many countries in the region to cancel or postpone hundreds of projects for a lack of finance that was mainly provided by international banks.

The cost of lending also became expensive, thus raising the cost of projects.

Jean-Christophe Durand, BNP Paribas managing director in the Gulf, said good projects will still be able to attract capital at the right price.

“(But) we still need international banks,” for financing of major projects in the Gulf, he said.

Abdulaziz al-Ghurair, chief executive of Mashreq Bank in the United Arab Emirates, said Gulf banks can fill part of the credit gap with some help.

“Gulf banks can fill the (credit) gap created by foreign banks… provided risk is distributed at all Gulf states and with help from other sources,” he said.

Speakers said cash-abundant Gulf governments are required to play a key role in financing mega projects, while others said local investment companies should also contribute.

Banks in the Gulf have been strongly affected by the credit crunch and many were exposed to bad debt, resulting mainly from a slide in the value of assets and problems at investment firms and family companies.

All central banks in the region have asked banks to allocate provisions against bad loans, a process that impacted profits of Gulf lenders.

Former Kuwaiti finance minister Mahmud al-Nuri said he believes Gulf banks will not be able to face the post-crisis conditions without key mergers.

“I believe that over the next five years, there should be three to four regional bank mergers. This is very necessary,” he said.

Ghurair said there has been no strategic plan for bank mergers in Arab countries and the few mergers that took place were among distressed banks. “I hope there will be some strategic mergers in the next decade.”

Dubai Good News – Dubai property dispute victims to get free legal advice – Let`s Hope that this is not again only a promise

source Arabian Business

Dubai Land Department on Monday announced a new initiative to introduce a free legal service to support home owners involved in real estate-related court cases.

The announcement follows a meeting between senior Land Department officials and representatives of law firms to finalise details of the move.

The Land Department said an agreement had been signed which would see the law firms become part of a new Legal Care Group.

The group will bring together senior lawyers, professional firms and consultants to offer free legal assistance to members of the public with “genuine real estate issues” who might otherwise be dissuaded from taking action because of the prohibitive cost of fees, the Land Department said in a statement.

Mohammed Sultan Thani, assistant director general of the Dubai Land Department, said: “The objective of this initiative is not merely to meet a need but to ensure fairness and justice is available to anyone who might have a concern which involves property, no matter their circumstances.

“This reflects the government’s commitment to ensuring there is in place a comprehensive equitable system of legalizing ownership and property transactions.”

He added: “Now, no one is prevented from pursuing their rights merely because of the possibility they might be priced out of the legal system.”

Richard Green, head of research at CB Richard Ellis Middle East, said: “The offer of free legal advice is another step in the right direction. Overall confidence in the legal dispute system has been somewhat low due to a time lag in addressing the current case backlog.

“This announcement will go some way to renewing faith in the system as well as providing confidence to individual investors facing financial difficulties in their disputes against developers.

“Overall this is seen as another positive advancement for the Dubai market.”

In August it was reported that property dispute cases that were originally submitted to the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera) and Dubai Courts are now being dealt with by Dubai’s new Property Court.

The new court, which started operations in October, was set up under the First Instance Court to deal exclusively with property-related cases.

Dubai Properties Chairman arrested on suspection of embezzlement

source Bloomberg October 30 2009

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) — Hashim Al Dabal, chairman of Dubai Properties LLC has been arrested on suspicion of embezzlement at the state-owned company that’s in merger talks with Emaar Properties PJSC, the emirate’s attorney general said.

“Mr. Al Dabal is accused of abusing his position and earning millions in illegal profit,” Attorney General Essam Essa al-Humaidan said in a phone interview today. “We are questioning him almost daily and Mr. Al Dabal indicated he is ready to answer questions without having a lawyer present.”

more….

Dubai`s off-plan buyers cash at high risk – Delayed Projects axed

source  MaktoobBusiness

DUBAI – Many real estate projects claimed to be on hold due to the collapse of the UAE’s property market have actually been cancelled, but developers do not want to admit this because then they will have to return investors’ money, industry observers say.

Observers also question some developers’ ability to repay investors when projects are finally cancelled, with the prospect of buyers losing millions of dollars.

“In the 18 months before the downturn a number of projects were announced that were not financially viable and therefore unlikely to see completion,” said Tahir Akhtar, chairman of Dubai Business Advisors, who has invested in projects across the UAE.

“Developers do not want to admit this because then they will have to return the funds.”

Billions of dollars worth of developments were launched during the UAE’s real estate boom, which had seen property prices close to double by mid-2008 from the start of 2007.

The boom was driven by speculation and easy credit, with developers funding the construction of projects through off-plan sales.

When the global financial crisis gripped the country’s real estate market prices plummeted as financing and demand dried up, leaving developers unable to fund construction.

UNDER REVIEW

Many developers have put projects on hold or have said they are reviewing projects, but few have come out and outright cancelled projects.

“If they (developers) say it’s cancelled they will have to repay the money to clients. Probably for that reason they are saying it is still on hold,” said Charles Neil, CEO of property consulting firm Landmark Advisory.

Michael Shvo, a well-known luxury real estate marketer from New York, said a developer told him privately a project that is “officially” delayed is actually cancelled, declining to name the developer.
 
“A developer told me that officially the project is on hold, but it is actually cancelled,” Shvo told a conference at Cityscape Dubai earlier this month, prompting him to call for greater transparency.

The number of real estate projects cancelled or on hold stood at around $408 billion in September, up 18 percent from $346 billion in April, according to the Kuwait Financial Centre.

The Centre, also known as Markaz, said it expects cancellations to rise further in Dubai due to the continued lack of financing and uncertain economic outlook.

UAE real estate regulations vary from emirate to emirate, but currently there are no laws governing how long a project can be on hold before a developer must refund investors’ money.

In Dubai, the UAE’s most developed real estate market, authorities are in the process assessing which projects are unviable and should be cancelled, with the findings due out before the end of the year, according to the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA)

Developers are not allowed to cancel projects in Dubai without the approval of RERA and the Dubai Land Department, RERA said, adding that if a developer does get approval to cancel a project it would have to reimburse investors. 

“It will vary from project to project as which ones will go ahead. Some will end up with half-completed buildings and some may not start (at all),” Landmark’s Neil said.

INVESTOR CONCERN

Investors have become increasingly vocal in voicing their concerns about delayed projects, calling on developers to transfer their investment to another project or refund their money.

Larger companies such as Emaar Properties and Nakheel have set up schemes that allow buyers to swap their investments between projects, but smaller developers lack the project portfolio to offer an alternative, analysts say, leaving investors at risk of losing their money.

Dubai Business Advisors’ Akhtar said a group of investors he belonged to stood to lose around 150 million dirhams ($40.8 million) from projects in the UAE emirate of Ajman that now look like they may not go ahead.

“Not a lot has been done to protect investors,” he said.

Dubai brought an escrow account law into force in mid-2007 in an effort to better protect investors – requiring developers to hold buyers’ money in a special bank account until the completion of a project – but many projects had been launched prior to the law, and other emirates were even later in introducing similar regulations.

“Most projects that fall under the escrow provisions of RERA have an established level of comfort and protection. Those projects that are not covered by escrow are a different situation,” said Blair Hagkull, regional managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle.

10 year old Emirati Boy 100 % owner of ACI Real Estate LLC Dubai ?

original source ExtremNews

Jungunternehmer Robin Lohmann (34) aus Gütersloh (Nordrhein-Westfalen) wurde im eigenen Hause von einem zehnjährigen Jungen als jüngster Chef getoppt.

Mohammad Ahmad Thani Obdaid Thani Al-Muhairi ist erst zehn Jahre alt und schon Boss zweier ACI-Firmen in Dubai: der ACI Real Estate LLC und des ACI Investment Project LLC. Robin Lohman ist dort sein Manager.

Das fand GoMoPa-Korrespondent Martin Kraeter (www.gomopa.net) zusammen mit Rechtsanwalt Hartmut Göddecke bei Recherchen im Departement of Economic Development (DED) in Dubai heraus, wo die genauen Firmenstrukturen des deutschen Fondsanbieters Alternative Capital Investment (ACI) aus Gütersloh eingetragen sind.

Damit sitzt also ein Zehnjähriger auf 300 Millionen Fondsgeldern, die deutsche, österreichische und schweizerische Anleger der ACI zum Bau von Türmen anvertrauten – die sogar von Boris Becker, Michael Schumacher und Niki Lauda beworben wurden. Die Projekte sind pleite, das Geld der Anleger wohl verschwunden.

Die ACI Real Estate LLC und die ACI Investment Project LLC gehören zu 100 Prozent dem zehnjährigen Moammad und seinem Vater, Ahmad Thani Obaid Thani Al-Muhairi (41).

Aber auch die beiden anderen ACI-Firmen in Dubai, die ACI General Trading Co LLC und ACI Consultancy, sind fest in der Hand eines einheimischen Besitzers: des Emiratis Ahmad Nasrulla Ismail Al-Ahmadi (57).

Al-Ahmadi besitzt aber nicht nur zwei ACI-Firmen als Mehrheitsgesellschafter beziehungsweise nationaler Agent, ihm gehört auch die YAMA International Commercial Broker LLC. Das ist die Firma, die alle ACI-Investmentobjekte im Dezember 2008 für 50 Millionen Euro offiziell gekauft hatte und dann nicht zahlen konnte. Weshalb die Anleger seit März 2009 in Deutschland vergeblich auf die versprochene Auszahlung von 50 Millionen Euro warten.

Die Lizenz der Yama war beim Verkauf schon ein Jahr abgelaufen

Die YAMA International Commercial Broker LLC wurde am 16. Oktober 1999 zum Handel mit Geschenken, Spielzeug, Kohle und Feuerholz gegründet. Die Firmenlizenz war aber bereits am 15. Oktober 2008 abgelaufen und wurde nicht verlängert. Der Verkauf fand also an eine Firma statt, die es zumindest von der VAE-Gewerbeerlaubnis her gar nicht mehr gab.

Und der Besitzer dieser Scheinfirma YAMA ist zugleich Mehrheits-Besitzer und nationaler Agent der beiden ACI-Firmen ACI General Trading Co LLC und ACI Consultancy. Die YAMA und die ACI Consultancy hatten sogar dieselbe Postfachnummer.
more….

official ACI Real Estate LLC Licence Details  ( expire of the Licence 20.September 2009)

Test Case for RERA Dubai – Investors file case with RERA over Dubai project delays

source ArabianBusiness
 A group of around 30 investors has filed an official complaint at the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera) over ongoing delays and specification changes at the Vue de Lac and Vista del Lago developments in Dubai.

Investors on the Al Attar project at Jumeirah Lake Towers accused the developer of unreasonable delays and changes being made to apartments without the consent of owners, Construction Week Online reported.

“We have been promised the project since then end of 2007. It was then pushed to 2008, then the end of 2008, and now he’s saying 2011 – which will never happen, because up to date they’ve only finished the piling,” investor Makram Mohamed told the website.

Many asserted that apartment specifications have changed so drastically that they no longer wish to purchase property in the project and want a full refund.

Investors are unhappy at what was described in a letter from Al Attar as “some small changes”, where two-bedroom apartments have been changed to one-bedroom ones.

Al Attar had revised the prices of the apartments in line with the reduction in apartment size, but investors said that they had bought two-bedroom apartments specifically and a smaller alternative was not acceptable.

“Because of the change of designation and all of this delay, we don’t want this property any more. The majority of people investing were buying to live in this property. Ninety per cent of our group wanted to live in this. Now they’ve changed the designation, we don’t need it. I bought a two-bedroom; you can’t give me a one-bed plus study,” said investor Shailendra Sainani.

“The majority of us need our money refunded and the costs absorbed. [Al Attar] needs to resell the project from the beginning.”

In addition to changes in designation, many investors are also concerned that delays to the project will result in a huge interest bill arising from finance agreements that can only be concluded following apartment handover.

Some investors took out finance agreements in 2006 under the impression that the project would be handed over in 2008. They are now facing the prospect of paying five years’ worth of interest on finance agreements, should the project be delivered according to a new completion date of 2011.

Some investors also query Al Attar’s ability to deliver the project on time.

“Can we still believe Al Attar can deliver in 2011, if they couldn’t even start construction in the last three years?” said one investor.

The group has filed a case with Rera because they say that Al Attar Properties is refusing to communicate with them except through a lawyer.

No-one from Al Attar was able to comment on the case or development.

The case has now been filed with Rera, who said a decision on the steps it would take would be forthcoming in the next few days.

UAE collect DNA from all Residents – DNA database set to start in a year

source The National

The UAE aims to start collecting genetic samples from residents within 12 months as part of its controversial DNA database project, the programme’s director said yesterday, making it the first country in the world to do so.

Dr Ahmed al Marzooqi, the director of the National DNA Database, also said the order for millions of people to allow lab technicians to collect samples of their DNA by swabbing their cheeks would probably be given as a security directive and not require the passage of new legislation.

“The first step is to set up the infrastructure and hire the lab technicians,” he said in an interview with The National.

“This should take us approximately one year.”

Then, he said, the UAE would start collecting DNA samples from the general public, beginning with juveniles.

“The aim is to eventually have a profile of the entire population,” said Dr Marzooqi, who is also the chairman of the DNA Working Group, made up of various police forces across the Emirates.

“Our goal is to sample one million per year, which could take as long as 10 years if you factor in the population growth.”

Some officials have suggested that the DNA programme may require new legislation, which would then need to be considered by the Federal National Council.

But Dr al Marzooqi said this might not be the case.

“We are not sure if this will go through the Federal National Council or not,” he said. “It could simply be decided as a security matter and not need the legislation of the FNC.”

The legislative route seems increasingly remote given that a new government department, the National DNA Database, has already been formed within the Ministry of Interior and collection kits ordered to help the police gather genetic material.

At present, only 5,000 DNA profiles are stored, all of convicted felons.

The notion of collecting DNA samples from non-criminals has raised ethical concerns about privacy protection.

In Britain, for example, such use of DNA was contested last year in the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that Britain must purge non-criminal genetic material from its database.

The UAE has not accepted the jurisdiction of any such body.

Even attempting such a database – in which DNA is gathered from the entire population, even those who have never gone through the legal system – is basically unheard of, said Sir Alec Jeffreys, the British genetics pioneer who invented the DNA profiling system.

He expressed concern over the lack of legislation required for a national database.

“It will be interesting to see how this develops,” he said.

“How this works out will really set the scene for how other countries approach this problem. If it’s seen as a great success which the population and citizenry fully endorse, I think it will open the way for a lot of other countries going down this route.

“If it turns into a disaster for whatever reason, that will be the end of the story. You are the interesting experiment at this point.”

Dr al Marzooqi, who is also Interpol’s single Middle Eastern representative in its DNA Monitoring Expert Group, said he was aware of the project’s challenges.

“We are certain the pros will outweigh the cons,” he said. “The issue of privacy is just as important for us as it is important for the public. We will implement strict usage rules and will take secondary tests in court cases to verify the identity matches.”

Other nations could use information from the UAE’s data bank, but not access the material, he said. Treaties and other international agreements would dictate the specifics.

“If there is co-operation with the country seeking the DNA profile, we share this information through Interpol – only the DNA profile, and obviously not the sample,” he said.

Because each country may have its own database of DNA profiles, Dr al Marzooqi said, databases would not be merged with those of any other country.

“Not every country who asks will be given this information,” he said.

The database, he added, would be “instrumental in helping with unsolved crimes, identifying unknown bodies and will also be a great help in major disasters, either man-made or natural”.

How safe are your Mobile calls ?

A company called Secusmart has developed an advanced encryption and authentication system to provide secure cellphone communication.

According to André Stürmer, operations director of the TriVest Group, South African distributors of the German developed Secusmart chip: “The hard fact about cellphone security is that you should always assume you have unwanted listeners. In countries where more and more business is conducted over the mobile phone network, such as is the case in Africa, this is particularly relevant.”

GSM-based communications can be attacked in three different ways:

1. An attack on the transmission network.

2. An attack on the air interface.

3. An attack by ID spoofing.

During an attack on the transmission network, the speech data is transferred clearly, and can be intercepted through legal as well as illegal measures. Air interfaces can be actively and passively attacked. An active attack on the air interface is performed by an IMSI catcher. The IMSI catcher makes use of the lack of authentication between the network and the mobile phone and intercepts the data by placing the phone on its ‘private’ network. Additionally, the IMSI catcher disconnects the normal GSM encryption. Not only does the cost of around R2 million limit its use, but it is also difficult to deploy and the active interception means that the use of the IMSI catcher can be traced.

A passive attack of the air interface requires cracking the A5/1 encryption. The two possibilities are:

1. GSS ProA – GSM interceptor

* On-the-fly decryption of up to 100 speech connections.

* Simultaneous interception and content analysis.

* Cost is approximately R750 000.

2. Open-source projects

GSM cracking project/A5 busters

The threat by this type of attack is high, as the interception cannot be traced and the entry barrier is low.

The cheapest alternative is to duplicate the caller ID – this is known as ID spoofing. Sites such as www.spoofcard.com show how easy and cheap this type of attack can be. The invader communicates the false call number and the victim trusts the number, resulting in them divulging confidential information. This threat by caller ID spoofing is extremely high because it is possible with any telephone.

These points illustrate that secure mobile communication requires more than just encryption. For this reason, Secusmart’s solution ensures encryption and authentication. Certificate authentication protects against caller ID spoofing thanks to the public key infrastructure (PKI). The Secusmart solution is independent of the mobile phone and it requires no changes to the device. The usage is simple, does not impede normal phone usage, no loss of battery time and intuitive handling, with no degradation in speech quality.

The solution makes use of crypto hardware integrated in a microSD card, which encrypts voice calls end-to-end using a 128-bit AES encryption algorithm. Authentication is certificate-based, using an elliptic curve Diffie-Hellmann key exchange and with a key agreement within 3 seconds. The microSD card is a standard chip for mobile data storage with up to 2 GB Flash storage. Additionally, it contains a secure PKI smartcard controller (NXP SmartMX P5CC072) with TCOS 4.0 operating system. The design has a high-speed AES co-processor which consumes little battery power and securely stores key.
More details-  information . Secusmart

Another ineresting Advice: original source Surveillance Self-Defence EFF

Critical test of Dubai’s credit worthiness – Dubai `s 80 Billion Dollar debt pile

original source online WallStreetJournal by Maria Abi-Habib and Stefania Bianchi

Dubai will crank up efforts this week to tackle its $80 billion debt pile with senior officials heading to Asia to meet potential investors amid reports that one of its most indebted companies has repaid a $1.2 billion bond ahead of schedule.

Top officials from Dubai’s Department of Finance will meet fixed income and Islamic investors in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Dubai and Frankfurt starting Thursday ahead of possibly selling more debt this year, according an invitation sent to bankers and seen by Zawya Dow Jones Monday.

An external spokesman for the department said the roadshows are part of “ongoing investor communication” but bankers suspect the meetings could be an early sign that Dubai may be preparing to issue the second half of its $20 billion bond program launched in February to support its economy and embattled companies.

“This will be the first time investors hear the Dubai story from officials post-crisis,” Abdul Kadir Hussain, chief executive of Mashreq Capital told Zawya Dow Jones. “How this story is received will determine how successful Dubai will be over the next three to five years.”

At the height of the global financial crisis, the Abu Dhabi-based central bank of the United Arab Emirates supported Dubai by underwriting the first half of its planned $20 billion bond program to bail out the sheikdom’s struggling companies and economy.

Recently, Dubai officials including Omar bin Sulaiman, the head of the Dubai International Financial Center, have said they expect strong interest from private investors for the eagerly awaited second $10 billion bond.

Mohamed Alabbar, who helps oversee a committee evaluating the impact of the global credit crisis on Dubai, told CNN earlier this month that the emirate may raise the additional $10 billion by November.

The investor meetings due to start in Hong Kong on Oct. 22 are the latest sign that Dubai and its government-owned companies are trying to dig themselves out of an estimated $80 billion debt pile, most of which was incurred during the emirate’s property, tourism and logistics boom.

According to Standard & Poors, Dubai has almost $5 billion worth of debt maturing between September and the end of the year. The biggest share of this debt is held by Nakheel, a unit of government-owned Dubai World. The company has a $3.5 billion Islamic bond maturing December. The bond, which will be pumped into Dubai’s Financial Support Fund, is seen as a critical test of Dubai’s credit worthiness.

“The Financial Support Fund is in need of further resources to fulfill its mandate of supporting Dubai’s government related entities, many of which face heavy debt repayments in the coming three years,” said Farouk Soussa, head of Middle East government ratings at S&P.

PAYING DEBTS

A report Monday in Middle East Economic Digest said Nakheel had repaid a 4.4 billion U.A.E. dirham ($1.2 billion) securitized bond issued in January, one month ahead of the scheduled repayment deadline of Nov. 15.
The repayment made on Oct. 15 will come as a comfort to many investors in Nakheel, and especially those concerned about Nakheel’s December sukuk. A Nakheel spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by Zawya Dow Jones Monday.
Nakheel’s bond repayment came on the same day that government-owned conglomerate Dubai World announced that it completed a major restructuring.

The move will help the firm save $800 million over the next three years and ease a small part of the near $60 billion of liabilities on its books. The term liability refers to a company’s legal debts or obligations arising from its business operations.

Earlier this month, Dubai Holding, a conglomerate controlled by the emirate’s ruler, paid back in full a $300 million loan belonging to its Sama property unit. There are also signs that Dubai is repaying some of its outstanding bills to construction contractors.

On Monday, U.K. Trade Minister Mervyn Davies said that debts owed to British contractors in Dubai have reduced, but payments remain outstanding.

“I think it has improved, but it’s been a sensitive issue, and it is important that Dubai companies pay their debts,” he said.

The U.K.-based Association for Consultancy and Engineering, which represents about 800 British construction firms, said in May it was tracking approximately GBP400 million in unpaid fees for building in the emirate.

(Natasha Brereton in London contributed to this story.)

To absorb the amount of commercial real estate UAE needs 150,000 white-collar jobs

source Arabian Business
The UAE needs to create at least 150,000 white-collar jobs to absorb the amount of commercial real estate expected to hit the market in the next two years, Nomura has said.

Dubai and Abu Dhabi need to create at least 100,000 and 50,000 white-collar jobs, respectively, to satisfy future supply of commercial real estate in the two emirates, the investment bank said in a note to investors.

Commercial real estate space in Dubai is expected to increase by 20m sq ft while the Abu Dhabi market could add another 10m sq ft.

In the residential market 65,000 and 15,000 additional units are expected to be completed by the end of 2011.

“This is in an environment where jobs, still real estate and construction related, are being cut,” Nomura analyst Chet Riley said.

“Capital values are stabilizing in Dubai, but growth is not expected until the latter part of 2010.”

Residential rents in Dubai could fall another 10 percent, he said.

“The residual risk has not fully unwound yet, in our view. When the risk does unwind and the financially weak developments are sidelined for good, we will become more positive on the macro real estate fundamentals.”

Consolidation among small developers would take less time if banks withhold financing, he added.

“The banking sector will not move until the current risks have been mitigated adequately, but when it does, we feel we would have passed the current pinch point,” he said.

Extrem News – Pressefreiheit endet beim Geldhahn – ACI Dubai Scandal

source Extremnews.com

Die springereigene Euro am Sonntag und auch die Financial Times Deutschland der Gruner + Jahr AG & Co KG aus Hamburg knickten anfang August vor den Drohschreiben des Gütersloher Dubai-Fonds-Emissionshauses Alternative Invest Capital (ACI) ein. Zwar versicherten sich die Chefredakteure bei GoMoPa, dass die von GoMoPa gelieferten Recherche-Ergebnisse über die ACI und deren Chefs, Uwe Lohmann (64) und dessen Sohn Robin (34), aus erstklassigen Quellen stammen und vor Gericht beweisbar sind, aber dennoch wolle man einem finanziellen Risiko aus dem Weg gehen und löschte bereits online veröffentliche Meldungen kommentarlos auf ihren Online-Plattformen.

ACI verklärte Löschungen als Wahrheitssieg

Die ACI feierte die Löschungen und schrieb in einer Pressemitteilung wörtlich: “Darüber hinaus wurde über Herrn Robin Lohmann weiter behauptet (ursprünglich in GoMoPa veröffentlicht und anschließend unter anderem in der Financial Times und Euro am Sonntag von dort übernommen), er habe einen Privatjet für 17 Millionen Euro sowie 6 Bentleys bestellt. Zudem hätten die Lohmanns in Panama eine neue Identität beantragt. Sämtliche Äußerungen sind frei erfunden. Die beiden letztgenannten Medien, Financial Times und Euro am Sonntag, haben hinsichtlich dieser Äußerungen strafbewehrte Unterlassungserklärungen abgegeben beziehungsweise ihnen wurde diese Äußerung durch einstweilige gerichtliche Verfügung verboten.”

Keine Stellungnahme von Euro am Sonntag und Financial Times

GoMoPa schrieb beide Zeitungen an und bat um eine Stellungnahme. Die Zeitungen zogen es vor zu schweigen. GoMoPa veröffentlich weiterhin die Wahrheit über die ACI. Die ACI reagierte mit einer Schmähkritik auf der Firmen-Internetseite . GoMoPa ging rechtlich dagegen vor und gewann. Die ACI nahm die Verunglimpfung aus dem Netz und zahlte die Kosten für den GoMoPa-Anwalt: 1.500 Euro. Der Inhalt der GoMoPa-Meldungen war nie strittig.

Die seit März 2009 fälligen Ausschüttungen in Höhe von 60 Millionen Euro an die Anleger bleiben weiter aus. Und Antwort, wo die 300 Millionen überwiesener Anlegergelder geblieben sind, bleibt die ACI ebenfalls schuldig. ACI-Juniorchef Robin Lohmann (34) musste, da er in Dubai auf Anordnung der dortigen Staatsanwaltschaft nicht verlassen darf (sein Pass wurde eingezogen), per Video in die Anlegerversammlung in der Gütersloher Stadthalle am 2. September 2009 zugeschaltet werden, die nicht von der ACI-Führung, sondern von den Vertrieben organisiert wurde.

Anlegerschutzanwälte und Journalisten waren nicht zugelassen. Aus Angst vor GoMoPa und seinem Netzwerk von Anwälten, wie man der örtlichen Presse erzählte, machte die Polizei Ausweiskontrollen und sperrte die Stadthalle für Nichtanleger ab. Die Anleger drinnen wurden wieder einmal mit Hinweisen auf die allgemeine Krise abgespeist. Kein Wort darüber, dass Lohmann zwei der vier ACI-Firmen einem zehnjährigen arabischen Jungen und dessen Vater überschrieben hat, wie GoMoPa-Korrespondent Martin Kraeter (KLP Group Emirates) und der Siegburger Anwalt Hartmut Göddecke bei Recherchen im Departement of Economic Development in Dubai herausfanden.

Anmerkung der ExtremNews Redaktion:

Auch unsere Redaktion bekommt aufgrund der Veröffentlichung von GoMoPa und anderen “kritischen” Pressemitteilungen immer wieder Drohungen sowie Aufforderungen von beauftragten Rechtsanwälten, die Meldungen wieder zu löschen. Sollten wir der Löschung nicht nachkommen, droht man mit Schadensersatzforderungen in fantasievollen Höhen.. Die ExtremNews Redaktion steht für eine freie Berichterstattung und lässt sich weder kaufen noch erpressen, daher veröffentlichen wir auch weiterhin Meldungen von GoMoPa und andere “kritischen” Pressemitteilungen. Der Bürger hat ein Recht auf eine Freie Presse. Genau aus diesem Grund wurde ExtremNews von seinen Gründern ins Leben gerufen, weil sie immer wieder persönlich erleben mussten, wie Unternehmen und Personen durch Drohungen erfolgreich  Einfluss auf die Berichterstattungen in den unterschiedlichsten Medien genommen haben. Es geht uns selbstverständlich nicht darum, irgendwelche Unternehmen und Personen zu diffamieren oder schädigen sondern die Bürger über tatsächliche Missstände zu informieren. Sollten betroffene Unternehmen und Personen meinen, die Berichterstattung entspricht nicht der Tatsache und Gegenbeweise haben, sind wir selbstverständlich gerne bereit auch eine Gegendarstellung zu veröffentlichen. Interessanterweise war bis jetzt aber keine Firma oder Person, von der wir Drohungen bekamen, dazu bereit bzw. konnten entsprechende Gegenbeweise liefern.

CEO Damas Dubai quits after 165 Million US$ unauthorised property transactions

source Arabian Business

Following Sunday’s voluntary suspension of trading by Damas on Nasdaq Dubai, the company announced that it has accepted Tawhid Abdulla’s resignation.

The luxury retailer said in a statement that he had stepped down “due to his disclosure to the Board of what is understood to be unauthorised transactions conducted by him”.

The statement added that the full extent of the transactions had not yet been calculated but the company’s initial estimate was that they could amount to about $165m.

The Abdulla brothers, who are founding members and current owners of more than 50 percent of the company’s shares, “fully stand behind the company”, the statement said.

“They have agreed to commit the necessary assets to secure and repay in full any unauthorised transactions,” the statement added.

A special committee of the Board is to appoint an independent global accountancy firm to conduct an independent review and an international law firm to assist in analysis of the transactions.

The Board has appointed Hisham Ashour as CEO of the company effective from Sunday. Tawfique Abdulla will continue to serve as chairman of the Board and has also assumed day-to-day responsibilities as managing director.

The company also said it had adequate funds to meet its current financial obligations and was continuing to conduct business as usual.

“The Board remains fully committed to the highest standards of corporate governance, and has implemented procedures to ensure that the repayment is conducted in an appropriate and timely manner and that all transactions are fully scrutinized in the future to prevent a recurrence,” the statement added.

Damas, a family-owned jewellery group with origins going back to 1907, raised $270m in an initial public offering on the Dubai International Financial Exchange, NasdaqDubai’s predecessor, in July 2008, in one of the largest privatisations of a family-owned business in the Gulf.

One of Dubai’s best-known brand names and a leading member of the city’s jewellery and precious metals industry, Damas has more than 500 stores across the world.

read also Police not involved in Damas probe
 and
Morning round-up: Dubai is Glut City the National crane country Blog

Technorati-Tags: Dubai, Damas, Scandal

Dubai Property Market already oversupplied – It`s going to be a long and slow recovery

source TheNational
Dubai home glut to worsen – The National Newspaper

The number of new homes in Dubai is expected to grow by 34,300 in the next two years, as a prolonged economic slowdown hits demand.

Dubai will have more than 340,000 residential units by the end of this year and is already oversupplied by 25 per cent, according to Colliers International, the property consultant.

“We see no reason to believe this will improve; it should actually worsen,” said JP Grobbelaar, the director of research and advisory at Colliers.

“Unless there’s a significant increase in population over the next two years, we expect these vacancy levels to increase.”

Mr Grobbelaar added that property prices in the emirate, which had fallen by 48 per cent in the past year, would only start to level out once demand started to exceed supply.

The broker believes the office sector will be worst hit, with the oversupply expected to double in the next two years.

“It’s going to be a long and slow recovery,” he said. “Levels of economic activity are greatly reduced … we don’t see any economic drivers that will lead to an increase in demand and absorb the additional supply coming on to the market.”

Read also: UAE needs 150,000 white-collar jobs to fill office projects – by Soren Billing Arabian Business

and  Quality Streets – by Rob Corder Arabian Business

Dubai Cityscape few Visitors – no deals – what a difference a year makes

original source Wall Street Journal
On the eve of last year’s Cityscape, Dubai’s annual real-estate trade show, Nakheel unveiled plans to build a one kilometer-high skyscraper at a glitzy event with guests including actors Catherine Zeta-Jones and husband Michael Douglas.

This year, the government-owned developer made a much more modest appearance, displaying just two of its $80 billion worth of projects at the four-day event, which closes Thursday. Plans for its Nakheel Harbour and Tower development are now on hold.

Since Cityscape 2008, Dubai’s property bubble has dramatically burst. Home prices have slumped up to 50% from peaks, lending has slowed and by some estimates close to $300 billion worth of construction is either delayed or canceled.

Many were hoping that this year’s Cityscape, usually a barometer of sentiment for Dubai’s real-estate sector, would kick-start activity in the emirate’s stalled property market, but the lackluster mood in the exhibition halls suggests otherwise.

Organizers say visitor numbers have fallen about 50% to 38,000 from a year ago. Those who are attending are there mainly out of curiosity rather than serious plans to invest in property.

“I’m here to test the market,” said one visitor from Saudi Arabia with property investments in Dubai. “There are no new opportunities, but its reassuring to see that there are projects underway. That means there’s still money flow here.”

With just one project launch at this year’s show – a $100 million development in the Kurdish region of Iraq by New Zealand-based developer Atconz Real Estate Development, developers say they are focusing more on project completion and the retention of existing customers.

“2009 is the year of the customer, rather than new projects,” said Markus Giebel, chief executive of Dubai’s second-largest developer Deyaar.

 LOST TOUCH

 It’s a far cry from last year’s event when men dressed as Zulu warriors alternately danced and lounged next to a sprawling scale model of AmaZulu World, a development slated for South Africa, by Ruwaad, a U.A.E.-based company.

During the boom times, some developers spent up to $3 million on exhibition models, entertainers and glamorous promotion girls, according to Donald Trump Junior, executive vice president of the Trump Organization.

“Some people had taken it too far,” said Trump. “They lost touch with reality.”

In December, plans for a $790 million Trump Tower on Nakheel’s Palm Jumeirah were suspended. Trump Jr said earlier this week that the project might be restarted in the next two years.

“I’d love it to happen in the next two years, but it won’t be any time soon,” he said.

One of the highlights of last year’s event was the launch of Meraas Development’s $95 billion project called Jumeirah Gardens. The sprawling scale model drew in crowds of visitors. This year, although Meraas’ model is on display, the crowds are smaller and the Dubai government-backed real-estate developer admits it is scaling down its plans.

“We looked at the market, the investors, the changing real-estate scenario,” said Sina Al Kazim, chief business development officer.

Despite the gloom, there are some murmurings of recovery, or at least the market having hit the bottom.

“Perhaps what we’re seeing is a new realism, a reality check,” said Blair Hagkull, regional managing director of real estate consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle. “2009 has been the year of contraction. 2010 will see the ushering in of a new era of stability.”

By Stefania Bianchi, Dow Jones Newswires; +971 4 3644967; stefania.bianchi@dowjones.com

Womand found dead at the 10th floor of Jumeirah Essex House Hotel New York

source Thaindian News
New York, Sep 20 (THAINDIAN NEWS)

According to sources, a naked body of a 44 year old woman with her throat reportedly slashed and a knife sticking out of it was found at the 10th floor of the Jumeirah Essex House hotel. According to the police, a maid found the body of the brutally slashed woman’s body lying on the floor.

The police said that the woman was repeatedly stabbed by a bread knife which was still sticking out of her throat when the body was discovered. Sources reveal that a rope had been found draped around her neck, although thepolice believe that the rope didn’t play any role in the murder of the woman (according to the Police Department’s spokesman Paul J. Browne).

According to the sources, the woman who has been identified as Andree (Sara) Bejjani, did not show any initial signs of sexual assault as further investigations would reveal the actual cause of the murder. When asked about the motive that led to the heinous murder, Browne said, “We don’t have a theory yet.” Investigators are questioning the hotel employees and staffs in order to learn that whether any employee had an access to the apartment or not. It is still not clear about when the murder took place and for how long the woman had been dead.

“Our heartfelt condolences go out to the victim’s family. Jumeirah Essex House management has been working closely with the police,” said Jenny Glover, a spokeswoman for the hotel. According to the sources, on Saturday night a little girl who seemed to be in the care of security guards was reportedly found crying on the 10th floor.

VIP Dubai – From the Archive – Rapid Change, Emphasis on Business Overshadow Concerns on Rights

original source Washington Post May 2007

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Mohammed al-Roken is perhaps the most prominent human rights activist in Dubai. That distinction has cost him. He was arrested twice. The government forced him out of his job as a professor, canceled his public lectures and banned him from writing in newspapers. Nine months ago, his passport was seized, barring him from traveling abroad.

That’s not the tough part, the lawyer said. Far more difficult is the loneliness that comes with political work in a brashly exuberant city-state that prides itself on having no politics. “An activist might be praised, might be congratulated for his work, might be clandestinely supported, but there will be no uproar if something happens to him,” Roken said.

Roken, a tall, bearded Emirati whose few softly spoken words belie a steely determination, is trying to create a political movement in the world’s biggest boomtown where virtually everything — from the import of cheap, often mistreated labor to the prevalence of English — is dictated by the logic of capital. Yet on the margins of Dubai’s culture of superlatives, with double-digit growth the norm and unbridled optimism a mantra, politics are timidly, fitfully but gradually coalescing in a place where notions of borders, citizenship and rights have become murkier.

“This is an apolitical city, but it will probably not stay that way for too long,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a professor of political science at Emirates University. He added: “Politics brings out the good and the bad.”

In a region beset by war and crises, Dubai sits like an oasis of confidence along the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf. If Cairo was the Arab world’s ideological capital in the 1950s and ’60s, and Beirut its cultural capital until the Lebanese civil war erupted in 1975, then Dubai is now its economic capital, drawing legions of the Arab world’s best and brightest from the malaise of their own countries. It has posted growth higher than China and India, with per capita income greater than Singapore. It has reaped the windfall of the region’s oil wealth, despite having scant reserves of its own. Its leaders, a modernized tribal dynasty, style themselves as corporate executives running Dubai Inc

“This is the nature of things here, the nature of the beast. Dubai has a focus. Unlike all other cities, it has a focus and it’s clear, perhaps clearer than it’s ever been: economics, stay the course, our business is business, our business is growth,” Abdulla said.

But with that growth have come pressing issues that no other Arab locale has had to confront so quickly. Its own citizens have become a tiny minority in a city where English, not Arabic, is the lingua franca. In the heart of one of the world’s most socially conservative regions, prostitution and alcohol are rife.

Tens of thousands of newcomers arrive in the city each month, joining hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, many of whom toil with few rights and at little more than subsistence wages. Their cause has become one rallying point.

‘No Civil Society Here’

“Get out of the house,” Sharla Musabih, a 46-year-old activist, pleaded into her cellphone on a recent day. On the other end was a Filipina married to an abusive Egyptian man, Musabih said. “Go to the hospital, then come to me.”

“This is every day,” Musabih said after hanging up the phone. “Every day.”

In a city of spectacles, Musabih stands out, an occasionally lonely activist trying to forge protections and safeguards for migrants. Born in Bainbridge Island, Wash., she has lived here for 24 years with her Emirati husband and six children. She has an exuberant touch: Her hands are in perpetual motion, and the woman on the other end of the phone is “Sweetie.” “Excuse me, honey,” she beckons to a waitress, grabbing her hand in both of hers. “I’m dying for a latte.”

Her first case as an activist was an incident of domestic violence she followed in 1991. Since then, she has taken on more of those cases, as well as of children working as camel jockeys, domestic servants mistreated by their employers and women forced into prostitution.

In 2001, she set up Dubai’s only shelter, the City of Hope, a two-story villa where two dozen women are staying. As part of her work, she said she has had to run a gantlet of harassment from lower-level police to angry husbands. A criminal case was filed against her — politically motivated, in her view — and she counts death threats among her workplace hazards. Years later, she still awaits recognition from the government that would bestow legitimacy in her endless tussles with the legal system.

“You run around like the Tasmanian devil and try to have a very big smile,” Musabih said, her face framed in a brown veil.

But she added, with a slight edge to her voice, “I’m not an outsider pointing a finger. I’m an insider.”

The challenges are many: She is one of the very few activists not only in Dubai, but also in the six other sheikdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates. In Dubai, the vast influx of migrant workers is testing a court system never equipped for a city with more than 170 nationalities; workers complain about unpaid salaries, dangerous conditions and an ever-present threat to deport them if they protest. One especially intricate case Musabih has taken: a Pakistani woman entangled in a custody fight who faced everything from a travel ban to a passport stolen by a vindictive husband.

“They’re new at this,” she said of the government. “There’s a good intention, but a lack of experience.”

Her assistant, Seher Mir, 27, was blunter. “There’s absolutely no civil society here. There are no [nongovernmental organizations] here, people don’t understand what human rights are. Human rights, women’s rights, when you mention it to people, they say it’s not my problem.”

City in Transition

In recent years, Dubai has attracted attention for its ambition. It has built or is building the tallest skyscraper, the largest shopping mall and the biggest artificial island. “Once again history is created,” reads a billboard promoting the Dubai World Trade Center. There is little that might be called traditionally Arab in its commercialized ambience or cityscape of manicured roundabouts and 14-lane avenues lined with mimosa trees and purple periwinkles, save the street names: Sheikh Zayed Road, or Khalid Bin Walid Street.

Divisions lurk in the background: between expatriates, for instance, and Emiratis, and between Emiratis who trace their origins to the Arabian Peninsula or Iran. But Dubai lacks the poverty of Egypt, the sectarianism of Iraq or Lebanon or the divisions of Jordan, a country still unreconciled with its Palestinian majority. Dubai feels transient, enticing many of its residents with the promise of money or a climate more socially liberal than in neighboring countries.

“Things are not deeply or well established because of the mood of transition. People come and make money and go,” said Suleiman Hattlan, editor in chief of Forbes Arabia in Dubai. “They are interested in either the sun or business.”

Added Yassar Jarrar, executive dean of the Dubai School of Government: “You would struggle to start a political movement here.”

But that sense of depoliticized space conceals a simmering backlash in Dubai among Emiratis who are a tiny minority in their own city and who are often bewildered by the pace of change in a country that, within some of their lifetimes, once relied on pearl diving and fishing. Like Musabih, who tries to instill a legal culture of human rights in an unaccustomed court system, some Emirati activists such as Roken are trying to understand how to safeguard their identities from the encroachment of a globalized culture.

Abdullah, the political scientist, described it as a mix of pride in what Dubai represents and fear at the costs it entails.

“There is hardly anybody in the city who doesn’t feel a bit of fear inside him, a fear of losing it all at a time when we have it all,” he said. “Do you call it alienation? It’s much beyond that. We live in the best of times and, in some ways, the worst of times.”

For Roken, the challenge of alienation is an unusual one. He wants to embolden citizens — a distinct minority — to raise their voices against an authoritarian government he says caters to expatriates, the majority. The government provides Emiratis with generous housing loans, pays for schooling and ensures free health care. But Roken is more unsettled by the intangibles: entering a mall where virtually everyone is a foreigner, beaches populated by swimmers in dress he considers immodest, and wine-tasting parties at luxury hotels. Only a more democratic polity, albeit entrusted to a minority, can stanch what he sees as Dubai’s more flagrant excesses.

“The majority sets the rules of the game,” the 44-year-old lawyer said. “If we keep ourselves passive, the identity, the culture will fade away very quickly. Activism is a way of protecting our identity and our culture, in a positive way.”

“A one-voice society has been tried in other countries and failed,” he said. “We shouldn’t repeat other people’s failures.”

As a way of adding voices, Roken has pushed for a more aggressive role by professional unions, often the arena of activism in the Arab world. But he said the government has imposed restrictions on their work. The government has canceled activities, including his own talks; security forces, he said, sometimes vet the names of participants in conferences abroad.

“The space for freedom has become smaller and smaller,” said Mohammed al-Mansoori, who heads the Jurists Association.

Like Roken and others, Mansoori laments the loss of what he says was an intimacy with the ruling families a generation ago. Since the 1980s, he said, the clans that run the Emirates have increasingly assumed the trappings of power, distancing themselves from those they govern. As the traditional society fades, Mansoori has pushed for a more modern alternative: an independent judiciary, human rights and labor laws consistent with international standards and freer elections.

Among his pursuits: ways to protect the country’s identity.

“Nobody wants to listen,” he said.

Mansoori, 49, fled to London last July after a disagreement with a government official he says was politically motivated. It followed several official warnings, he said, to stop speaking to foreign media about topics from Musabih’s shelter to wildcat strikes to the rights of children of Emirati mothers. He plans to return, with a British lawyer, in coming weeks.

“It’s normal to be nervous,” he said. “But I’ve prepared myself to face anything.”

He paused on the phone for a moment, with a hint of unease. “We’ll see.”

Nakheel Dubai – Discovery Garden residents take their row to Dubai Rulers Court

source Arabian Business

Angry residents of Dubai’s Discovery Gardens are set to take their row to the Ruler’s Court this week in a bid to force developer Nakheel into slashing “exorbitant” service charge fees.

More than 90 tenants and homeowners have signed a petition, set to be presented to the Ruler’s Court and Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) later this week, which asks the government to force Nakheel back to the negotiating table to review the charges, which cover building maintenance, community and cooling fees.

Residents are due to pay the first installment of next year’s fees on October 1.

“We want the government to freeze our payments to Nakheel and to force Nakheel to justify its charges in light of the substantial drop in costs we’ve seen since last year,” said Michael Aldendorff, the head of an unofficial resident’s association.

Al Fajer Properties and Fraudulent announcements from a Blogger against our partner Blog Dubai7stars

Important announcement of our partner Blog Dubai7stars.blogspot.com

Friday, August 21, 2009

Update : Fraudulent announcements from The Pirates and Spyer Dubai9Stars

The Blogger Dubai9Stars.blogspot.com copied our Blog layout 1:1 to simulate a mirrow Blog ( we reported about this)

Now the Blogger Dubai9stars published again false and now also fraudulent defame informations about dubai7stars.blogspot.com

It seems Dubai9Stars has a real big problem with a special still pending court case in Dubai. This Case Al Fajer Properties seems to be the reason for Dubai9Stars to target us in this way.
The Fantasy and now shown Agression of Dubai9Stars against Dubai7Stars is worth to show our readers.

As we assumed, we get now the confirmation by they last actions of Dubai9Starst, that this Blog dubai9stars.blogsspot.com seems to have a special mission – to target and mislead Dubai7stars and also other individuals.
( click to enlarge the piture)

Meanwhile we take it easy, the official legal investigation from our side is still going on and this will be the last public response to the slander campaign of Dubai9stars.

We have to post the Response here, because Dubai9stars is not reachable over the own comment section. They post to our comment section yesterday under anonymous – so no way to respond to them by this way. They are the ones who are operating under the cover ” Anonymus”

Our Message to Dubai9Stars

So, Dubai9stars , with your threat today it seems you have any problems with the press releases about the case Al Fajer Properties and the case of Dr. Shahram Zadeh who filed a civil lawsiut against Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum and Al Fajer Properties. The Story of Mr. Zadeh was first published in the Wall Street Journal .

And by this,problem you have you created now a mirrow Blog of our Blog Dubai7Stars …to do what with this ????????????

Your outing of today shows us that you focus extremely and only in this direction, the Dubai court case Sharam Zadeh  against Al Fajer Properties ,  the lawsuit Mr. Zadeh filded against Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Juma Al Maktoum and his father.

Are you also hunting and investigate journalists from the internatinal press who reproted about the scandal Al Fajer Properties and the CEO Shahram Zadeh and the Media Blackout for Journalist and more in this case Al Fajer Properties – Dynasty Zarooni – Jumeirah Business Centre Scandal in Dubai ?

Are you vasalls of this special network who defarm individuals, by simulating other Blogs and providing Forums like Skyscrapercity with fraudulenent informations ?

We do not know what`s going on in your brain and what kind of illustar combinatoric you produce .

Dubai7stars is INDEPENDENT

Which Blogs Dr. Shahram Zadeh registered, is out of our acknowledge. And if so, it`s his good right to do so.

dubai7stars or 7starsdubai ( in cooperation with us) are registered since 2005 – until today they havent been purchased from whom ever.

Both domains are existing since 2005 – the owner of dubai7stars and 7starsdubai has not purchased them to Dr. Zaddeh.

We Dubai7Stars have also no editor or sponsor whos name is Dr. Shahram Zadeh nor we are the ghostwriters for Dr. Shahram Zadeh or any other person in relation to Dr. Shahram Zadeh.

Our Blog Dubai7stars contents 99% various press releases from the international press only and 1 % comments. That`s it.
To this we show a wide range from the local UAE Press over our widgets , so every reader of our Blog has the full spectrum to the Press in UAE.

What we see by your threat of today is, that you Dubai9Stars seems to have extreme interest to defam Dr. Shahram Zadeh and us. To mirrow our Blog Layout , to misuse the copyright of the picture in the header, to post under ” sheikha” and to tell others that we have copied you, this is something like Kids do. But now you have shifted in the criminal corner.

You dubai9stars ride yourself deeper and deeper in legal problems whith threads like this and the really poor action of your 1:1 layout copy of our Blog dubai7stars. Now you have expressed yourself and it needs not a lot of fantasy what is staying behind this acts.

We are also amused that you dubai9stars are since 24 hours brand new appear on Twitter with the same campaign, by using our copyright picture also here as backgraund and copy our following list 1:1. Here on Twitter with dubai9stars you opereate under the pseudonym Stefan Haswell, just having 1 Tweet.

(click to enlarge the picture)

You mirrow yourself, now under the pseudonym Lars Barton by using 9starsdubai. The Crux of your following list, you follow yourself. what kind of simulation is this ?

We see by your additional Twitter accounts that you extremly love our picture from the Burj Al Arab. You can purchase it from us for 5000 US or you should just take a sunbed at Bab Al Yam and get in the right position to take the exact same shot. Your sponsor will make it possible for you, he is at home there.

The relevant persons (who know us since years) – have been already informed about this super idea of you dubai9stars – just to give them an impression who you are and about the ” who ” we assume is standing behind your acts. The feedback we got is amazing.

You also link your readers to to Skyscrapercity. It`S amazing to see, that also here you create a brand new user name “TomJones69″ and post the misleading false informations under this name.
Has TomJones found you or did you find him ? Why operating so brand new under TomJones69 since yesterday with only 2 Posts ?

(click to enlarge the picture)

By linking to Skyscrapercity you forget to mention what you also whish to spy out further persons over this forum , this with the help of users from skyscrapercity who colaborate with you.
A Screenshot of your activity from at Skyscrapercity is already taken. ( see pic beside)

It is interetsing to see how strong you focus to defam Dr. Sharam Zadeh, how deep is your interest to hunt persons who are sharing free opinions and how extreme you wish to protect and promote Al Fajer Properties and his President Maktoum Hasher Maktoum.

As you know, we have already forwarded your acts of the event that you mirrowed our Blog for further legal investigation . You will have the problem with the regristration date of your so called ” layout brainchild” dubai9stars and the copyright misuse of the header picture and the already mentioned gadget. To simulate with false journal dates, that your Blog is longer existing , will not help you.

Now you have extent this matter, and we see no other way than to file a criminal complaint against you.

With the defarmation you publish today – you will have another legal problem.

(click to enlarge the picture)

Generally your behavior is like a status from the Kindergarden and you expressed yourself enough with your statement (copied below) – like we assume from the beginning.

The correspondence with you dubai9stars over this way , for us is now at end and will be investigate and monitored over the relevant authorities, like we mention to you earlier.

Dubai 7 stars, August 20. 2009

___________________________
The Full Text
Dubai9Stars wrote in their Blog

Interesting post about our mates at 7starsdubai….
As we were checking out some neat photos at skycrapercity forums, we noticed an intriguing post nestled in at the bottom of page 24 by tomjones69 about our mates at 7starsdubai. Click here to see the post or read the following.

Who is ebony007 and who is 7starsdubai?
For those of you who may be wondering who ebony 007 it is none other than Shahram zadeh aka Dr Shahram aka Dr Zadeh

I’ve been following the story and eventually linked up all the blogs that have been created that eventually led me here. I found out that Ebony 007 is Shahram Abdullah Zadeh. The disgraced CEO that created 4 biliion in liabilities on al fajer and did not build for 4 years.

They fired him as they found out that he was fleecing the company as he was more foucussed on taking commissions than running a property development company. According to Nakheel, he used to work as a broker there before he came and worked for Al Fajer.

To add more spice to the story after a criminal complaint was filled against him he went on the run and filed a frivolous civil suit in the hopes of getting the criminal charges filed against him to be dropped.

He also purchased a blog from a german lady called 7stars dubai. He also registered multiple variants of the same web site and other blogs which he is using as part of an amateur blogging campaign against his former employer.

Everything that Ebony007 said in the blog turned out to be more fantasy than reality. I am Sure Legal Eagle would agree and would be able to connect the dots 2. Enjoy : )

PS – I’ll be trying to dig up some more on the history of this guy so stay tuned.

It sounds like Shahram Abdullah Zadeh may be the puppet master pulling the strings over at 7starsdubai. While we’re not sure if it’s Zadeh, it wouldn’t surprise us all that much. He is the former manager of Al-Fajer Properties, who was removed from his position for stealing money from the company by forging contracts and surreptitiously moving money into his own accounts. Zadeh is suing several members of Dubai’s royal family, alleging they illegally took control of the business. The defendants in the suit have flatly denied the allegations, stating that Zadeh was bilking the company dry. See this Forbes story.

If tomjones69 is in the know, it sounds like Zadeh is projecting his bitterness at the entire industry!
Posted by Sheikha at 12:21 AM 0 comments
Labels: Al-Fajer Properties, Dubai real estate

The Link to the original Blog Dubai 7 Stars : www.dubai7stars.blogsot.com

Snapshot from the original Dubai7stars.blog

10 BillionDollar Fraud – Saudi Firm Sues Maan Al-Sanea

source Zawya Dow Jones

LONDON (Zawya Dow Jones)–Ahmed Hamad Al Gosaibi & Brothers Co, a powerful Saudi conglomerate, has filed a case in New York alleging that Saudi billionaire Maan Al Sanea
fraudulently “misappropriated approximately $10 billion”.

A copy of the suit filed on July 15 at New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan alleges “Al Sanea obtained loans frequently using forged or falsified documents and then diverted the funds received to his own use.”

A spokesman for Al Sanea’s Saad Group, which is estimated to hold assets worth $30 billion, said Friday that the Saudi billionaire is unaware of the lawsuit.

“If we are served with such a claim, we will respond to it vigorously,” said the spokesman for Saad Group, the conglomerate controlled by Al-Sanea, in an emailed statement to Zawya Dow Jones.

The case will add to concern about Saad Groupand Ahmed Hamad Al Gosaibi & Brothers Co, or AHAB,as they struggle to restructure their debts after details of financial difficulties at both companies emerged in May.

The Gosaibi family, which controls stakes in Saudi American Bankas well as other interests in shipping and industry in the kingdom, has confessed to possible losses at their Bahraini banking unit. Al Sanea, who owns a stake in HSBC HoldingsPLC, faces cash flow problems.

AHAB filed the suit against Al-SaneaAlin response to a case filed in May by United Arab Emirates Dubai-based lender Mashreqbank(MASQ.DFM) over $150 million that the bank alleges it’s owed by the conglomerate.
Both families are linked by marriage and have close links with Saudi Arabia’s ruling establishment, making the case a highly sensitive issue in the conservative kingdom.

Escape from Dubai – Washington Post – Herve Jaubert fled last Summer

Escape from Dubai , Hervet Jaubert

source Washington Post

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Herve Jaubert, a French spy who left espionage to make leisure submarines for the wealthy, was riding high.

Bankrolled by Dubai World, a government-owned conglomerate, he built a submarine workshop on the Persian Gulf, lived rent-free in a villa with a pool and tooled around town in a red Lamborghini. He had two Hummers. He vacationed with local plutocrats.

Jaubert said he heard whispers about Dubai’s darker side — the abuse of desperate laborers from impoverished Asian lands, the jailing of the occasional Westerner who crossed a sheik — but “I brushed it all off. I saw glamour. I saw marble columns, mirrors and money.”

Today, the former intelligence operative, who fled Dubai last summer in a rubber dinghy, is a wanted man. In June, a Dubai court convicted him in absentia on charges of embezzling $3.8 million and handed down a five-year sentence, plus a big fine. Jaubert, speaking recently at his new home near West Palm Beach, Fla., said he stole nothing and vowed never to set foot in Dubai again. He said he fled because of gruesome threats by interrogators to stick needles up his nose and what he described as constantly shifting, and all bogus, accusations relating to bullets, murder and the finances of Dubai World’s now-defunct luxury submarine subsidiary.

“If I hadn’t escaped, I’d be in the same hell as everyone else,” said Jaubert, one of scores of expatriate business people in this gleaming city-state who have been accused of crimes — and, in some cases, jailed for long periods without being charged.

Jaubert’s troubles began two years ago when Dubai’s then-booming economy was showing the first faint signs of strain. Local stock and property prices have since swooned, and the tempo of arrests for alleged business misdeeds ranging from a dud check — a criminal offense here — to serious fraud has picked up sharply.

Dubai’s government declined to comment on Jaubert’s allegations of mistreatment. But it has targeted what it sees as dodgy dealmakers and deadbeat debtors, and has declared “no tolerance” of “anybody who makes illegal profits.” For many expatriates, however, the crackdown smacks of a hunt for foreign culprits to blame for the sheikdom’s sliding economic fortunes.

‘It’s All a Bit Scary’

A haven of stability in a region of tumult, Dubai is usually a place people flee to, not from. Foreigners, lured by what President Obama in a June speech in Cairo hailed as the “astonishing progress” of this autocratic but vibrant Persian Gulf metropolis, account for more than 90 percent of the population, and 99 percent of private-sector workers.

But a severe economic slump has reversed the flow. Those who came to Dubai seeking fortunes in property, banking and luxury goodies for the rich now face a less alluring prospect — a prison cell or furtive flight. Only a tiny minority has been picked up by police but, says a longtime foreign resident who runs a company here, “It’s all a bit scary. They are looking for people to carry the can.” The foreign resident, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, said a British neighbor was picked up last year.

The turbulence is a blow to a place that promoted itself as the Middle East’s answer to Hong Kong or Singapore. It is also a setback for Washington, which has for years touted Dubai as a model of a modern, prosperous Muslim land that, though far from democratic, seemed anchored in the rule of law and committed to basic rights.

Among those who have been locked up are a JPMorgan investment banker; American, British and other foreign property developers; a German yachtmaker; and two Australians who worked as senior executives of what was to be the world’s largest waterfront development. The gigantic project had been launched by Nakheel, the crisis-battered property arm of Dubai World and builder of Dubai’s signature palm-tree-shaped resort islands.

A few have been convicted, mostly for bouncing checks. Those still awaiting trial often waited many months in jail before being charged: The two Australians, for instance, were arrested in January, held in solitary confinement for seven weeks and then finally charged, with fraud-related offences, last month, said their Melbourne lawyer, Martin Amad.

A banker who headed JPMorgan’s Dubai office and its Islamic banking business was first jailed in June last year but was charged, also in connection with fraud, only this spring. JPMorgan said the alleged crimes do not relate to his work at the bank, which he joined in 2007 and quit in April this year while in detention.

Some have complained through lawyers of being deprived of sleep, denied food for days and routinely menaced. “We will insert needles into your nose again and again,” a security officer can be heard telling Jaubert, the spy turned submarine-maker, on an audio recording, which the Frenchman said was made on his cellphone during an interrogation before he fled. “Do you know how painful it is to have needles put inside your nose repeatedly and then twisted around? Do you think you can resist this kind of pain?”

Jaubert said the interrogation was conducted by two men in long white robes in a bare, windowless room on April 22, 2007, at Dubai’s Al Muraggabat Police Station. On the recording, the interrogators described themselves as state security officers, with one warning Jaubert that “we are above the police, we are above the judges. We can keep here you forever.”

Dubai’s Media Affairs Office said the emirate “prides itself on a well-established system of law and order and judicial fairness.” It did not respond to repeated and detailed questions, and said that officials who could “are physically not here.”

A Developing Chill

Released unharmed but without his passport, Jaubert, who is married to an American, began to plot his escape. Last summer, four years after he arrived Dubai on a business-class ticket, he slipped away by sea. “They picked the wrong guy,” said Jaubert, 53, a former naval officer who, according to a confidential French report, left France’s DGSE intelligence service in March 1993. “With my background, I don’t need a passport to travel.”

The French Consulate in Dubai, which is the business, business and tourism hub of the United Arab Emirates, said it could not comment. France in May opened a naval facility in Dubai’s sister sheikhdom, Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital. Western diplomatic missions have mostly avoided public criticism of the legal system.

Dubai is still far more free and more predictable than most of its neighbors, but a chill has taken hold as property values tumble, jobs vanish and businessmen are detained. Tensions long masked by prosperity have burst into full view — tensions between a foreign majority and locals, known as Emirati; between a city studded with shiny modern skyscrapers, including the world’s tallest now in the final stages of construction; and Dubai’s antiquated political and legal foundations.

Washington counts the UAE as one of its best friends in the region. U.S. warships dock at Jebel Ali, a huge Dubai port area where Jaubert had his luxury submarine venture, Exomos, which promised rich clients “the ultimate underwater experience.” Big U.S. companies, including General Electric, Boeing and Microsoft, have their regional headquarters in Dubai, which has around 20,000 American residents.

These intimate relations include a deal that will allow the UAE to develop a nuclear-power program with U.S. know-how. The relationship came under scrutiny in Washington this year after the release of videos that showed a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family torturing an Afghan grain dealer he accused of cheating him. Abu Dhabi authorities are investigating.

The number of expatriates jailed in Dubai for alleged economic crimes is not known. The government issues no figures. “All I can say is that it is definitely on the rise,” said Samer Muscati, a lawyer with New York-based Human Rights Watch. The main concern, Muscati said, is not that all those arrested are necessarily innocent but that Dubai’s legal system is so opaque, fickle and often heedless of due process.

A vivid example of this is the plight of Zack Shahin, an American businessman of Lebanese origin. A former Pepsi-Cola executive who headed a Dubai property company called Deyaar Development, he was arrested in March last year in connection with a corruption probe involving the Dubai Islamic Bank. Shahin was held incommunicado for 16 days and was not charged for over a year. A Web site set up by his family in the United States alleged that Shahin had been tortured, and it pleaded for his release. The UAE blocked the Web site. U.S. diplomats asked that the case be handled in “an expeditious and transparent manner,” and complained that a delay in granting access to Shahin violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

Early this summer, it looked as if Shahin might finally get his day in court and be allowed to go home to await trial. His family took out an ad praising Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler, took down the Web site, and scratched together $1.1 million to meet bail. Just as Shahin was about to be released, state security officers arrived and hauled him away for questioning on new charges. He is still in detention. The bail money has not been returned, his lawyers said. Dubai officials said no one was available to comment on the case.

Locals have been picked up, too, and some complain of being unjustly detained. But well-connected Emirati rarely spend long in jail for economic crimes. Wary of debtors’ prison, a growing number of foreigners simply run away.

Simon Ford, a British entrepreneur, skipped town this summer after his company, a specialty gift service, was hit by the crisis and couldn’t pay its bills. He wrote an emotional “letter to the Dubai public” to apologize for bailing out. He acknowledged that he owed money, and said he had fled because Dubai “drives people to make horrible decisions.” He promised to pay back creditors.

Jaubert, the ex-French spy, said he fled because he feared getting stuck in Dubai’s penal twilight zone. A keen amateur marksman, he was first called in for questioning in 2007 after bullets were found at his submarine company offices. Interrogators told him that someone had been shot in the head and that he might be involved. Jaubert replied that he didn’t have a gun: his rifle, which he had declared at Customs, was still stuck at the Dubai airport. His bullets got through.

Security officers accused him of lying. Warning him that Dubai “is not France; there is no democracy here,” an interrogator heard on Jaubert’s tape threatened to put him “in a cave 300 meters underground, away from the world and your family, and I will keep you there until you tell the truth.” Jaubert said authorities later accused him of fraud because “they were just looking for something to nail me with.”

Jaubert blamed his woes on pressure on Dubai World to rein in some of the wilder investment projects launched by Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the company’s chairman, who had first invited Jaubert to Dubai. “It was a palace struggle over money,” Jaubert said.

The Escape

Reached on his cellphone, Sulayem declined to comment. Dubai World’s internal audit chief, Abdul Qadar Obaid Ali, said Jaubert and his submarine venture ran into trouble for other reasons: His submarines didn’t work, and auditors uncovered evidence of fraud involving overbilling for equipment purchases. Jaubert denied this, saying all the transactions were approved and paid for by Dubai World managers.

Fired from Exomos, the submarine company, and unable to get his passport back, Jaubert hatched an elaborate escape plan. He sent his wife and their two boys to Florida. He had diving equipment shipped out from France — broken down into small bits to avoid arousing suspicion. Then, using a phony name, he bought a Zodiac dinghy and sailboat. Using Google Earth, he surveyed the UAE coastline for an escape route. He found an isolated beach and arranged for a friend to take the sailboat out into international waters.

On the eve of his escape, the former spy checked into a hotel near the beach, put on his diving equipment and donned a long abaya, the body-covering cloak worn by strictly observant Muslim women. He said he then went down the beach and swam underwater to a nearby harbor, where the only patrol boat in the vicinity was moored. He clambered aboard and sabotaged the fuel line to make sure the craft could not give chase, he said.

Jaubert then set out to sea in the dinghy to the boat his friend had positioned just outside the UAE’s territorial waters, and they sailed toward India. After eight days at sea, the pair arrived in Mumbai — an account corroborated by his traveling companion. With a new passport issued by the French consulate, Jaubert flew to join his wife in Florida, where he is writing a book he has titled “Escape From Dubai.”

Herve Jaubert fled Dubai dressed as a woman

source Arabian Business

A former French special agent who worked for Dubai World has spoken of his anger at being convicted in absence of defrauding the company out of millions of dirhams – a charge he strongly denies.

Herve Jaubert told Arabian Business of a carefully planned escape from Dubai aboard a rubber dingy and dressed in a burqa to evade police using skills he developed as a spy.

The former French naval officer, who is now living in the United States, said he is not worried about being tracked down to face his five-year prison sentence because he can prove his innocence.

“I deny everything,” he told Arabian Business during a telephone interview. “When I saw that I was convicted in absentia I was totally outraged. But no matter what the truth is going to come out eventually.”

One way he hopes to be able to do this is through his book outlining the story of his escape, which is due to be published in October.

Jaubert told Arabian Business he decided to flee the country last year after his passport was confiscated by police and he was fired by Dubai World.

“In Dubai, if you don’t have a passport and you don’t have a job you cannot survive,” he said. “I found myself in this situation. So instead of fighting it, I told the auditors I would pay them back. I did not sign anything, but I played the game.”

Meanwhile he was planning his escape. Jaubert sent his wife and children back to Florida where they had all been living before moving to Dubai in 2004, and once they were gone he went into hiding.

“Once I was alone in Dubai then I turned to what I used to do before as an intelligence officer.

“A friend would rent a room for me in a hotel with his passport so my details would never show up. I would stay in the hotel for three days and then change.

“I bought a sail boat, and then I bought a rubber dingy and I escaped on the dingy. When I was a secret agent for my country I used to do that – go in and out of countries on a rubber dingy – because no one pays attention to a rubber dingy.”

Jaubert left from a beach in Fujairah early one morning after sabotaging the only coast guard boat in the area to make sure no one could follow him.

He spent six hours aboard the rubber dingy before meeting his friend, who had sailed his boat into international waters, and the pair headed to India on a journey that took eight days.

“I’m a naval officer, so at that point I knew what I was doing,” he said.

“When I was a secret agent I was a ghost, but here it was different, I was not a ghost anymore. I decided to disguise myself as a woman and then I became a ghost.

“When you are covered from head-to-toe in an abaya and veil nobody talks to you, nobody looks at you. Wearing the abaya nobody bothered me, it’s like I never existed.

“That’s the best disguise you can find because even a police officer can not talk to you.”

Jaubert was sentenced to five years in jail and fined AED14m by Dubai Criminal Court at a hearing in June at which he was not present.

The court was told that Jaubert’s company, Seahorse Submarines, had bought equipment worth AED11.8m for Exomos, the submarine division of Dubai World, but that it did not all arrive.

Jaubert had a contract with Dubai World to build two submarines, but prosecutors told the court that when the vessels were delivered they were incomplete and faulty. He wrote to Dubai World and agreed to settle the matter by paying an initial AED3m, but he fled the country before handing over any money.

“My book is going to come out and people are going to know the true story and then I will put it behind me,” Jaubert said.

He is even confident that readers in Dubai will be able to get a copy.

“There’s no way this book is going to be available in Dubai in the open, but I’ve found a way. There will be some tricks, if you want. The book will be disguised. If you order the book you might receive a book on flowers or furniture, but it’s just a cover,” he said.

Related : Dubai Police to track down convicted sumarine fraudster

Dubai, Dubai World, Herve Jaubert, Bestseller Dubai fraud

Damac breaking Dreams

The comments shown below are in response to an article published in Construction Week online and show an extrac of what Dubai Real Esate investors think of Damac and the CEO Peter Riddoch:

comment: straks  (Jul 8, 2009)  United Kingdom

no longer to be trusted
Damac have not paid out the correct compensation, FAR FROM IT and regardless of what Damac ‘claim the contract says. Also building still not fully complete and verging on dangerous with lifts not working and fire escapes not safe. Incidently another thing you might want to ask Mr Riddoch – it turns out that the apartments were NEVER OVERSIZED IN THE FIRST PLACE so where did the excess area charges come from – TOTAL FRAUD and a diversion so owners were to o busy fighting that cause and not noticing the compensation issue and also too tired to fight that as well. I hope, for Dubai’s sake Damac are told to get their ‘house in order’ by the ruler and we can get the quality of apartment we were promised and expected in Dubai

comment: an annoyed investor (Jul 7, 2009)Dubai United Arab Emirates

Peter riddock damac
Damac are technically insolvent, if they operated in Europe thye would have filed for bankruptcy prior to economic crash

Comment: SANDRAJJACOBS (Jul 2, 2009)STAFFORD UK United Kingdom

SIZE VARIATION IN LAKE VIEW jlt dUBAI
Whilst having being notified by Damac of a refund for the above, can anyone please advise why they are not paying it 4 months on, and still no sign of the refund

Comment: navas (May 23, 2009)uk United Kingdom

Fair coverage?
The reporter should do a follow-up interview with a representative of the disgruntled investors to get fair coverage on both sides. Site photos should also show proof of who is really telling the truth. How about it, Mr. Conrad Egbert???

Comment: Neil Roberts (May 22, 2009)Abu Dhbai United Arab Emirates

DAMAC management and interpol
I have heard that interpol have been contacted about alleged fraudulant sales of DAMAC properties does anyone know if this is true?

Comment: Stay Away from Damac (May 21, 2009) Dubai United Arab Emirates

Stay Away from Damac
Peter Riddoch needs to open his dictionary again and read the definition of ‘ETHICS’. This company is totally unethical and I am an unfortunate owner of one of the units in the Lake View tower. My advice to investors: Stay away from Damac.

Comment: Nas001 (May 20, 2009) United Kingdom

Lake View Lies!
I have read all the comments by Peter Riddoch who is very economical with the truth. The reality is that DAMAC bullied me into signing my legal rights away by refusing to hand my keys even when I called the police, they have refused to pay me adequate compensation as per my contract, their building is far from complete despite their blatant lies that Lake View was handed over at end of 2008. Perhaps Mr Riddoch can explain why his company sent letters to ALL investors in MARCH 2009 inviting us to take possession then if he claims Lake View was ready in 2008??? The staff have zero customer service skills and are an extention of theie CEO. What a pathetic disgraceful company. I will never do business with this company.

Comment: Joe (May 18, 2009)Kildare Ireland

Lake View
I think damac are a joke, they try to extract as much money out of people as possible for a bad customer service, bad work, late projects, bullyboy tactics, projects that dont represent what was sold to people. They really bring Dubai’s reputation. We wouldnt touch damac again and advise everyone else to run a mile from them

Comment: dont invest in damac (May 18, 2009) motherwell, United Kingdom

lake view
Amy1 is right We have a forum on www.skyscrapercity.com if anyone wants to see the 400+ happy customers!The full building is a joke it looks like something out of a council development ready for demolition. Damac Breaking Dreams………..maybe an idea for a new slogan……

read more also  Palm Springs Damac Investors Group

Nakheel Dubai is a public joint stock company – not a private one

Dubai, August 17, 2009

 A letter presented to the Dubai Court of Appeal yesterday established that developer Nakheel is a public joint stock company (PJSC), not a private one.

The letter was produced by a lawyer representing Nakheel in the case of two former employees who are appealing against their convictions for bribery.

The defendants’ lawyer, Saeed Al Gelani, had said in an earlier session that a ruling by Court of First Instance that Nakheel was a public shareholding company was not true to facts.

He referred to an article by Nakheel’s legal advisor, David Nicholson, that appeared in Arroaya magazine, which is published by the developer. The article said Nakheel had become a private company and was published before the defendants were sent for trial. As a result, said Al Gelani, the two had been tried wrongly.

The accused are 32-year-old UAE national WA, a former general manager of sales at Nakheel, and Egyptian KN, 28, who was a sales representative at Nakheel. Prosecutors say they allegedly asked for a bribe of Dh5.1 million from a real estate brokerage firm to help it buy a plot owned by Nakheel.

Dubai Criminal Court jailed the defendants for three years and ordered them to pay Dh3m. The court is considering a third appeal by Public Prosecution.

original source Emirates Business 24/7

Dubai property owners treated like puppets – Loss off confidence swamps Real Estate Market

August 15. 2009 11:34AM GMT

DUBAI // Rashmey Seth paid Dh3.2 million for two luxury flats, furnished them and rented them out. That was nearly two years ago – but she is still not sure she actually owns the properties.

Receipts from Nakheel confirm that she paid the state-backed developer in full for a three-bedroom flat on the Palm Jumeirah. Mrs Seth has similar paperwork for a one-bedroom unit in downtown Burj Dubai, purchased last year from Emaar, the Middle East’s largest developer.

What she has not received from either of the property giants are title deeds – the crucial documents that verify ownership.

It is a predicament shared by many, their status as lawful owners in limbo because of the absence of a piece of paper that, after properties are registered with the Dubai Land Department, should be handed to buyers.

The issue, says Mrs Seth, makes her wonder whether she has a legal right to sell her flats.

She is by no means the only property owner in Dubai worried about not having deeds to the flats she has paid for. Without deeds, it is unclear what would happen if the company they bought their property from went bankrupt.

There could also be problems with selling the property on: potential buyers could find it difficult to get a mortgage without formal proof of ownership.

In Mrs Seth’s case, her dilemma has shaken her confidence in Dubai’s freehold property laws, introduced three years ago to give foreigners the right of ownership.
“Why am I not getting the comfort that there’s a legal structure to support me, that makes me feel sure that I really own my property?” said Mrs Seth, 52, an Indian who has lived and worked in Dubai for 28 years.

Her fears are not unfounded. Law Number 7 of 2006 states that until flats are registered with the Land Department, which will then grant title deeds, buyers lack the rights of fully fledged owners.

In an email statement, Emaar did not specify how many of its property holders had not had units registered or lacked deeds.

Nakheel said the “majority of … purchasers who have taken handover have received their title deeds”.

Given the size of Nakheel’s development portfolio, that could still mean thousands have not received them.

There are indications that a substantial number of buyers across Dubai lack deeds. After posting a query on Crest of Dubai, a website used by residents of the Palm Jumeirah, The National received nearly two dozen complaints.

And Michael Aldendorff, a 39-year-old South African who is one of the leaders of an informal homeowners’ group in the Discovery Gardens development, reckoned that most buyers in the 26,000-apartment community lacked deeds.

“I don’t think that many people here have them at all,” he said.

That, however, has not stopped developers from asking purchasers to pay to get their deeds.
Mrs Seth said she was asked to hand over about Dh55,000 for flat-registration fees to Emaar and Nakheel. She said she had little choice but to comply; according to Land Department regulations, a buyer cannot register a property without the developer’s consent.

“They take these undated cheques from you, and they bank it at their will, so what can you do about it?” she said of Emaar and Nakheel.

“If there is a delay or something from the Land Department in getting the registration, or the documentation is not ready from the developer’s side, then why are they taking my money?”

Sabri Pozem, who owns a one-bedroom flat in Discovery Gardens, in which he has a tenant, wonders whether the authorities – or anyone apart from himself – have records of his purchase.

Mr Pozem, a 29-year-old from Turkey, is one of the owners in the development who complain about disorganisation among Tamweel, the mortgage lender, Nakheel, the master developer, and property companies which, after purchasing Discovery Gardens apartment buildings from Nakheel, have sold them as flats to individual buyers.

He said a salesperson with the company he bought his flat from entered the property last month and began showing it off to a prospective buyer. His tenant had just come out the shower and was wearing only a towel when she encountered the surprise visitors.

“The problem is, they are so disorganised they don’t even know who bought which apartment in the building,” said Mr Pozem, who said he had tried many times to obtain his deed and has had no success.

He fears that if he wanted to sell his flat, the records would show it was still owned by the property firm. “If they go bankrupt tomorrow, I’m basically out of luck; all my money’s gone because I don’t have a title deed.”

Mr Pozem is not the only owner worried that without deeds they might not be able to sell their units.

Anne, 37, a British national, bought two one-bedroom flats in the Dubai Marina’s Marina Promenade in August last year and two more in Green Lakes Towers in Jumeirah Lake Towers. Despite investing nearly Dh4m, she does not have a deed for any of them.

Anne, who asked that only her middle name be published, said her main concern was that banks would refuse a mortgage to prospective purchasers without a deed, an increasingly common requirement after the credit crunch.

She also said Emaar, the developer of Marina Promenade, and Asam Investment & Real Estate, the Green Lakes Towers developer, had been little help.

“I’ve been given exactly the same reasoning: ‘there’s a queue at the Land Department; expect to hear from us in September’.”

A senior administrator at Asam Investment & Real Estate, who gave his name only as Abraham, told The National that a backlog at the Land Department was responsible for the delay.

In Green Lakes Towers, he said, about 700 units in the three towers were still waiting to be registered.

“We cannot do them individually; we have to register the whole tower together,” he said. He added that he hoped the process could be completed within a month.
Humaid al Shamsi, the head of the transactions section at the Land Department, acknowledged the issue.

Eighty per cent of the buildings on the Palm Jumeirah have been registered, he said, but he did not have details of how many flats had been registered or title deeds granted.

At Jumeirah Lake Towers, he said, “the process has been started now.” He attributed any delay to “extra measurements” being done to the buildings.

Emaar declined to give reasons for delays in handing over deeds, but said in an email that it “works closely with the Dubai Land Department to assist its customers during the process, including having a representative from the Land Department available for assistance at the Emaar Property Handover office.”

However, Karim Nassif, a property lawyer at Habib al Mulla & Co, said the slowdown in the property market meant a logjam at the Land Department was an unlikely cause for the problem.

In most cases of undelivered title deeds, he said, “the developer should be held liable – 100 per cent – for it. They should be delivering their title deeds”.

And he had a warning for the worried owners: “If they don’t have the title deed, their transaction, according to the law, is voidable.”

original source The National

Powered by ScribeFire.

Malika Karoum hits back – Karoum accuses ex husband of conspirancy

source Emirates Business 24 /2
Malika Karoum, a senior executive of Dubai’s real estate sector yesterday accused her former husband of spreading rumours about her being convicted by an Egyptian court on charges of money laundering and involvement in arms trading.

Malika Karoum told Emirates Business the claims were made in a Dutch tabloid magazine to damage her reputation, career and life.

“This whole story has been created by my ex-husband and his private detective,” she said. “I was shocked to see my picture on the front page of your paper. I am Malika Karoum and I have been living and working in Dubai for the past three years.

“I have no problem with any authorities or police. Call any of my ex-employees and check with them. The only correct thing in this article is that I have worked for Omniyat, Define and ACI.

“My ex-husband started this and there is a long dispute between us over custody rights for our son. He says anything to destroy me and destroy my reputation by saying I am a spy and mafia and a fraud.”

Karoum alleged her ex-husband was a fugitive and accused him of spreading lies about her on the internet. “All these blogs are created by my ex-husband and a private detective. He has been doing this for the past six years through my family and friends. When it didn’t work he started with the media.”

Powered by ScribeFire.

Malika Karoum finally arrested – 28 month imprisonment

While Australians languished in Dubai jails, a much bigger fish made fraudulent millions with impunity. This glamorous but treacherous spy is finally behind bars, writes Rick Feneley.

They call her the modern-day Mata Hari, a spy-turned-criminal who laundered fortunes from drug runners and arms dealers through Dubai’s high-rise wonderland.

Alternatively, they have cast Malika Karoum as an innocent woman, a fugitive not from the law but from an abusive husband who maliciously defamed her – and concocted the whole spy-crime thriller – as part of a bitter custody battle for their young son.

The Netherlands media have been wrestling over the two Karoums for a year. The 33-year-old Dutch-Moroccan’s exotic good looks made great fodder for magazines, newspapers and tabloid television. But on Wednesday this week came the bombshell. The cover story of Revu, a quality weekly magazine, announced: ”Spy Malika in the cell.”

Only now could it reveal that Karoum had been in jail for the past six months in Egypt, where the Ismailiya State Security Court convicted her in April of money laundering and involvement in weapons trading, but acquitted her of espionage.

Karoum, who had also performed intelligence work for Egypt, had been sentenced to 28 months in prison, and the Court of Appeal had upheld the decision last month.

More sensational, though, is the news of how Karoum was caught. In a top-secret operation, her former colleagues from the Dutch secret service arrived at her Dubai apartment at 2am on January 21. They held her there for several weeks under house arrest before taking her to Egypt, an intelligence source has told Revu’s reporter Jan Libbenga. Dubai has no extradition treaty with the Netherlands. The Dutch, in effect, abducted Karoum only after negotiations with her lawyers, to bring her back to Amsterdam, broke down.

Four days after the swoop on Karoum’s home, Dubai police arrested two Australians, Matt Joyce and Marcus Lee, on suspicion of fraud. The pair are former executives of Dubai Waterfront, the world’s grandest waterfront project, a subsidiary of the Emirate’s biggest property developer, the government-owned Nakheel.

The jailed Australians, who are fighting to prove their innocence, are in no way linked to Karoum.

Karoum – using her apparent cover as a real estate executive – did do some work on property developments within Dubai Waterfront, among other sites. She was accused of funnelling drug and arms money – including that of an Egyptian weapons dealer – into Dubai’s property bubble, which burst spectacularly last year. Millions invested through her by criminal networks are said to have vanished.

While Joyce and Lee and other Australians languish in Dubai’s jails, the Karoum story throws light on the way business is done in the Emirate. The sheikhdom is making a big show of cleaning up corruption in its property industry, but it showed no apparent interest in stopping Karoum. Indeed, Libbenga says, she ended up spying for the United Arab Emirates, too, and it offered her protection. She had also spied for Egypt.

Her old Dutch colleagues could well understand the analogy with the original Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, a seductress who became a double agent during World War I, working for both French and German spymasters.

Karoum joined the Dutch secret service in 2004, Revu says. Most of her work had concerned secret investigations of Islamic organisations in the Netherlands suspected of terrorist aid. She was sent to Dubai late in 2006 to investigate terrorist financing and money laundering to and from Dubai. Once there, she soon defected to her own cause: making money.

For her Dutch spymasters, the alarm rang in October 2007, when a Dutch-Turkish money courier was arrested at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, with more than €100,000. He said it was to be collected by Karoum. This man was not known to her spy colleagues.

The secret service contacted police. It transpired that observation teams from the Bureau of National Research had photographs of a woman in the company of Dutch drug dealers. Only then did they realise it was Karoum.

Now authorities suspect Karoum played an important role in drug trafficking, Revu reported.

Karoum had managed to slip back into the Netherlands at the time of the man’s arrest, but she escaped via Madrid and Casablanca to Dubai. She left her hire car behind, with a note to the hire company, in a garage in the town of Breukelen. Diplomatic pressure on Dubai failed to have her returned to the Netherlands.

The Herald began trying to find Karoum in early February this year. As late as April our calls were being transferred to her extension at ACI Real Estate in Dubai, the subsidiary of a German-based company. Like many caught in the Arab Emirate’s collapsing real estate market, ACI is struggling to complete grand visions such as its Sports Trilogy: the Niki Lauda Twin Towers, the Boris Becker Business Tower and Michael Schumacher Business Avenue. ACI’s switch repeatedly told the Herald that Karoum was, indeed, still working there. But messages went unanswered, as did emails to Karoum’s address with the firm, requesting a detailed response to the many allegations against her. Now we know why.

Also in February, Political News of Morocco editorialised that Karoum was giving its emigrants a bad name and asked why Dubai was doing nothing about her. Now we know that the Dutch secret service already had.

In a webcast by Panorama Magazine late last year, Karoum said the whole story against her was a lie, created by her former husband Mohammed Boulnouar. She said she had fled the Netherlands because he had mentally and physically abused her.

Jacques Smits, an Amsterdam private investigator and former policeman, has been on Karoum’s trail since January last year. He was originally employed by Boulnouar to hunt her down in Dubai and retrieve their son, Mohammed jnr, now aged about eight.

In February last year Smits flew to Dubai, hoping to confront Karoum. He had already intervened and warned her then employer, the Dubai property firm Omniyat, about Karoum. The company went on to sack Karoum and her boss for alleged fraud.

Smits only managed to get Karoum by phone. He told the Herald: ”She said, ‘I am going to kill you.’ I had ruined her life in Dubai.”

He believes she is capable of it, and this motivated his campaign to bring her to justice, long after he stopped working for her husband. A Dutch court later ordered Karoum to return her son to the Netherlands, then overturned that ruling last December.

Either way, Smits is no friend of Boulnouar, who had been a travel agent in West Amsterdam. He says Boulnouar paid him only €7000 ($12,000) and still owes him €10,000. Smits says he helped Dutch intelligence to keep pursuing Karoum.

Last November customers accused Boulnouar of stealing the money they had paid him for the haj to Mecca. He had claimed he was the victim of a robbery on October 31 when he tried to deliver about €300,000 in cash and several hundred passports to Royal Jordanian Airways. He claimed the robbers told him they were sent by ”Malika”.

Smits does not buy his story. Nor does he buy Karoum’s. In January last year Smits received a tip that she was returning to the Netherlands for a wedding. He says he went to Schiphol Airport and, armed with photographs, alerted a Dutch military police officer. The officer had called up Karoum’s Interpol file, then left the room briefly to get the print-out of the document. Smits says he was able to read the warrant on the screen. ”There were six or seven felonies.” They included money laundering and drug offences.

Dutch police observation teams had seen a woman in the company of a British man, Simon John ”Slapper” Cowmeadow. Only later did they realise she was Karoum. Cowmeadow was shot dead in an Amsterdam street on November 18, 2007.

Nadim Imac, a suspected heroin importer and the sponsor of a Dutch soccer team, Turkiyemspor, was thrown to his death from a moving bus on February 17 this year. Police found €223,000 in his home.

A player from his soccer team had acted as a money courier to Dubai, where money from a Turk associate of Imac’s was invested in Damac Properties. Karoum had handled that introduction.

Revu has reported on Karoum’s connections with the Dutch company Palm Invest, which has come under the spotlight for alleged fraud. Karoum’s old boss at Omniyat took her with him in June last year when he launched Define Properties in Dubai. Define had 12 lots on Nakheel’s Waterfront site, and relied heavily for funds on a key Karoum contact, an Egyptian arms dealer. But when stories began circulating about Karoum, the boss sacked her.

Later, Define could not raise enough capital and ACI Real Estate took over some of its properties. It first employed the Define boss, but dumped him after recruiting Karoum. ACI has not responded to the Herald’s questions.

From last December Karoum’s lawyers advised her to co-operate with Dutch authorities. Revu reported she was offered an ”ample golden handshake” from the secret service and an opportunity to start a new life in a third country. Los Angeles, Singapore, Luxembourg, Malta, Egypt and the Dutch Antilles were destinations recommended.

The Dutch, more than anything, wanted to stop her giving intelligence to other countries, and to stop her criminal pursuits.

Karoum had seemed agreeable but withdrew at the last moment. She reportedly believed she would be afforded the protection of sheikhs in Dubai. That came to nothing at 2am on January 21.

In most countries the snatching of Karoum – a breach of sovereignty – would have caused a diplomatic crisis. But there has not been a peep out of Dubai, which does not care about bad publicity.

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it could not answer any of the Herald’s questions, on privacy grounds. The names of even convicted criminals are protected in the Netherlands.

Jan Libbenga will publish a book, The Hunt for Malika, Modern Mata Hari, in October.

Jacques Smits says an estimated €19 million is still missing from Karoum’s crimes and the Dutch secret service may recruit him to help retrieve it.

”If the price is right, I’m your guy,” he told the Herald. Smits says he feels safe until Karoum’s release from jail – but only until then

source  artivle original

also source Revu

read more about Malika Karoum

interview Video Malika Karoum in Dubai

Dubai ist dringend auf neue Finanz-Injektionen angewiesen – 80 Millliaren Verbindlichkeiten

original Handelsblatt Germany

Dubai unternimmt einen neuen Anlauf, um seinen gigantischen Schuldenberg abzubauen. Die Regierung rief eine Finanzagentur ins Leben, die strategisch wichtigen Firmen des Emirats mit Krediten unter die Arme greifen soll. Das Geld stammt aus dem Verkauf von Bonds über 20 Mrd. Dollar und soll in einen Unterstützungsfonds fließen.

DUBAI. Die erste Tranche über zehn Mrd. Dollar wurde im Februar von der Zentralbank in Abu Dhabi gekauft. Die Märkte feierten den Schritt damals als Zeichen, dass die Regierung der Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate dem hochverschuldeten Dubai im Zweifelsfall aus der Patsche helfen wird. Nun sucht das Emirat nach nationalen und internationalen Investoren, die das Kapital für die zweite Tranche über zehn Mrd. Dollar lockermachen sollen.

Dubai ist dringend auf neue Finanz-Injektionen angewiesen, um seine Verbindlichkeiten von insgesamt 80 Mrd. Dollar zu schultern. Das Emirat wurde durch die Immobilienkrise und den Rückgang der Touristenzahlen besonders hart getroffen. Seit Herbst 2008 brachen die Häuser- und Wohnungspreise zum Teil um 50 Prozent ein. Spekulanten konnten auf einmal ihre Bankkredite nicht mehr bedienen, Entwicklungsgesellschaften reichten den Zahlungsengpass an Subunternehmer weiter. Die Baubranche erwirtschaftet fast die Hälfte des Bruttoinlandsprodukts (BIP) in Dubai.

Experten begrüßten die Einrichtung der neuen Finanzagentur als positives Signal, kritisierten jedoch den Mangel an Transparenz: “Es ist völlig unklar, welche Betriebe in den Genuss der Staatsgelder kommen und zu welchen Bedingungen”, sagte Simon Williams, Chefökonom bei HSBC in Dubai. Finanzminister Abdulrahman Al Saleh hatte lediglich angekündigt, dass öffentliche oder regierungsnahe Gesellschaften von “strategischer Bedeutung” Zugang zu den Darlehen hätten. “Investoren würden auch gerne wissen, ob die Mittel für die Rückzahlung der Schulden oder für die Finanzierung neuer Projekte eingesetzt werden”, betonte deshalb Farouk Soussa von der Ratingagentur Standard & Poor?s.

Aus der ersten Bond-Tranche über zehn Mrd. Dollar wurde bereits mehr als die Hälfte verbraucht, teilte die Regierung in Dubai mit. Vor allem Immobilienfirmen mit staatlicher Beteiligung hätten profitiert, heißt es. Die Konditionen sind äußerst günstig: Die Unternehmen bekommen für ihre Kredite einen Zinssatz von etwas mehr als vier Prozent. Dubai seinerseits zahlt an die Zentralbank einen Zinssatz von vier Prozent über eine Laufzeit von fünf Jahren.

Die Frage ist nun, wer bei der zweiten Bond-Tranche über ebenfalls zehn Mrd. Dollar einsteigt. Nach Angaben von Omar bin Sulaiman, Vorsitzender des Dubai International Financial Centre, haben private Investoren und Staatsfonds Interesse gezeigt. Anleger von außen wären nach Ansicht von Fachleuten auch bitter nötig, um die Kreditwürdigkeit des Emirats zu heben. “Wenn Dubai die zweite Tranche komplett selbst stemmen könnte, wären das gute Nachrichten über eine frische Finanzquelle”, meint Philippe Dauba-Pantanacce von Standard Chartered.

Davon ist bislang allerdings nichts zu sehen. Falls alle Stricke reißen, steht jedoch die Zentralbank Gewehr bei Fuß: “Wir sind bereit, Teile des Bonds zu kaufen”, erklärte Notenbankchef Sultan Al Suwaidi. Marktbeobachter sehen darin eine wichtige Rückversicherung, dass die Zentralregierung der Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate Dubai aus politischen Gründen nicht fallen lassen wird.

Dennoch kann das Emirat nicht bei allen Engpässen nach Abu Dhabi schielen. Mitte Dezember muss die Bau-Entwicklungsgesellschaft Nakheel einen Kredit in Höhe von 3,5 Mrd. Dollar refinanzieren. Die Firma, die so spektakuläre Immobilienprojekte wie die künstliche Insel Palm Jumeirah angestoßen hat, drücken massive Zahlungsprobleme. Nach unbestätigten Berichten aus der Finanzszene hat das Unternehmen seine Gläubiger aufgefordert, auf 30 Prozent ihrer Außenstände zu verzichten. “Die Refinanzierung von Nakheel ist ein wichtiger Lackmustest für die Entschuldungskapazität Dubais”, sagt Philipp Lotter von der Ratingagentur Moody?s.

Prominent Emirati Businessman found dead in his car

source GulfNews

A prominent businessman was found dead in his car in the Al Butaina area of Sharjah early on Tuesday. Police suspect homicide.
Police said an Emirati in his early 60s was found dead in his four-wheel drive vehicle at around 6am.

Passers-by on their way to work spotted him.”The passers-by told Al Hira Police Station,” the police official said. “He was found with a bloated body.
Experts at the forensic laboratory are conducting an autopsy to find out the reason behind the death,” he said. The official added the man’s body was abnormally swollen but he did not seem to be wounded in any way.
“It could be poisoning or he could have been strangled,” police said.The man was a prominent businessman in Sharjah.

“We suspect a crime took place. It could be homicide,” police said.

“The man did not disappear from his home and his family did not report him missing,” the police official said.”We are investigating the death of the man. He ran a business here. According to initial investigations the man has no enemies.”Relatives of the victim are being questioned. The official said no one has been arrested in relation to the case.
The man was married and had a number of children.

Last week a Bangladeshi man was found stabbed to death in Sharjah and another Indian man was found murdered in the Umm Khanoor area.The Indian victim was found stabbed and had his legs bound.

Dubai `s glitzy property market is in trouble – no doubt about that

Western investors fear Dubai`s Wild East reputation.

Dubai’s property market is in trouble, there’s no doubt about that. Just take a look at the hundreds of motionless cranes, unfinished projects and the expats who are leaving in droves as they lose their jobs.

And prices and rents which soared during a six-year boom have crashed since late last year. According to one resident who recently moved in the City, it now costs 150,000 dirhams to rent a three-bedroom flat on the Palm, a man-made island off the coast of the emirate, around the same it would have cost to rent a one-bedroom appartment there a year ago.

It’s not just the global downturn thats the concern for Dubai’s once-booming property market, but also the lack of transparency and need for greater regulation. And that’s what’s going to keep the western investor from splashing the cash.

Investors looking at Dubai’s real estate sector are a different breed. They are no longer looking to snap up properties in the hope of making a quick buck. They are more conservative with a longer term outlook.

“RERA (the Real Estate Regulatory Authority) has been trying to introduce regulation to minimise the impact of speculative investors,” said Andrew White, head of Middle East operations at UK-based investor Kenmore property Group.

“But some have said this is like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted because the downturn has more or less wiped these out anyway.” So, a little too late perhaps ? And what about the recently announced planned merger of Emaar Properties, builder of the world’s tallest tower, with
three other local property firms?

Well, so far no one really knows. Simply put, there has been little in the way of information about this.

“If you look at Emaar and the potential merger, there is little financial clarity on how this will proceed and that is going to worry investors,” said Bobby Sarkar, analyst at Al Mal Capital. ”The U.S. and European markets have high levels of clarity in terms of regulation, but that isn’t the case here.”
 
There is no doubt however that the government is trying to improve regulation and transparency. Several wins for the property market over the last year include the introduction of a monthly rental index and new laws for property maintenance, not to forget the continuing effort to crack down on corruption.

But there is a long way to go and more is needed for Dubai to come close to rivalling mature markets such as the UK and U.S. which offer the longer-term investor the transparency they crave.

original source Reuters

Damac Dubai – UK TV news investigation

Dubai – 29. July 2009

In a report broadcast Monday night in the UK, Channel 4 News spoke to unhappy British investors with property developer Damac who have yet to see a return on their money in the Dubai market.

While some wanted quick returns, others simply wanted an apartment in the sun – not least David Hunter of Oxfordshire who said he had handed over £60,000, so far, for an apartment at Damac’s Lotus development.

Hunter said a Damac representative told him at the time (February 2007) of purchase that construction on the development had already started.

Three months later Hunter found out otherwise when it emerged that the plot was occupied by a UNICEF building. Hunter not surprisingly said he ’should have been told’.

Citing documents, Channel 4 claimed Damac had been selling developments off-plan without having title to the land in the first place – a practice outlawed by the Dubai Government last August.

Another document, dated from ‘late last year’ alleged that almost one quarter of the firm’s projects had been put on hold.

Meanwhile, a Harrow NW London resident who bought off-plan in the Flamingo Heights development 18 months ago, told the broadcaster he had paid three instalments totalling £70,000.

”I asked them in writing what the current state (of the development) was before I made my investment. I was assured that the foundations had been laid and construction was well under way at the site.”

With the Flamingo Heights development showing no evidence of construction when Channel 4 recently visited it Ludmila Yamalova of Al Sayyah Legal Consultants – to whom Channel 4 took the investor’s complaint – said he may have a case as a statement claiming foundations that had been laid when in fact they hadn’t, could amount to misrepresentation.

Erik Pekarski, former VP Customer Relations at Damac said the line being put out to customers was that ‘progress is ongoing, development is ongoing and construction is ongoing’.

Customers would continue to scream and yell at you as they should, because they had been put off for months, he added.

Damac has, in some cases, since offered alternative flats either complete, or near completion. However, many investors Channel 4 spoke to said they wanted their money back but, like the Harrow investor, had been informed by Damac that there is a ‘no refund’ policy.

When asked about the ‘no refund’ policy an unnamed former manager at Damac said the company took a tough line. David Hunter meanwhile says he has hired a lawyer.

In a statement to Channel 4 News the company confirmed it didn’t have a refund policy, except within ‘the provisions of the regulatory framework’.

It also denied any allegations of wrongdoing and said investors interviewed by the broadcaster were ‘not a representative group’. The company added that it had no intention or policy to mislead customers.

Addressing the allegation that the company had claimed foundations had been laid at the Flamingo Heights development when in fact they hadn’t Damac said: ”It is possible to have a rogue element who communicated information which was inaccurate and not endorsed.”

It added that the Flamingo Heights project tender is due to go out shortly.

source of this report Arabian Business

Damac back in the Headlines – Stressed Investors from UK – A TV Report

Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum – Investors demand Investigation Al Fajer Properties Scandal

Al Fajer Properties , HH Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum

HH Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum – Al Fajer Properties

Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum is giving interviews about the sucess but a major real estate scandal is unfolding in Dubai as 500 angry unit buyers and investors in the $630 million Ebony Ivory Towers project demand a full government investigation of developer Al Fajer Properties and its agent Dynasty Zarooni Inc., according to Ebony Ivory Investors Group.”

source Financial Post

Misleading advertisements and press releases, overselling of non existing space and the missing down payments are among the buyers’ documented complaints, according to Moses Oye, a British investor and spokesperson for the Al Fajer Properties Investors Group having investors from US, UK, Russia, Iran, India, Canada & Pakistan.

“We are calling on Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) and the Dubai Ruler’s Court to investigate the developer, cancel the Ebony Ivory project and compel a refund of our $140 million in down payments,” said Oye.

Oye cited a series of fake construction photographs that ran in a local newspaper in July 2008 with Al Fajer Properties logo. The photos showed a structure rising six floors above ground with the following caption: “Shot on location on 10th June 2008, Ebony Ivory, Jumeirah Lakes Towers.”

In reality, the photos were taken at another Al Fajer Properties  site and currently there is only a hole in the ground at the Ebony Ivory project, according to Oye.

“Had we known that Al Fajer Properties was presenting false and misleading photographs, we would never have invested in the development,” he said.
“In fact, some investors have already filed criminal cases for misrepresentation with the Dubai Public Prosecutor.”

In the past year, there has been virtually no construction on the site, said Oye. In addition, investors have learned that the developer sold approximately 250,000 square feet more space than the maximum built-up area allowed by government permit – another indicator of potential fraud selling air.

Most importantly, Al Fajer Properties paid Dynasty Zarooni Inc approximately $55 million of the $140 million collected in down payments that should have been deposited in an escrow account, Oye said. “We demand our money back and want to know why Al Fajer gave those funds to Dynasty Zarooni rather than use them for construction,” continued Oye.

“The law sets a punishment of imprisonment and fines for any person who embezzles payments made for the purpose of construction of real estate project.”

To date, RERA has ignored the investors’ demands of a transparent investigation and the evident violations of RERA regulations and UAE criminal laws in order to serve the interests of Sheikh Maktoum Bin Hasher Al Maktoum and Al Fajer Properties, said Oye.

“What do you do when the independent government agency trusted by the Ruler of Dubai to regulate and monitor the real estate developer’s performance actually participates in a cover-up operation that deprives investors of their rights?

What does that say to the world about the security of real estate investments in Dubai?

Where is the transparency and accountability Dubai Ruler ordered?

Are the laws not applicable when it comes to Sheikh Maktoum Bin Hasher Al Maktoum ?”

“Al Fajer Properties, which is controlled by Sheikh Hasher Maktoum from a ruling family using the government agency platform, continues to mislead the public about their non-existing construction with false reports as evident in their recent press release claiming 15% construction where in reality it is a deserted site with no construction at all.”

Summing up the case, Oye raised grave concerns about the recent threats some of the investors have received and quoted attorney Salim Al Shaali who represents plaintiffs in a criminal case against the Ebony Ivory sales agency for misrepresentation.

In a recent interview, Al Shaali said,

“We have full trust in Dubai justice system. I personally guarantee all investors that Dubai government will never allow a few individuals to abuse their social or official positions for illicit profits and damage the reputation of the brand Dubai as a safe and most secure investment hub in the region.

We are waiting for a reply from the prosecution’s office

Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum – Iranian’s lawsuit reveals royals’ power in UAE

source WoMy BlogsrldTribune 09 June 2009

A  member of the royal family (Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum)  in the United Arab Emirates has for the first time been sued by an Iranian executive on charges of fraud.

Shahram Abdullah Zadeh has sued the brother-in-law ( Sheikh Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum) of the emir of Dubai ( Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum) in an unprecedented civil action in the UAE. The 37-year-old Iranian national has accused the brother-in-law, Hasher Maktoum Bin Juma’a Al Maktoum, of trying to take over Zadeh’s real estate firm.

“He thought he could do it all because he’s a sheik,” Zadeh said

Shahram Abdullah Zadeh CEO Al Fajer Properties 2008

The suit has challenged the transparency of the justice system of Dubai, which requires foreign investors to take on a UAE partner. Zadeh said he reverted to a civil action when prosecutors refused to file criminal charges against Hasher.

Zadeh, a life-long resident of Dubai, said he selected Hasher as the required UAE partner in Al Fajer Properties, established in 2004 and now worth $2 billion. Zadeh said he and Hasher fell into a dispute amid delays in building a billion-dollar office tower.

The economic downturn in the UAE has harmed a range of partnerships with foreign investors. In Dubai, the commercial capital, police have detained nearly 20 executives on suspicion of fraud. None of the detainees was connected to the ruling Al Maktoum family.

“There is no room for corruption and the corrupt,” Dubai ruler Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum said. “In all corruption cases, people are not only prosecuted and punished, administrative and legal holes that they exploited to commit their crimes are plugged.No one in the emirates is above the law and accountability.”

Zadeh said Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum, who ignored two summonses, exploited his connections to the ruling family to have the Iranian arrested. In February 2008, Zadeh was imprisoned for 60 days and pressed to renounce links to Al Fajer.

As Zadeh languished in prison, Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum was said to have taken over Al Fajer and appointed his son chief executive officer. By the time, he was released, Zadeh found that his office safe was ransacked and cleansed of any documents that linked him to the company.

At one point, Zadeh appealed to Dubai’s emir. He said the emir did not respond to the complaint against his brother-in-law.

“We understand that Al Fajer Properties is controlled by a powerful member of Dubai’s ruling family,” Moses Oye, who represents investors in another Al Fajer project, said.

Still, Al Fajer continues to operate. On April 15, Al Fajer and the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency, RERA Dubai,  announced the first transfer of property using a new official online system.

Photo: Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum facing lawsuits from Investors of Ebony and Ivory Towers - also named Jumeirah Business Centre) developer in Dubai is Al Fajer Properties

Hasher’s son, Maktoum, was identified as president of Al Fajer.  Zadeh was not mentioned.

Foreign investors have demanded an investigation of another Al Fajer project, Ebony Ivory.

The investors, alleging fraud, have called on the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency to force Al Fajer to issue a refund.

“We have paid approximately $140 million and have a signed contract from Sheikk Maktoum Hasher  Maktoum Al Maktoum,” Oye, who represents investors from Britain, Canada, India, Iran, Pakistan and the United States, said. “Now, we want our money back.”

From Sunday Times – Dubai – Construction halted, westerners jailed for adultery – but prostitutes do well

source TimesOnline SundayTimes July, 2009

Andrew Blair says he will pick me up from outside my sleaze-bucket of a hotel, give it 20 minutes or so, got some work to finish off. He has a job again, contracts apparently “coming out of his ears”, which is good, because until recently he had earned a certain notoriety for not having a job and, more to the point, for the manner in which he went about finding a new one. He drove around Dubai, back in January this year, from the plug-ugly creek to the plug-ugly marina, in his white Porsche, with a sign in the back window saying he wanted a job; vroom vroom he went, gizza job. Scratch scratch scratch went the keys and coins along the side of his car whenever it was parked up.

Such conspicuous flaunting of vulgar affluence seems to me entirely appropriate for this foul city — especially when combined with an admission of desperation and hopelessness, that scrawled sign and telephone number in his rear window. Fur coat and no knickers, etc. But, unaccountably, the local expats found it all a little contemptible and the journalists — none of whom possessed Ferraris — sniggered long and loud in print, out of exquisite Schadenfreude. Just look at this idiot on his uppers, was the subtext. But the ploy worked, and Andrew is once again in gainful employment as a construction project manager, and therefore can remain in this country where they deport you if you’re skint, so who’s laughing now? Not Andrew, as it happens. The whole episode, he says, made him think, made him change his ways. Those first two years out here in this dusty and scorched semi-reclaimed desert were enormous fun: huge tax-free income, palatial apartment — “the crème de la crème” — silent or monosyllabic servants, all that sex (a city containing 8,000 air hostesses can’t be bad), the fast cars, the alcohol.

But he’s a changed man, he says; that epic, shallow, soul-destroying materialism and vulgarity now leave him cold. Being out of work for a while left him a little bruised but a better person, understanding that money and consumer durables are not everything. A changed man. Although not that changed, I notice, as the white Porsche pulls up.

“Why did you leave Britain?” I ask him, slung well below sea level in the bucket seat as we cruise the baked streets past the filthy, crumbling apartment blocks where the Bangladeshi slave labourers live or die, 10 or 12 to a room, and then into the hideous bling of downtown Dubai, a vast architectural experiment conducted by, seemingly, Albert Speer and Victoria Beckham. One skyscraper appears to be gilded in gold leaf, another looks like the birthday cake of a spoilt five-year-old brat — and all of them trying desperately to be taller, flashier, more grotesque than the one next door.

“Well, you know,” he says, in a soft Scottish burr, “I think it was the immigration more than anything else.”

“But Andrew, you’re an immigrant now…”

He looks astonished at this, as if the notion had never occurred, then says: “Yes! Ironic, I suppose. But the difference is, I’m a wanted immigrant.”

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Up to a point. In truth, needed more than wanted. As one local put it: “We are fed up of westerners who come here thinking they deserve an easy meal ticket. You were nothing in the West, so you came here for the houses and cars you could never get back home, you stole through taking out excessive finance that is not justified by you [sic] salaries. Then when you cannot pay you run, this is theft born out of greed and arrogance.

“Anyway despite all of this you still disrespect our cultural and religious values with your behaviour, dress and conduct in our malls and on our beaches and comments about us our race and our religion. You spend all your time critizising [sic] our laws, society and systems. Yet, you could never have the lifestyle you have here back in your system. You people are no longer welcome, please go and pollute somewhere else.”

That was the message posted by a disgruntled Emirati on an expat website recently, and, as a description of the British, South African, Australian and eastern-European workers now living in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), it has a certain truth about it. The Emiratis are a minority within their own country, the UAE, and an even smaller minority within Dubai, the most populous city of the UAE, where they number about 20% of the population.

On the other hand, it seems a bit rich coming from an Emirati, the inhabitant of a country that lucked into oil money about 43 years ago and is now utterly dependent on foreign labour for its current, unsustainable prosperity — the ranks of the skilled and talented working class from Europe, who come here and run their absurd, extravagant and now faltering construction projects, and the traders and the dealers.

The British expats I spoke to believed, without exception, that the Emiratis are utterly useless, corrupt and indolent, and, according to several, some British managers are leaving rather than abide by a new law that requires them to employ a certain percentage of Arabs on every job. They’re simply not up to it, they say. As it is, the locals make up less than one-fifth of the total UAE population, the westerners roughly half that amount. The majority population in Dubai is the criminally low-paid, enchained, abused, dispossessed peasantry from south Asia.

The Europeans work long hours, mind — you could not really call it an “easy meal ticket”: 12- and 14-hour days and not much in the way of holidays. But there was, until recently, an unspoken quid pro quo: listen, you soft, decadent westerners, you can have your salary income-tax-free, providing you don’t lose your job, obviously (in which case we’ll deport you and you’ll lose everything you own). You can have your big apartments, providing you don’t default on the payments when times are hard, in which case we’ll put you in prison — there ain’t no bankruptcy get-out clauses here, inshallah. Owing money to people is a crime. You can swan around in your flash cars and hang out at the malls, just as if you were in Maidstone or Cottbus or Pretoria. You can dress like you were at a stag-party pub crawl in Prague, or like an infidel whore on the make, and we’ll grit our teeth and smoke our hubba-bubba pipes and look the other way. You can even have that other stuff you seem to like so much, the relentless, enervating fornicating, the stuff Allah really dislikes; we will turn a blind eye to the legion upon legion of addled post-Soviet whores in your horrible Brit-style pubs, nightclubs and wine bars, the cheap babes from the ’stans. Just keep the money pouring in, please: keep building those gargantuan hotels and facilitating those loans for us.

But this long-standing deal may be in the process of disintegrating. The credit crunch hit Dubai badly, and it is clinging to its despised but less feckless neighbour, Abu Dhabi, for a very large bail-out. Troubled state-backed firms owe British companies more than £400m. The plush apartment complexes down at the marina are half-empty, investment has collapsed and property prices with it — house prices are down by as much as 50% and are predicted to fall by another 20%. It is almost impossible to put a precise figure on the rate of the collapse, because, according to one estate agent, there is no market. Nobody is buying, nobody is renting; there is no new business. An estimated £335 billion of projects have been halted or are on hold. And it is predicted that the population could decline by 17.1% by the end of the year, so things will not be getting better too quickly.

The depression in Dubai makes our own look like a vague afterthought, because nowhere else in the world was unregulated and unfettered capitalism and a belief in perpetually rising property prices embraced with quite so much ardour as here. And it seems, as a consequence, that since the crash the locals are in recriminatory mood: if you’re going to bring us a depression, they seem to be saying, then you can clear off and, in the meantime, behave like dignified human beings rather than dragging us down into your gutter. The sex thing has been bothering them particularly.

Mohammed is an Emirati who owns a big dive shop a hundred miles across the burning sand to the east of Dubai, at Khawr Fakkan, in the slightly more conservative province of Sharjah. Khawr Fakkan, circled by stark and beautiful mountains, is on the Gulf of Oman and there is good diving to be had, plenty of tourists. Mohammed is a divorcee and he employed young western babes and chicks to run his business, because working in a dive centre is a sort of halfway house between backpacking and the real world for a certain sort of young postgrad western chick. Roxanne Hillier worked for him: young, blonde, pretty and half South African, with an English dad called Freddie. Roxanne’s in the rather bleak Khawr Fakkan prison right now, and will be for the next few months, following an unsuccessful appeal against her sentence in late June. Would you like to hear what she did to get herself there?

It was about 2am when the old bill arrived. Mohammed had been filling up the 80 or so oxygen tanks he needed for the next morning’s dive; Roxanne had returned from the last dive of the day, helped out for a bit, then, exhausted, took a nap in an anteroom. Outside, Mohammed heard a disturbance, so he went down to check it out.

“It was local people, gathered around the door to the dive centre,” he told me. “They were angry, saying, ‘Who have you got in there? You’ve got a woman in there, haven’t you?’ I told them, ‘No, no, the dive centre is closed.’ They said to me, ‘Where is the key?’ Later the police arrived. I told them there was nobody there, but they took my key and opened the door and searched the place and that’s when they found Roxanne.” The two of them were carted off to Khawr Fakkan prison (separate cells, natch) and held on remand for a week until the case came to court. Did you have sex with Roxanne, I ask Mohammed. “No, no, no, never!” Did you kiss her? “No, of course not. It is not true. It is all a misunderstanding.”

Well, as regards the first denial, we don’t have to take Mohammed’s word for it, because the Sharjah judicial authorities were kind enough to check the whole business out for themselves. They stripped Roxanne Hillier bare and invaded her with swabs and scrapes; a little bit of Mohammed’s DNA found inside her would have hugely increased the eventual sentence. As it was, she received a sentence of three months for the crime of being alone in the same building as a man who was not her husband. She didn’t know this was the sentence, because the court proceedings were conducted in Arabic and therefore she could not put her case across, either. It was later they told her what had been decided. Mohammed got a couple of weeks on the same charge.

I take a cab to the beach, Jumeirah beach, and spend 3 minutes watching sarcomas grow on the semi-naked expats strung out across the sand under flimsy shades, E-number-flavoured Slush Puppies to hand, their eyes closed against the vicious glare, their bodies porky and immobile. It is 46C out here, unendurable — this is the country where you should never go outside. Thirty miles or so across the water is Iran, where they are probably not stripping off for the beach. Behind the beach is a dusty freeway and a hospital for people with bad kidneys. It was this beach upon which the British woman Michelle Palmer performed an ill-advised act of fellatio upon a chap she had just met — Vince Acors, from Bromley — and ended up doing three months in the local nick as a consequence. I just hope it was a shade cooler when Michelle went to work.

Vince did a lot of interviews bragging about the women he’d had sex with in Dubai when he got out. Reading the interviews, you feel Vince may have been the last person in the world you should ever give a blow job to on a beach. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Bromley say, or Downham.

Then there are the adultery cases that are stacking up. Such as Marnie Pearce, 40, sentenced to six months initially (three months plus a £600 fine and deportation after appeal) for an unproven adulterous relationship with a man she insists was just a friend: she was already separated from her husband. And the case of Sally Antia, whom the police swooped on as she emerged with a male friend from a Dubai hotel in the early hours of the morning — two months in prison reduced to six weeks on appeal. You get the feeling that the Emiratis are feeling vindictive right now.

Nor is it just sex: the Dubai authorities are getting a bit twitchy about all sorts of western behaviour when it impinges directly upon them. An Australian immigrant, Darren O’Mullane, had just finished a 14-hour shift as a nurse at a Dubai hospital and was driving home when he was badly cut up by another driver who swerved in front of him. When he finally overtook this clown, he — again, ill-advisedly, as it turned out — stuck one finger up in fury. Just one finger. Three weeks in prison, lost everything — house, car, the lot. He told me the whole process had been devastating, not least having to apologise to the idiot driver who was, as bad luck would have it, a UAE police official. “I am fed up with foreigners not respecting the rules and our culture,” the puffed-up medieval official told the local Arab media later. You can tell a lot about a country from a quick look at its policemen going about their business. In Dubai they appear strutting, arrogant and faintly ludicrous, the sort of policemen you might have seen in a pre-war Third World fascist theocracy. That is not too far removed from a description of Dubai today.

The Rattlesnake bar at the Metropolitan Hotel Dubai at 10pm, just before the Filipino dance band comes on, is the place to be; this is where the Islamic blind eye is at its most consciously, calculatedly, unseeing. The whores outnumber the punters by about two to one, and that’s only the lucky whores actually inside the place. There’s a phalanx of about 30 of them crowded just inside the door, just standing and watching, possessed of insufficient money to buy drinks. Another 40 or so are working the rooms, their buoyant pre-recession breasts rubbing up against some happy but bewildered surveyor from Daventry, or project manager from Glasgow, or engineer from Düsseldorf. Outside, 40 or 50 more sit at tables, or stroll arm in arm along the pathways, begging western men to take them inside. These girls are almost exclusively Russian — but not from Moscow or St Petersburg, or even Kiev. They are Russians from the de-Russified ’stans, drawn here by the lack of work for people of their ethnic origin in Almaty, Dushanbe, Tashkent, Samarkand. They are a remarkable phenomenon. I will bet that right now, in a village halfway up the Andes, or in a yurt just south of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, or somewhere down a long broad river in Sarawak, Borneo, Svetlana and Olga and Zinaida are sidling up to the local menfolk, offering them a bit of vigorous glasnost and perestroika for £30 an hour.

Iliana, a pretty chemical blonde in her twenties from Uzbekistan, is telling me who she would deign to sleep with for money. “English, good. Scottish, better. Irish, good. German, okay. But no f***ing blacks and no f***ing Arabs.” No locals? “Arabs?” she asks, outraged. “No Arabs.”

“What if they paid you 20,000 dirhams [nearly £3,500]?”

“Oh, well, then, yes, sure,” she says, laughing.

None of the Russian girls will sleep with black people or Arabs, not even Luba from Turkmenistan, who is a little older and a little brighter and a little more circumspect. There were lots of West African girls in this bar not so long ago, but the Russkies forced them out. The refusal to have anything to do with the Emiratis is not confined to the sex workers: every taxi driver I spoke to — almost all of them Pakistani — said they would refuse to pick up an Arab. Why? “Because they are arrogant scum,” one driver told me. Nobody wants anything to do with the Emiratis.

Luba worked in a travel agency in Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, but the money was appalling and she needed to put her son through university, so she came here. As we talk I notice her still working, trying, over my shoulder, to catch the eye of someone who might actually pay her for her time. She hates her work — most of the girls hate their work — but not Iliana. “I like f***ing men,” she says cheerfully, and disappears, presumably to meet a client. Luba looks like she will not be so lucky tonight, which is a shame, because I like her, although she’s quite fervently racist, as they all are. As everyone here in Dubai is, here in this lovely little melting pot, all these races gathered together, loathing one another.

At midnight I make to leave but am stopped by Keri, who is a very attractive young lady from Almaty in Kazakhstan. She hangs onto my jacket because she has found something very attractive to admire in me, too. This is gratifying, if you’re me. “So lovely, so lovely,” she says, holding the thing in her hands, turning it over and over, “I haven’t seen one like it.”

I blush a little and clear my throat.

“Um, it’s a Bic,” I tell her.

“Bic? What is this Bic?” she says shaking her pretty head, still stroking it.

“A lighter. Its name is, you know, Bic. I think they’re, er, French.”

“Aah,” she says, kohl-heavy eyes flashing. “So you have been to France, yes?”

“No — I mean, yes, um, I’ve been to France. But you can get these lighters in England too!”

“Really?” She says, entranced.

“Er, yes. In Sainsbury’s. Or a corner shop. For about 70 pence.”

I give her the lighter and skedaddle, back to my hotel room. She is less pleased with the lighter now that she possesses it.

My interview at the Islamic Information Center is a brief, uncomfortable experience, albeit conducted with exquisite politeness and civility (on their part, at least). This is a propaganda arm of the government, or more properly a state-run evangelistic Islamic operation aimed at westerners, situated in a lock-up shop in a frowzy sector of downtown Dubai. What happens is this:

I sip water (they were out of beer) and ask a question like — hey, have you seen all those whores down at the Rattlesnake? Isn’t that against the law? And then the five berobed interviewees talk among themselves at great length in Arabic and eventually one of them explains to me very courteously, with a shy smile and an apology, why they won’t answer the question. Not their responsibility, you see. This happens seven or eight times, and eventually the interview is terminated. After many handshakes I am sent on my way with a copy of a little book about how Jesus Christ was quite a nice man but totally useless, if we’re being honest. One of the men, Wael Osman, sort of agrees that the economic downturn has made relations between Emiratis and their western Gastarbeiter a little more tingly, a little more fraught, and concurred that while the government turned a blind eye to all sorts of westerner shenanigans, this was becoming harder to do of late. But when I say “agrees” and “concurred”, I mean that I said this stuff and he smiled a little and in a very vague sort of way nodded his head. The man I should be speaking to was the chief of police, they said, but sadly he was away receiving a medal in Djibouti.

I didn’t really have a chance to get on to the main topic, the stuff about Dubai that really, truly offends — and indeed should offend Islamic sensibilities. I don’t mean Luba and Iliana, although the traffic in Russian prostitutes is brutal and violent. I don’t mean the westerners in their Porsches, or the authoritarian nature of this place and complete and utter lack of democracy, or the vile architecture and unbounded materialism, or the prosecution of women for the crime of standing near men. I don’t even mean the mass rounding-up and prosecution of homosexuals, who are summarily imprisoned and — the government has suggested — may face hormone treatment in order to make them, uh, “better”; this is a Sodom where sodomy carries a 10-year stretch. All of that stuff makes Dubai a fairly foul place to be, but compared to Dubai’s real crimes, they are as nothing.

Maz, a Pakistani from Lahore, drives a taxi for a living (he won’t pick up Emiratis, of course). He lives in a room in the grim suburb of Al Quoz, a room costing £700 a month that he shares with six other Pakistanis. His passport has been taken from him in case he nicks the car he is driving. He cannot get home, he hasn’t the money or, indeed, the passport. Maz, though, is one of the lucky ones, very near the top of the hierarchy of Third World workers induced to come to this country by the promise of large wages — wages that are rarely forthcoming. Maz at least gets paid, even if all the money goes on rent.

The bar staff are also near the top of this hierarchy. Mostly Roman Catholic Goans, they get looked after by the hotels and even get a chance to visit their families once a year or so. I spoke to one barman to glean a bit more detail about his living conditions, but an Emirati overseer barked something out and the man ceased talking to me. But at least the hotels provide their staff with accommodation, even if it is in dormitories.

t is the construction workers, the labourers — the Bangladeshis, the Tamils, the Filipinos, the Somalians, the Chinese — who are the real scandal of Dubai. Hundreds of thousands of them lured again by the promise of large wages, stripped of their passports, their contracts rarely honoured — some have gone months without being paid, some have even paid just to be there. They cannot go home. They hunker down in cramped, squalid apartments in Sonapur and Al Quoz. This is Dubai as a slave state. There were serious riots recently in the Chinese quarter: the workers finally had enough of criminally low wages — 500 dirhams, or about £83 a month — and continual mistreatment. The Chinese embassy got involved. Worse still are the conditions of the south-Asian workers, the construction men and the maids, effectively imprisoned in this country, abused by their employers, scrabbling around in sometimes 50C heat to earn enough to pay the rent on their shared accommodation. The Indians rioted too last year, but were forced back to work by water cannon. In the year 2005 alone, the Indian consulate estimated that 971 of its nationals died in Dubai, from construction site accidents, heat exhaustion and — increasingly — suicide. The figure for suicides the next year alone was more than 100. The Emiratis were, to give them credit, appalled by this figure, so they asked the consulate to stop collating the statistics. In October 2007 a construction-work strike resulted in 4,000 migrant workers being flung in jail and then deported. In 2006 the campaigning charity Human Rights Watch detailed the “serious” abuses of workers’ rights — the wages withheld, the high rates of injury and death with “little assurance” of medical care, the passports confiscated, the wages either criminally low or never paid. The UAE had done “little or nothing” to address the problem. You get the picture?

Local human-rights activists, when they raise their concerns, tend to receive a visit from the secret police; some have had their rights to practise as lawyers stripped from them.

Andrew Blair, he of the Porsche, is a project manager for construction work. He believes the condition of the labourers is appalling, unforgivable, almost beyond belief. I suggest to him that in his position, he could ensure that the contracts went out to firms that treated their workers fairly. He thinks about this for a moment. “Um, well I don’t care about it that much,” he says.

He is not a bad person, Andrew, and my suggestion is probably a little naive. He is, at least, conflicted. He acknowledges the issue and can comprehend that it is an evil. But that’s what you sign up to when you buy property in Dubai, or go there to work, or to stay in one of its bling hotels. You sign up to all that stuff you condone it.

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed my taxi ride back to the airport with Tariq, the taxi driver from Peshawar (he won’t pick up Emiratis); to see that towering skyscape left behind in a cloud of desert dust. Paris Hilton had just flown in to do something pointless in a mall. When that happens, you just have to get the hell out.

where the money comes from

GDP in 2007: £23 billion

Trading: 31%

Construction/ Real estate: 22.6%

Financial Services: 11%

Oil/Petrol/Gas: 5.8%

Dubai’s foreign debt is well over 100% of its GDP

Annual incomes

Project manager, Construction: £57,576

Project manager, IT: £38,438

IT manager: £33,891

Construction worker: ± £993

Politics and human rights

1 No suffrage

2 Political parties illegal

3 Freedom of association and expression curtailed

The UAE refuses to sign the following treaties:

4 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

5 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

6 Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families

7 Convention against Torture

Crime and punishment

8 Death penalty by firing squad for several offences

9 Death penalty by stoning for adultery

The people

Population (Inc Migrants)

Male 75.5%

Female 24.5%

Dubai Property Market – Flippers, skippers, runners, survivors battle it out

source PropertyWeekly

‘Flipping’, ‘skipping’ and ‘running’ are relatively new terms in the argot of Dubai’s property market. Many would know about at least one person who has done one of the three ‘disrespectful’ things, and may even be aware of several more via the city’s thriving rumour mill.

The residents who remain also have a new nomenclature for themselves — the ‘survivors’.

New players experiment with speculation

Flipping was hitherto the activity of buying and selling property instantly, and solely for instant profit. Despite the impression that this dangerous game is a thing of yore and was once the exclusive prerogative of high risk takers, it is not, and has attracted new players.

Flipping was once restricted to incomplete properties, but they are now doing it with credit notes. Also, flippers are not necessarily risk takers; some are trying to recover investments gone awry, while others are desperate for much needed cash.

Offloading multiple units

AR is a classic flipper. In December 2007, he owned three apartments — on paper — at various buildings in Dubai Marina. By September 2008, he had sold two for a cumulative profit of Dh1.23 million, despite the fact that both were not ready for occupation.

“I am lucky that I disposed them of before it was time to start paying my mortgages and before the economic downturn,” he says. “If things get bad, I will move into the one I still own, so no money lost. But, many other people who acted impulsively have done badly. I know some really sad stories and consider myself blessed.”

However, despite his narrow escape from steep losses, AR cannot shed his innate instincts. When questioned, he admits that he has purchased a credit note for 60 per cent of its face value, and is looking for a buyer who will take it off him for a profit.

Skippers caved in

Skippers are other risk takers like AR, but who didn’t have the sense, instincts, or gumption to offload their properties when the market soured. When they could not find buyers and saw alarming drops in prices, they caved.

Faced with the prospect of bounced cheques, rising debts and the threat of unemployment, some of these foolhardy investors just upped and left, or skipped.

Skippers are not available for quotes, but TQ who left the country in the first week of February is believed to have invested in no less than six properties across the country. A feat made possible by two facts: he was the creative director of an advertising agency and had a substantial salary, and he dealt with an Islamic bank that allows customers to have multiple mortgages.

Coincidentally, the day he lost his job is also the day he realised that the next set of payments towards his property portfolio totalled Dh246,000, and also, that there were no prospects of serious buyers on the anvil, for any of them.

Forfeiting down payments

His simple solution was to forfeit the nominal down payments he had made on the said properties, and to head back to his native country to sit out the storm. In his case, he paid off his credit cards, cleared his lesser debts, and told his bank that he was giving up his claim on the many apartments he owned.

Trail of debts

Runners, on the other hand, don’t bother doing any of the latter or the formalities associated with relocating from the country. One minute they are in Dubai, revelling in their enviable status as the owners of several properties, and the next minute, they are simply missing from the country, with only the trail of debts proving they lived here. They could now be anywhere.

Finally, those who have heard the horror stories and heaved heavy sighs say they too need a moniker for not falling into any of the above categories.

Ordinary residents who continue to pay rent on their homes, have strongly resisted the urge to invest in property. Those who actually live in the properties they purchased say they are just holding tight.

BJ owns a modest studio flat at The Greens and his brother MJ rents a one-bedroom apartment at Dubai Marina, and by their own admission, they worry about the appalling state of the world, just as much as they are alarmed about their own job security… or the possible lack of it.

According to MJ, their mission is to put away and save as much money as they can every month just so that they are not taken unawares by any unpleasant surprises — be it falling prices, increased rents, unexpected payments or unplanned debts.

“All those people we hear about have titles that classify them into categories. We believe that the rest of us who live in Dubai and eke out an everyday existence without running, skipping or flipping need one too. Just call us the ‘survivors’,” say the brothers.

And they are not being sardonic.

Flippers now deal in credit notes

• Despite the impression that flipping is a thing of yore and was once the exclusive prerogative of high risk takers, it has attracted new players
• Flipping was once restricted to incomplete properties, but they are now doing it with credit notes
• Also, flippers are not necessarily risk takers; some are trying to recover investments gone awry, while others are desperate for much needed cash
• Skippers are other risk takers, but who didn’t have the sense, instincts, or gumption to offload their properties when the market soured
• Runners simply go missing from the country, leaving behind a huge trail of debts

Al Fajer Properties Case – Zadeh says he’s a victim of a system in which the rulers can manipulate police and the courts to protect their business

Al Fajer Properties Dubai 2009 , Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum

source

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — In this Gulf city-state, two things have long been untouchable: business interests and the ruling family. However, an attempt to sue a member of the family over an alleged financial swindle is a sign of how much the economic crisis has rattled business as usual here.

Shahram Abdullah Zadeh accuses the brother-in-law , sheikh Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum, of Dubai’s emir illegally of taking over his real-estate firm Al Fajer Properties and having him detained by police to help the swindle.

Zadeh, a 37-year-old Iranian national who has lived in Dubai all his life, brought a civil case against the brother-in-law and his son Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum to get his firm Al Fajer Properties back, a rare move. Even more surprising, shrahm Zadeh tried to raise criminal charges, but that step went nowhere because prosecutors rejected it.

The case has raised questions about whether Dubai really is what it claims to be: A boomtown where international businessmen can safely invest and turn a profit; or rather, a nest of cronyism and connections where royal blood can still trump entrepreneurial effort.

Such questions were largely ignored by everyone – businessmen and politicians alike – as long as the cash was rolling in during Dubai’s stunning expansion over the past decade. But now the emirate has hit the skids in the world financial crisis.

“During the boom, Dubai’s shortcomings were glossed over, but now that the economy is struggling, it’s becoming a different story,” said Christopher Davidson, an author of two books on the United Arab Emirates and a lecturer at Durham University in Britain.

Dubai’s emir, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, led the emirate’s vast financial ambitions. But business ran far ahead of the effort to modernize legislation in what remains a traditional Arab monarchy, where the ruler and his family hold final say.

Now the government has been trying to rein in some fast-and-loose business practices. About a dozen former executives are in custody for various investigations. Some have close ties to the government, but none of those in custody are related to the ruling family.

Zadeh’s case goes farther – breaking to taboo of questioning Dubai’s leadership. Zadeh says he’s a victim of a system in which the rulers can manipulate police and the courts to protect their business.

“If Dubai cannot provide security for foreign investors, they might as well switch off all the lights,” he said.

Attempts over the past weeks by The Associated Press to contact the brother-in-law, Sheikh Hasher Maktoum bin Juma’a Al Maktoum, were unsuccessful. Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoumand his company attorneys did not return repeated phone calls or respond to interview requests.

In the first session of Zadeh’s civil case, Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum and his lawyers failed to appear. In the second a week ago, his lawyer asked the court for more time to study the allegations. The case is to resume May 4.

Zadeh and the Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Al Maktoum went into business in 2004. Foreigners are allowed to deal in property only after finding an Emirati sponsor to officially register a company. The usual practice is for the Emirati sponsor to give his signature for an annual fee or profit share. Several members of the sprawling ruling family are involved in such deals.

Zadeh set up a firm, Al Fajer Properties, and was chief executive while Sheikh  Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum held the trade license. The firm was profitable and is now worth about $2 billion, according to Zadeh. But the partnership soured over delays in building a commercial tower, Juemirah Business Centre.

Zadeh said in an affidavit to Dubai’s attorney general that he was arrested in February 2008 and held for 60 days. He says he was never charged with any crime but was questioned over his business – including the combination of his safe.

While Zadeh was in detention, Sheikh Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum took over the company Al Fajer Properties by appointing his son Sheik Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum as chief executive, ousting Zadeh, according to Zadeh’s filing. When he was released, Zadeh says he found his office safe had been cleaned of documents showing he was the owner of Al Fajer Properties and Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoums partner.

Zadeh also says police tried to push him to sign a document saying he had no connection to Al Fajer Properties. He submitted to the court

Al Fajer documents listing him as CEO and transactions that his lawyers contend show he was the sole investor. The Associated Press was given a copy.

Sheikh Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum  “thought he could do it all because he’s a Sheik,” Zadeh said.

Police refused to comment on whether Zadeh was detained. Shahram Zadeh says they continue to hold his passport and so far he has had little luck pushing his claims.

He submitted a criminal complaint but the attorney general refused to investigate, giving no reason.

Zadeh then filed a complaint directly to Dubai’s emir, who holds what is called the Ruler’s Court. Residents can bring to the emir what they believe are injustices unaddressed by the courts – from disputes over money to wrongful deaths.

Zadeh says he has received no response.

see also: Terahn Times

More: Al Fajer Properties Dubai – Jumeirah Business Centre – Ebony Ivory Towers Dubai

Don`t kiss your girlfriend in a Dubai Taxi !

source GulfNews

Dubai: An Arab man is in police custody and could face deportation after being accused of kissing his girlfriend while they were both in a taxi in Dubai, Police told Gulf News.

A police source from Al Rifaa police station said that the Lebanese businessman working in Dubai, was arrested by Criminal and Investigation police officials recently while he was accompanying his Ukrainian girlfriend in a taxi.

The man – in his late thirties – is being detained at Al Rifa’a police station. He was later transferred to Al Aweer central jail.

The man said he was leaving a hotel in Dubai’s Al Rifaa area with his girlfriend. They were sitting next to each other in the taxi. “We took a taxi and I was sitting next to my girlfriend. I was leaning at her showing her a video clip on my mobile phone,” he said.

He said that after a few minutes the taxi was stopped by undercover police. “We were asked to leave the taxi. They asked me why I was kissing her in public. They said this is not allowed here,” he said.

The man said he and his girlfriend were arrested and taken to Al Rifa’a police station.

Police said that the man and his girlfriend have been arrested for committing an indecent gesture in public.

RERA Dubai has designated 69 proptery projects

The Real Estate Regulatory Agency has been surveying every project in Dubai with an engineer who photographs the site and gives the official state of construction. Until recently, none of these projects were designated as stalled.

Now, Rera has designated 69 projects out of 407 surveyed (so far) as “on hold”, or about 17 per cent.

Two developers, in particular, are responsible for many of these: Abyaar Real Estate Development and Al Mazaya Holding, both from Kuwait.

Abyaar has put on hold 46 groups of villas in its Acacia Avenues project in Al Sofouh alone, as well as its Pier 18 project in Dubai Marina, its Olgana tower in Al Sofouh, and its Hiliana tower in Al Sofouh. That amounts to 49 projects, according to Rera’s survey

Al Mazaya has delayed 14 of its clusters of buildings in its Q Point development in Dubailand.

Other stalled projects include Damac Development’s Admiral Bay in Maritime City; Dheeraj & East Coast LLC’s Bay Residences in Business Bay; Marina Crown Real Estate’s The Vantage in the Dubai Waterfront; the RUFI Heaven in International City; and the RUFI Luxury Heights in the Dubai Waterfront.

Most of these projects are from smaller developers, so it’s most likely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to delay.

Real estate brokerages ignore Rera regulations on advertising

source Business24/7

Most of the real estate brokerage companies in Dubai are ignoring Real Estate Regulatory Agency’s (Rera) rules when it comes to newspaper advertising.

A search of newspaper listings shows that even some of the top brokerage companies don’t mention their Rera registration numbers, leave alone mentioning the trust account number for off-plan properties or title deed number for completed properties.

Rera regulations state that when a real estate brokerage company advertises “off-plan” properties, the advertisements must mention the project name, the trust account number and the broker office registration number. And for completed properties, they need to mention the title deed number and the broker office registration number in the advertisements.

“If brokerage companies fail to comply with the advertisement guidelines mentioned above, we send a notice to them through the Department of Economic Deve-lopment (DED) asking them to comply with our guidelines. If any company fails to comply with our guidelines, we issue penalty through the DED and take legal action,” a senior agency official said.

This newspaper has reported about Rera’s recommendation that people should only use service of Rera-registered brokers. They should also check the broker’s Rera accreditation at the agency’s website (www.rpdubai.com) before dealing with them.

high profile individuals and those running big businesses are not sent to jail immediately even if they are caught up in bounced cheque cases involving big amounts.

source GulfNews

Dubai: Personal insolvency and companies’ bankruptcy have become major issues since last September when the impact of the global recession became evident in the UAE.

Colonel Khalil Ebrahim Al Mansouri of Dubai Police told Gulf News: “We are very strict against bounced cheque cases, but before taking any legal action, we give the cheque issuers a chance to reach a compromise with the second party before filing a formal case. If the settlement can’t be reached the complaint will be registered as a case and transferred to public prosecution and later to court.”

Al Mansouri pointed out that high profile individuals and those running big businesses are not sent to jail immediately even if they are caught up in bounced cheque cases involving big amounts.

“What we usually do is set them free after they sign an undertaking leaving their passport [until] they can pay back their debt. However, people who fail to settle their financial commitments will be sent to jail to protect the rights of the affected parties,” he said.

With the number of cases of bounced cheques increasing, Minister of Justice Dr Hadef Bin Jua’an Al Daheri earlier told Gulf News that the UAE government is reviewing a proposal to deal with them out of court.

Al Daheri said: “The government is currently reviewing a proposal to set up a centre to handle bounced cheque cases before referring them to court.”

Such a centre, he said, will reduce the burden on the courts by minimising the cases referred to them. In the first three months of 2009, police recorded a total of 11,440 bounced cheques, against 6,462 in the same period in 2008.

As part of their ongoing efforts to combat the issuing of cheques that are likely to bounce, the Dubai police have signed a data-sharing agreement with Emcredit, an entity that is developing a credit database of people and companies.

The database will help financial institutions to assess the credit risk of an individual or a company.

Lenders can check an applicant’s credit history to see if they have bad records, and also detect if they have defaulted cheques and if there is an available balance for any cheque.

The verification process can be done in seconds, but not all banks are Emcredit subscribers. The police are currently providing Emcredit with the names of people who have been involved in bounced cheque cases.

Dubai Police are also planning to establish electronic links with bank settlement sections in Dubai to help them track data about bounced cheques fast.

The links will also facilitate complaint-filing against the cheque issuer without the complainant having to go to a police station. An electronic form with all data required about the bounced cheque is filled in and then automatically sent to one of Dubai’s police stations to be recorded as an official complaint. The applicants are not obliged to go to police except to sign the formal complaint before it is sent to the prosecution.

Read also: The cost of bounced cheques and Bad cheque offences should be considered individually

UAE pledges fair trial of royal Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan on torture claims

source Zawya

ABU DHABI, July, 2009 (AFP)

The Abu Dhabi prosecution service on Monday pledged an “impartial trial” of torture allegations against a brother of the United Arab Emirates president.

“The overriding principle of these investigations is the protection of law, guaranteeing a fair and impartial trial for all persons involved,” an unidentified prosecution official told WAM state news agency.

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan has reportedly been put under house arrest and is barred from leaving the country pending investigations into video footage aired by US television network ABC on April 22 which appeared to show the prince mercilessly torturing a man.

“The investigation is being carried out with full transparency and according to the principle that all are treated equally before the law,” said the official.

“The lawyer representing Sheikh Issa bin Zayed, Mr. Habib al-Mulla, is following the investigation,” WAM added.

The Abu Dhabi prosecutors’ office is “carrying out its investigation and engaging with those involved in the case in order to reach a clear understanding of all the pertinent aspects and circumstances,” the official said.

In the video, Sheikh Issa, a brother of UAE president and Abu Dhabi emir Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, appears to beat a man with whips, electric cattle prods and a wooden plank with protruding nails.

Assisted by police, he is seen to pour salt in the man’s wounds and run over him with a sports utility vehicle.

The victim, who needed months of hospital care, was reportedly an Afghan trader who lost a load of grain worth 5,000 dollars.

Other allegations of torture by the prince have since emerged.

Lawyer Anthony Buzbee, representing a former business associate of the prince who also alleges he was tortured by him, wrote to the UAE authorities on May 2 that he had “more than two hours of video footage showing Sheikh Issa’s involvement in the torture of more than 25 people.”

The Texas-based Buzbee acts for Texas businessman Bassam Nabulsi who smuggled out the original footage aired by ABC.

Human Rights Watch called on the UAE government to establish an independent body with authority to inquire more broadly into the prevalence of abuse and torture by UAE police, and to ratify the Convention against Torture.

ACI Real Estate Dubai: Nakheel hits back at ACI Waterfront claims

source Arabian Business

Master developer Nakheel on Monday hit back at claims made by Dubai property group ACI Real Estate – and insisted its Waterfront mega-project was going ahead.
 
Robin Lohmann, managing director of ACI Real Estate, in an interview with Arabian Business this week, blamed the state-owned developer for a lack of progress on his flagship Ferretti Luxury Beach Residence and Pershing Luxury Beach Residence projects, located in the Madinat Al Arab area of the Nakheel’s Waterfront development in Jebel Ali.

“We have invested in several plots in Dubai Waterfront. We need to know from the master developer of Waterfront, which is Nakheel, if they plan to go ahead with the project now or not. Once we have these answers we can give to answers our purchasers,” Lohmann said.

But in an emailed statement to Arabian Business Nakheel said it had handed over ACI’s two plots and the company was free to start construction.

“The two plots which ACI own at Madinat Al Arab have already been handed over,” a spokesman for Nakheel said.
 
“Waterfront has not been cancelled. Our current focus at Waterfront is on Badrah, Veneto, and Madinat Al Arab. Work continues to make good progress at these sites,” the spokesman added.

The Madinat Al Arab phase of the Waterfront is due for completion in 2015. Other sub-developers such as Plus Properties have started construction at Madinat on its Pixel Tower and Wave Residence projects.
 
“At Madinat Al Arab, we remain committed to providing infrastructure to third party developers as per their Sales and Purchase Agreements. The majority of plots in this phase have been handed over with some third party developers already mobilised on-site,” the Nakheel spokesman added.
 
Dubai-based property developer and investment company ACI Real Estate, is a division ACI (Alternative Capital Invest) Group, a German firm with interests in asset management and real estate.

The Waterfront is a planned seaside mega project, twice the size of Hong Kong. It is being built over six phases and completion dates range from 2010 to 2018.

Nakheel said in December the Madinat Al Arab, Veneto, Badra and Canal District phases of the Waterfront were pressing ahead, while other sections would be delayed in the wake of the global crisis.

German Developer ACI Dubai verzettelt sich in Dubai – Financial Times Germany

source Financial Times

Prominente verkauften ihre Namen für Bauvorhaben in Dubai – jetzt gerät das Projekt zum Skandal. Es geht um geplatzte Immobilienspekulationen, neue Identitäten in Panama – und für Anleger um 600 Mio. Euro.

Promis sind gut. Promis ziehen immer. Daher erblickte, wer vor zwei Jahren ins glamouröse Dubai reiste, überall Plakate eines Projektentwicklers aus dem nicht ganz so glamourösen Gütersloh. Sein Name: Alternative Capital Invest (ACI). Selbst Wolkenkratzer waren mit Riesenpostern bedeckt, die mit den Konterfeis von Promis wie Michael Schumacher, Boris Becker und Niki Lauda für Türme warben, die deren Namen trugen. “Man dachte, die ganze Stadt gehört ACI”, erinnert sich Lothar H.

Der Geschäftsmann hat Strafanzeige gegen ACI-Chef Robin Lohmann gestellt. Für ihn geht es um 150.000 Euro. “Lohmann ist ein Betrüger”, sagt H. Mit der These ist er nicht alleine.

Rund 600 Mio. Euro will ACI von insgesamt 8.000 Anlegern für Projekte im Scheichtum eingesammelt haben. Doch an den Baustellen stehen die Kräne still, zugesagte Auszahlungen fließen nicht. ACI beschwichtigt – und schießt gegen Kritiker zurück: Man sei Opfer von Internet-Stalking, es liefen Rufmordkampagnen. Nutzer von Finanzforen stießen kritische Recherchen an – und behaupten: Die Chefs von ACI sollen versucht haben, für 750.000 Euro die Flucht aus Dubai nach Panama vorzubereiten, unter fremder Identität. ACI dementiert das. Anlegerschützer sind dennoch alarmiert: “Wir befürchten das Schlimmste”, sagt Claudia Lunderstedt-Georgi vom Deutschen Verbraucherschutzring.
Dass es für das Geschäftmodell von Lohmann schwierig ist, liegt auf der Hand. Die Immobilienpreise haben sich in Dubai seit ihrem Hoch halbiert, die Analysten der Deutschen Bank rechnen mit einem weiteren Preisverfall um 20 Prozent. Der Preissturz brach vor allem den so genannten “Flippern” das Genick, den Spekulanten, die Immobilien erwerben und sofort weiterverkaufen. In Boomzeiten brachte das sichere Gewinne: In den USA wie auch in Dubai wechselten Immobilien bis zu zehn Mal zwischen den Flippern, ehe sich der erste Baukran drehte. Bricht der Markt jedoch ein, sitzen die Flipper auf Objekten, die sie nicht wollen. Oder nicht zahlen können.

Den “Master of Flipping” nennen Immobilien-Insider Lohmann im Wüstenemirat. Doch es hat sich ausgeflippert. Ohne Extrakugel. “Hier gibt es leere Häuser und Büros ohne Ende”, sagt Esther Stimmler vom Deutschen Wirtschaftskreis in Dubai. Auch ACI-Projekte sind so ins Schlingern geraten. Bei der Auszahlung der Anleger von vier Fonds gebe es “Verzögerungen”, gesteht ACI auf seiner Homepage ein, das Kapital sei nur noch “weitestgehend gesichert”. Es geht zunächst “nur” um 54 Mio. Euro. Schuld sind die Anderen: Ein Käufer von ACI-Bauten könne angeblich nicht zahlen. Während FTD-Anfragen in den ACI-Büros in Gütersloh und Dubai unbeantwortet bleiben, meldete sich Robin Lohmann am Donnerstag auf der Online-Plattform “Arabian Business” mit den Worten: “Geld zurück ist derzeit keine Option”.

Jetzt fahnden mehrere Anwaltsbüros nach geprellten ACI-Investoren. Anwalt Jens-Peter Gieschen aus Bremen, hat nach eigenen Angaben zehn Mandanten gewonnen. “Nach unseren Informationen sind auch bei Projekten, die Investoren als Sicherheit dienen sollen, die Bautätigkeiten inzwischen weitgehend eingestellt”, sagt Gieschen. Auch einstige Vertriebspartner des Fonds haben sich von ACI distanziert. Man sehe “dringenden Handlungsbedarf”, heißt es in einem Schreiben, dass der FTD vorliegt. Sie haben ein Kontrollgremium eingerichtet und fordern eine Gesellschafterversammlung der Fonds.

Der Berliner Anwalt Sven Tintemann will die prominenten Zugvögel, die die Immobilien bewarben, zur Verantwortung ziehen. Er bastelt nun an einer Klage gegen Schumi, Becker und Lauda.

Troubled German Developer ACI puts Dubai Waterfront Towers on hold

source The National

Alternative Capital Invest (ACI) Real Estate, the troubled German-owned developer behind projects such as the Boris Becker, Michael Schumacher and Niki Lauda towers, says it will put on hold its developments on the Dubai Waterfront and shift investor holdings to other assets.

Affected projects include the Ferretti and Pershing towers, which have yet to begin construction. The company said it would shift client’s investments in these developments to its towers in Business Bay, which consist mainly of the towers linked to prominent German sport figures. The Becker, Schumacher and Lauda towers are currently under construction but running significantly behind schedule.

In recent weeks a group of German investors in ACI-linked funds, which have financed the developments, complained that the developers have missed payout deadlines. The postponement of the Dubai Waterfront towers comes as ACI is struggling to maintain investor funding that it needs to complete existing projects.

Robin Lohmann, the managing director of ACI Dubai, said in a recent interview slowing payment was having an impact on construction schedules.

“All our sites [in Business Bay] are under construction,” he said. “But since there are delays in people’s payments, we have had to slow down in order to deal with it. If nobody pays, the risk is that construction stops. This is the last thing that we want.”

He added that of the 11 projects the company had underway, at least seven were under construction.

Dubai Police Nab Real Estate Agent on the Run

source KhaleejTimes

DUBAI — A real estate agent, on the run for
nearly a month, was caught by Dubai Police for allegedly issuing dud cheques worth Dh203 million to high
end clients.

Ahmed Thani bin Ghalita, Director of the anti-crime department of Dubai Police said, about 39 people, including top soccer players, had lodged complaints against the man, a British citizen of Pakistani origin.

Ghalita s
id the complainants alleged that the man had sold them property, for which they gave deposits, and when the deals fell through, the deposits were not repaid as guaranteed. “The police received information that the suspect, who is a holder of a British pa
sport, was trying to escape from the UAE. The police launched a search for the suspect who worked as a real estate broker and who was wanted by Interpol for issuing dud cheques to clients, including soccer players of various teams,” he said.

“
he police was informed by employees that the suspect was not living with his children and that he changes his appearance and was not using his mobile phone to avoid being caught by
the police.

“The suspect was stunned when he was arrested by the police in a coffee shop in the Murraqabat area — he thought that the police would not recognise him. The suspect has been on the run for 25 days.”

Ghalita said the suspect, using his work in the real estate company, dealt with clients through the email and online resources so as to avoid providing evidence for an office or home address.

Ghalita would not say which company the man was working for or which property or properties he claimed to be a broker for.

The department of anti-crime, established by the Dubai Police on September 2008, has approved a number of ways to curb crime, including the investigation of bounced cheques of large sums.

It was a part of this initiative that Dubai Police tracked the 39 complaints issued at various police stations, investigated and arrested the man for issuing bounced cheques worth Dh203 million.

During the first half of the current year the police recovered thousands of dirhams by investigating on dud cheque cases and arrested 278 wanted people.

Dubai Property Developer Al Barakah chief arrested on bouncing cheque charges

source The National

The chief executive of the property developer Al Barakah is in custody, and is likely to face charges relating to the signing cheques worth millions of dirhams, which later allegedly bounced.

SIK, whose company was planning what would have been the tallest tower in Ajman, surrendered himself to the Dubai police last Thursday and was officially arrested on Sunday, according to the public prosecutor’s office of the Muraqqabat police station.
“He has been captured on Sunday this week,” said a first sergeant at the public prosecutor’s office. “He said that his name has been blocked and that he can’t leave. He told that his business had [gone] worse and that he wanted to solve everything by the court. And because of that he surrendered himself.”

According to the officer, the charges related to a bounced cheque. “He had one bounced cheque of nearly Dh10m and the case has been sent yesterday to the court,” he said.

The chief executive was being sought by Dubai Police for more than seven months for allegedly bouncing cheques that totaled more than Dh40 million (US$16.33m), according to the Dubai police.

Al Barakah, which launched a dozen projects in Dubai and Ajman from 2007, found itself in difficulty last year.

SIK signed agreements with investors promising to buy back their properties after six months with a guaranteed 50 per cent profit on the downpayment. He issued post-dated checks as a guarantee of the buy-back.

ACI Real Estate Dubai Update: ACI Owner ordered new identities in Panama

source 06. July 2009

ACI owner Uwe Lohmann (64) and his son Robin (34) shall have offered 750.000 Euros down payment in cash to an international offshore and consulting provider in Panama – to receive two new identities in South America!?!

The consultants should also care for a secure domicile abroad with protection against extradition – as well as for bodyguards as company for both German “businessmen”. Robin Lohmann shall also have transferred huge amounts to Bahrain, further funds shall be deposited in Panama and Belize.

What the Lohmann family did not consider with their supposed flee preparations: The consultant which has been contacted by them, is also correspondent of the Financial Intelligence and News Service www.gomopa.net.

Father and son Lohmann planned and launched in Dubai commercial and residential tower projects, accumulating 300 Million Euros from more than 8.000 German investors, at least in the same amount from Off-Plan unit buyers in Dubai and further 500 Million Euros from UAE banks. Parts of their projects have been branded with the names of celebrities like Boris Becker, Michael Schumacher and Niki Lauda. Meanwhile, Robin Lohmann was forced to deposit his passport at Dubai authorities and has to show up frequently at police and public prosecution in Dubai. His management team under Indian Sanjay Chimnani already left the country.

In spite of several trials, none of the Lohmanns was available for statements. For journalist colleagues from ArabianBusiness as well as GoMoPa and others, Robin Lohmann was not reachable – neither in person, nor via phone.

Under these conditions, it seems to be just a matter of time till the former “CEO of the year” will be brought into custody.

Property Prices Dubai will fall further

Source Arabian Business  05 July 2009

More than 60 percent of people think UAE property prices are going to drop by another 20-30 percent this year, according to an online poll.

Arabian Business asked its readers whether they thought the real estate market had hit the bottom, with just 5 percent in agreement.

Instead, some 63.4 percent of people thought there was still another 20-30 percent correction to come.

House prices in Dubai have tumbled 50 percent from their peak during the fourth quarter of last year.

Problems of over-supply and population shrinkage, with thousands of jobless expatriates expected to return home now schools have broken up, will mean continued pressure on prices.

The poll results provide a rather more pessimistic view of the UAE real estate market than a recent Shuaa Capital survey into investor confidence.

The Dubai-based investment bank found that 19 percent of investors believed that the market had bottomed out.

The investor confidence survey, conducted between June 13 and 16, is the only one of its kind in the region. It also found the highest increase in investor confidence, rising 16.8 points to 123.8 points on the month.

However, the Arabian Business poll found that only 6.1 percent of people were optimistic, believing that the market was now on the road to recovery.

While, 25.6 percent played it safe, saying nothing was going to change until the end of the year.

ACI Group denies CEO Robin Lohmann has been jailed, fled UAE

source Arabian Business

UAE-based real estate broker ACI Group has denied stories in German business media that the company’s CEO Robin Lohmann has been jailed.

Trade title Financial Intelligence Service last week reported that Lohmann has been under investigation by the Dubai police.

The paper stated that four independent sources had confirmed Lohmann had been taken into custody for one night, had surrendered his passport to the authorities, and was not allowed to leave the country before the debts of ACI Dubai were settled.

Real estate companies have been battered by the collapse in property prices in the UAE, which has led to several master developments grinding to a standstill.

Sub developers with projects within these master developments have been battling to satisfy investors who have paid deposits for property that is not currently being built, while struggling to pay contractors on jobs that are ongoing.

Last week a senior executive of Khoie Properties, the developer behind a $550 million project on Ras al Khaimah’s man-made island of Al Marjan, was handed a three year jail sentence for bouncing two cheques totalling over $30 million.

An official from ACI, who spoke exclusively to Arabian Business but would not be named or directly quoted, said that reports in the German business press about Lohmann’s arrest, and rumours circulating in the Gulf that he had fled the country, were not true.

ACI Group is a German-based company that entered the Gulf market in 2004 with a multi-million dollar marketing programme for a succession of projects and established a glamorous headquarters – a large converted beach villa that overlooks the Arabian Gulf.

High profile projects in the emirate included tie-ups with F1 racing legend Michael Schumacher and former Wimbledon tennis champion Boris Becker.

The office is still functioning, as Arabian Business discovered when it visited the premises last week. Mr Lohmann was not available for a meeting and has not returned our calls.

A company spokesman mounted a robust defence for ACI, noting that, unlike many other developers who had already fled the country, ACI was still operating and construction work was ongoing. The company’s web site, he said, showed pictures of ongoing construction work that proved work is progressing.

There are 19 projects promoted on the web site, but only seven have “construction updates” that show progress on building sites.

The remainder, which includes the Boris Becker Beach Resort & Tennis Academy in Ras Al Khaimah, have no construction updates on the web site.

ACI said that no refunds were being paid to investors because projects have been postponed, not cancelled, but added that investors were not required to pay additional instalments until construction work restarted.

ACI Real Estate Dubai – ACI Funds Germany and Austria – Investors in Becker, Lauda and Schumacher Towers demand refund

source The National  July 01, 2009

German and Austrian investors are demanding their money back from funds set up for the construction of the Niki Lauda, Michael Schumacher and Boris Becker towers in Dubai.

The investors paid about €150 million (Dh779.7m) into funds to pay for the buildings. The investments would then be repaid from the capital gains.

But the investors said money due in March had not been repaid and they were consulting lawyers to withdraw their money from the funds.

Alternative Capital Invest (ACI), the investment company behind the project, insists it has “solid assets” and the towers will go ahead, according to its managing director, Robin Lohmann.

Mr Lohmann said the money to repay investors was not available because the projects could not be sold as planned due to the market slowdown.

He offered the investors the choice of waiting until ACI’s assets could be liquidated, or the chance to take property assets owned by another company, Falcon International Investment Group, based in Dubai.

But some investors fear that if they accept the Falcon option, they may end up with additional risk and costs.

“Since I do not know the value of Falcon’s properties nor what exactly the liabilities and commitments are according to Dubai law, I am extremely sceptical,” said Hartmut Goddecke, the lawyer for several German investors. “We don’t know what exactly we are buying here.”

According to Martin Kraeter, a German business facilitator based in Dubai, the ownership of Falcon’s assets is unclear, although it has links to ACI.

Falcon only speaks about reservation contracts of different properties but reservation contract is not a purchasing contract,” Mr Kraeter said. “We may end up with shifting Falcon’s risk into investors’ responsibility.”

But Mr Lohmann said: “With this package, we just wanted to show people that we have the ACI assets which are the Boris Becker Tower, the Schumacher Tower and all the rest, and th0at in addition to that we also offer a security package through Falcon of fully paid assets worth about €100m, which is almost the double of what was due in March.”

In Dubai, property buyers who have invested off-plan in apartments in ACI’s buildings are also upset at delays in construction. Mr Lohmann said there had been complaints from the buyers but also delays in their payments to the developer.

Ajman Property Investors File Fraud Case

A group of 20 property investors from Canada, the UK and Pakistan turned up in Dubai yesterday demanding a meeting with the Ajman developer Casamia Star, which they claim has failed to update them on their investments.

The group said they had bought properties in Frankfurt Residence, a yet-to-be built tower in Ajman. Casamia’s general manager, Merzak Gaci, refused to meet the group as they had not made an appointment and they were “rude”. Mr Gaci called police. Two officers turned up but there were no arrests.

The group said they had bought properties in Frankfurt Residence, a yet-to-be built tower in Ajman. Casamia’s general manager, Merzak Gaci, refused to meet the group as they had not made an appointment and they were “rude”. Mr Gaci called police. Two officers turned up but there were no arrests.

The investors then went to the Bur Dubai police station to file a complaint against the company. “The police told us to come back at 7.30 in the morning to file a case for fraud,” Mr Ghulam said.

Afterwards, he said, the group would go to the Ajman Real Estate Regulatory Authority and Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Agency.

Casamia Star was established by the German architect and entrepreneur, Hendrik Hommel. Mr Hommel is currently in Germany and unavailable for comment.

“We thought it was a German company and we trusted the market,” said Farhad Norousi, a spokesman for the investors. “But in February the developer Casamia Star sold its brokerage branch, also called Casamia Star.

 And in June the brokerage told us they have cancelled their contract with the developer, whose director has disappeared and they are no longer responsible”

He said investors did not know what had become of the money they had already submitted.

Mr Gaci said the contract with the developer had been cancelled because of a lack of co-operation, which “means when somebody does not pay you, does not give you the status of your construction”.

He added:

“What will happen to the investors? We all want to know. The investors’ money is in the developer’s account.”

Source The National

ACI Dubai : The Fizzling ACI Towers from Boris Becker, Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher

18.06.2009 – The Fizzling ACI Towers from Boris Becker, Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher

Souce: GoMoPa Berlin

Alternative Capital Invest (ACI), Germany‘s first and biggest mover in offerings of property investments funds in Dubai, went now in a sorrowing financial swirl. Senior head Uwe Lohmann (64) has to fear meanwhile daily that his son and head of Dubai operations, Robin Lohmann (34), has to move his presence in Arabia into a Dubai jail due to financial debts. Huge funds for projected towers with the branding partners Boris Becker, Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher seem to be trickled somewhere in Dubai, the projects appear bankrupt.

The Germany based Financial Intelligence Service http://www.gomopa.net gained from four independent sources in Dubai that Ferrari and Maybach driver Robin Lohmann shortly has been taken in Dubai into custody for one night. The junior chief of ACI had furthermore to deposit his passport with the Dubai authorities. He shall not be allowed to leave the country before financial debts of ACI Dubai are finally settled.

Based on own publication, ACI since 2004 did accumulate EUR 300m (AED 1.5bn) from more than 8,000 private investors in Germany and Austria only. Purpose of the funds was the project development of residential and commercial property in Dubai in a volume of EUR 600m (EUR 3bn).

Up to date, only construction pits with unclear ownership situations are existing. Within the total of seven separate investment funds entities, independent external auditing and control never has been settled. Another managerial from ACI, formerly employed at Dynasty Zarooni, additionally shall have collected huge sums among Arab private investors. Dubai’s public prosecution is in process of investigation against ACI and its entire management due to suspected fraud and embezzlement of funds. The former DZ manager as well as most of ACI’s other managerial meanwhile left the country. Except Robin Lohmann, he now frequently has to show up at Dubai Public Prosecution.

According to ArabianBusiness, Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Authority RERA is investigating as well against ACI due to bounced cheques, fronting and breaking of Dubai’s Escrow Laws. Robin’s father, Uwe Lohmann (operating from Guetersloh, Germany) meanwhile tries to calm down the more than 8,000 German investors, who are waiting since March 2009 without success for a promised front-up profit share of EUR 60m (AED 300m). For June 26, 2009 he initiated an extraordinary general assembly via fax voting.

Even in 2008, many investors signed ACI shares with the expectation to make easily some 12% annual profit with a lot of emphasis. They paid at least shares in the value of EUR 10k (AED 50k) plus a surplus of 5% to ACI. Thus, due to the enormous success of ACI’s pilot investment fund from 2004, which was the first Germany based fund in Dubai over all, with profit returns higher than calculated.

This kind of masterpiece was the newcomer’s “ice breaker” in relations to many German speaking as well as Arab investors. Robin Lohmann received a lot of honors in Dubai as exceptional entrepreneur: He was the first German who received 2008 the “CEO Middle East Award” as well as the “Arabian Property Award”.
And, Robin Lohmann “invented” 2007 the so-called Tower Branding – giving huge investment objects the names of living legends. November 2007, Robin inked with the motorsport legend and airline chief Niki Lauda from Austria his first branding license agreement. Two residential and commercial towers (33 and 30 floors) in Dubai Business Bay shall be named Niki Lauda Twin Towers. Lump sum to be paid from the investor’s funds back in Germany to Lauda, was EUR 1m (AED 5m).

In January 2008, tennis and poker game legend Boris Becker became patron for another planned tower with 23 floors, next to Niki Lauda Twin Towers. Although his branding was related only to one tower, he received from ACI 100% more than Niki Lauda: EUR 2m (AED 10m).
Im Summer 2008, Formula One Driver Michael Schumacher joined as third prominent branding partner – name of “his” project Michael Schumacher Business Avenue with 35 floors. He received EUR 5m (AED 25m).
What a genius move! The media applauded and investors queued up in front of ACI’s offices. Huge funds went into ACI’s accounts and no one did wonder that the concerned HNWIs Lauda, Becker and Schumacher didn’t invest a single penny themselves in “their” tower projects.

Entrepreneur and millions juggler Robin Lohmann jumped with the branding strategy on top of Dubai’s Tower Flip Sales Bubble. “Sales is tremendously increasing”, stated his father Uwe in press releases. But when Dubai’s property bubble did burst in autumn 2008, the free fall for Robin Lohmann couldn’t be stopped. What did he wrong? Why did his projects switch “on hold”, although most of the other projects sustained the crisis? Martin Kraeter (45), Principal, Trustee and Dubai analyst at KLP Group Emirates and living in UAE since 5 years: “Lohmann’s branded towers with the name of prominent people have been very ‘hip’ in Dubai. But Lohmann and his management team closed any sales deal they could get. More or less blind they sold their off plan units to anyone, whoever came across. By this, they often sold units to ‘flippers’.

‘Flippers’ paid with signing of contracts just a down payment of 5 or 10%. If feasible, the project started with the first project step. Before starting the next level, the buyers had been scheduled to pay the next installment, what they didn’t or couldn’t. Because it was their plan to ‘flip’ – means to sell the purchased off plan unit before the next installment due date with a ‘premium’ to the next following ‘flipper’ – themselves. The financial crisis came up and all follow up ‘flippers’ disappeared, being the needed target to make the buck.

Due to the financial crisis and the consequences in lending policies of banks, these terrible speculator models disappeared over night. Serious fonds initiators and developers take at least 20 or 30% down payment so that the off plan buyers keep on track.”

What went wrong now with the fund entities II to V from ACI, to which also the branded towers are belonging?
The reasons gave Senior Uwe Lohmann by himself with a letter to all investors end of May: The fund entities would have been closed and finalized as per 31st of December 2008, due to the negative change of the double taxation treaty between Germany and the UAE. Closing per end of 2008 would enable the entities to pay out profits tax free, by this all projects has been sold out in one move to one buyer end of December 2008. Buyer was a company called YAMA International LLC from Dubai. But YAMA has not been able to pay the contract price in the amount of EUR 100m (AED 500m) because their bank loan and finance agreements failed. Due to that reason, ACI would not be in the position to pay its investors the front up profit share of EUR 60m (AED 300m) as promised per March 2009.

Dubai expert Kraeter values this letter as a Bluff: “It seems for me that the project purchase by YAMA is a fake. This over hasted sale of the construction pits should have been initiated by the specific tax-free situation, ending with December 31st 2008. But this obviously cancelled deal is in my view possibly more the spoofing of inproper usage of investor’s moneys.”

Before 26th of June – the deadline of the general assembly – now one wants to comment on that at ACI.

************

There are some more actual press releases in Germany coming up at the moment:

17.06.09 – http://www.gomopa.info/Pressemitteilungen.html?id=256&meldung=Die-Pleitetuerme-von-Becker-Schumacher-und-Lauda [Translation above]
22.06.09 – http://www.gomopa.info/Pressemitteilungen.html?id=259&meldung=ACI-Dubai-Fonds-inklusive-Lear-Jet-fuer-den-Juniorchef [German]
23.06.09 – http://www.gomopa.info/Pressemitteilungen.html?id=261&meldung=ACI-Dubai-Dr-Schulte-Anwaelte-pruefen-Haftung-von-Boris-Becker-Michael-Schumacher-&-Niki-Lauda [German]

Al Fajer Properties-500 Investors Sign Petition Seeking Dubai Ruler’s Intervention in Dispute with Dubai Developer

Al Fajer Properties DUBAI, United Arab Emirates June 2009

Ebony Ivory Investors Group, 500 international property buyers and investors, have signed a petition requesting Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) and the Dubai Ruler’s Court to investigate the Jumeirah Lakes Towers Ebony Ivory Towers project, involving Al Fajer Properties and its marketing agent Dynasty Zarooni

The petitioners have asked RERA to cancel the Ebony Ivory project and require Al Fajer Properties to provide a full refund, alleging legal violations by the developer, including fake construction photographs and misleading press releases.

“We have paid approximately $140 million and have a signed contract from Sheikh Maktoum Bin Hasher Al Maktoum,” said Moses Oye, spokesperson for the affected investors from the US, Canada, UK, Russia, India, Iran, Pakistan and other nations. “Now, we want our money back.”

The investor group said it is essential for RERA to conduct a comprehensive and transparent investigation to resolve the matter quickly because of the potential damage it may cause to overall investor confidence in Dubai. “We understand that Al Fajer Properties is controlled by a powerful member of Dubai’s ruling family,” added Oye. “However, if our complaints are not treated as per the rule of law, that will damage the reputation of the Dubai government, which we believe has always stood for transparency, accountability and implementation of the rule of law for all.”

Advertisement June 2008 with false construction status
In its complaint, the investor group cited advertisements in a local daily newspaper published in July, 2008 that show construction cranes with Al Fajer Properties logo and a structure rising six floors above ground. The caption read: “Shot on location on 10th June 2008, Ebony Ivory, Jumeirah Lakes Towers.

However, independent media reports have confirmed that the photographs actually showed Al Fajer’s other project, Jumeirah Business Centre Towers.

In reality, the site for Ebony Ivory Towers is merely a hole on the ground with no workers or machinery on site.

The investor group has sought for an explanation from Al Fajer Properties and has raised the issue with RERA on a number of occasions, without receiving a response for the past six months.

Now the investor group is ready to seek further legal action against Al Fajer Properties and Dynasty Zarooni.

-Ends-

Contacts
For Ebony Ivory Investors Group:
Moses Oye, +447956289390
Fax: +442084590202
ebonyivoryinvestorsgroup@yahoo.com

German Version:

500 internationale Immobilienkäufer und Investoren, die der Ebony Ivory Investors Group angehören, haben eine Petition unterzeichnet, in der sie Dubais Immobilienaufsichtsbehörde (RERA) und den Dubai Ruler’s Court auffordern, das Ebony Ivory-Towers-Projekt ( Juemirah Business Centre Phase 2) von Al Fajer Proeprties zu untersuchen.

Die Unterzeichner werfen dem Bauträger Al Fajer Properties Rechtsverstöße wie falsche Baufotos und irreführende Pressemitteilungen vor und fordern die RERA auf, das Ebony Ivory-Projekt aufzulösen und Al Fajer Properties zur vollständigen Rückerstattung zu verpflichten.

„Wir haben ca. 140 Mio. US-Dollar bezahlt und haben einen Vertrag, der von Scheich Maktoum Hasher Maktoum  Al Maktoum unterzeichnet ist”, sagte Moses Oye, der Sprecher der betroffenen Investoren aus den USA, Kanada, Großbritannien, Russland, Indien, Iran, Pakistan und anderen Ländern. „Nun wollen wir unser Geld zurück.”

Der Investorengruppe zufolge ist eine umfassende und transparente Untersuchung durch die RERA unverzichtbar, um die Angelegenheit schnell zu aufzuklären und den potenziellen Schaden, den sie dem Investorenvertrauen in Dubai insgesamt zufügen könnte, abzuwenden. „Nach unserer Kenntnis wird Al Fajer Properties von einem einflussreichen Mitglied der Herrscherfamilie von Dubai kontrolliert”, erklärte Herr Oye weiter. „Sollten unsere Vorwürfe jedoch nicht dem Gesetz entsprechend behandelt werden, würde dies den Ruf der Regierung von Dubai schädigen, die nach unserem Ermessen immer für Transparenz, Rechenschaft und die gleiche Anwendung des Gesetzes für alle eingetreten ist.”

In ihrer Beschwerde führt die Investorengruppe Anzeigen an, die im Juli 2008 in einer einheimischen Tageszeitung erschienen sind. Auf diesen waren Kräne mit dem Logo von Al Fajer Properties zu sehen sowie ein Bau mit sechs Stockwerken. Unter dem Bild stand: „Aufgenommen vor Ort am 10. Juni 2008, Ebony Ivory ( Juemirah Business Towers 7 bis 9), Jumeirah Lakes Towers.”

Unabhängige Presseberichte bestätigten jedoch, dass auf den Fotos in Wirklichkeit  ein von Al Fajer Properties anderes Projekt zu sehen war, die Jumeirah Business Centre Towers 1 bis 5. Tatsächlich handelt es sich bei der Baustelle von Ebony Ivory Towers lediglich um eine Baugrube ohne anwesende Gerätschaften oder Arbeiter. Die Investorengruppe verlangte eine Erklärung von Al Fajer Properties und machte die RERA wiederholt auf die Angelegenheit aufmerksam, hat aber im Laufe der vergangenen sechs Monate keine Antwort erhalten. Nun sind die Investoren zu weiteren rechtlichen Schritte gegen Al Fajer Properties und Dynasty Zarooni bereit.

Die Ausgangssprache, in der der Originaltext veröffentlicht wird, ist die offizielle und autorisierte Version. Übersetzungen werden zur besseren Verständigung mitgeliefert. Nur die Sprachversion, die im Original veröffentlicht wurde, ist rechtsgültig. Gleichen Sie deshalb Übersetzungen mit der originalen Sprachversion der Veröffentlichung ab.

Dubai source Zawya

Sheikh Mohammed had given the investigative team carte blanche – Corruption team makes its case

source The National

An independent team investigating alleged corruption in Dubai companies began laying out its findings in court yesterday, having been given unprecedented powers of scrutiny.

The team, led by Mohammed Mustafa Hussain, was appointed by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, the Ruler of Dubai and Vice President of the UAE, to investigate dealings at the developer Deyaar.

Mr Hussain told the Dubai Court of First Instance that an intricate web of land deals and transactions had created a massive fraud. He was giving evidence in the case of SA and IJ, two former Deyaar employees who stand accused of bribery involving the sale of land.

Both men have been on bail but only SA, an Emirati and former member of the Deyaar board, was present at the hearing, where he was represented by three lawyers.

In one case, the pair allegedly bought a piece of land and engineered its sale to Deyaar days later for almost twice what they paid.

SA, who was also an executive of Dubai Islamic Bank, had bought the land in Dubai Marina for Dh415.8 million (US$113.28m) on September 23, 2007.

Two days later it was sold to Deyaar for Dh800 million. In addition, Mr Hussain alleged, SA made a personal commission of Dh11.5 million.

As Dubai Islamic Bank and its subsidiary Deyaar are both government-owned entities, their employees are prohibited from accepting commissions.

The land deal had been struck between SA and IJ, who “initially claimed they did not know each other”.

However, Mr Hussain said his team had unearthed evidence that the two had been business partners before.

“When confronted about their history, IJ claimed that he was simply acting as the middleman for Deyaar,” said Mr Hussain. IJ had persuaded Deyaar executives that the Dh800 million price represented “an opportunity”.

During his investigation, Mr Hussain could find no one in Deyaar who could account for the doubling in the price of the land.

“The people we interviewed could not even give a single reason for the price increase,” he told the court.

He also provided evidence of a farm and another parcel of land that were sold in Al Ain, allegedly earning another defendant, AA, also a Deyaar employee, Dh73,647 in kickbacks.

Dubai’s public prosecution has charged 10 former Deyaar employees with a range of offences including bribery, forgery and breach of trust, swindling and supplying company secrets to competitors.

Speaking outside court, one of the public prosecutors said that Sheikh Mohammed had given the investigative team carte blanche to look into the Deyaar allegations.

By law, they were allowed to question anyone, and to demand any documents or files. The team reported directly to Sheikh Mohammed.

Sheikh Mohammed publicly stated his firm support for the investigations during an internet question-and-answer session in April.

“These cases are a sign of the Government’s clear interest in improving management of firms and its commitment to principles of proper accountability,” he said. “No one in the Emirates is above the law and accountability.”

There was, he said, “no room for corruption and the corrupt”, adding: “In all corruption cases, people are not only prosecuted and punished, administrative and legal holes that they exploited to commit their crimes are plugged.”

Al Sheikh Deyaar Properties chairman resigns

source Arabian Business

Sunday, 21 June 2009

Deyaar Properties chairman Nasser Al Sheikh has resigned from his post, the Dubai property developer said in a statement on Sunday, without giving a reason.

Al Sheikh was replaced in May as head of Dubai’s Department of Finance after spearheading the launch of the emirate’s $20 billion bond programme in February, a move aimed at easing worries state-linked companies could default on debts.

“The board of directors of Deyaar will convene shortly to consider its ratification of the same,” it said in a statement.

Deyaar did not name Al Sheikh’s replacement.

Al Sheikh remains chairman of Islamic mortgage lender Amlak and is an assistant to the director of the ruler’s court for foreign affairs. (Reuters)

Stripping down the laws

source Kippreport

June 21st, 2009

A Lebanese man in Dubai has been sentenced to one month in jail followed by deportation for wearing a cancer awareness t-shirt featuring a nearly naked Victoria Beckham, reports The National. The Dubai Court of Appeals charged him with offending public decency.

The 28-year-old was reportedly stopped at a bakery in Dubai last year by an Arab man, who questioned him about his t-shirt, which showed a nearly nude Beckham with the slogan “Protect the Skin You’re In.”

The two argued, and after the accused left to change his shirt, the police were called and charged him with three accounts; drunkenness, fleeing the scene of a conflict and offending public decency. The first two charges have since been dropped.

The shirts were designed by Marc Jacobs for a cancer awareness campaign; the accused was working as a brand manager for the Chalhoub Group, which holds the franchise for Marc Jacobs in the region.

Laws regarding public behavior in Dubai came to light when a British couple was arrested for having sex on a public beach last year.

It was followed by media reports earlier this year that claimed that the Dubai Executive Council had launched a campaign against what it considers inappropriate behavior in public. According to the reports, playing loud music, dancing, nudity, kissing, holding hands and being under the influence of alcohol in public will be considered offenses, and may result in jail time and fines.

Wearing revealing clothing in public, including short skirts and shirts that expose shoulders, will also be considered offenses, the council said.

Last week, the British Foreign Office launched a campaign urging British nationals to dress appropriately and respect local customs when overseas on holiday. The office warned that there have been several cases of British nationals being charged with indecent public exposure while on vacation, reported the Telegraph.

Research by the office found that half of all British women who sunbathe topless risk prosecution, and that one in seven men admitted to having had sex in a public place on holiday.

Some of the instructions given include: “Rude gestures in Dubai are considered to be an obscene act and offenders can be prosecuted,” and “topless sunbathing in Abu Dhabi is forbidden and liable to be punished by imprisonment or deportation.”

The latest incident again highlights the struggle that Dubai seems to be facing: being a cosmopolitan city with traditional Islamic laws. With more cases of “public indecency” making headlines, is the emirate trying to prove a point? And will the negative publicity prove to be detrimental to Dubai’s image?

Dubai doesn`t need enemies with friends like Paris Hilton

source Arabian Business Blog

Dubai has spent the past 20 years marketing itself as a luxury holiday destination for wealthy, westernised, European and Asian travellers – work that has paid off with the city becoming a household name in living rooms from Hong Kong to Huddersfield.

Americans, despite direct Emirates flights beginning several years ago to New York, and more recently to San Francisco, Houston and Los Angeles, still don’t entirely grasp the Dubai brand.

All that could change in the next few weeks as global party princess Paris Hilton is in town filming a series of Paris Hilton BFF for music television channel MTV.

Or will it?

So far, Ms Hilton has not worked too hard at breaking down the stereotypical image of a modern Arab state. In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, a popular late night talk show host in the United States, she laughed off suggestions that only her eyes would be visible when dressed for Dubai, but went on to joke that she would be wearing a burkha.

More seriously, and I’m sure much to the annoyance to the generous Dubai people that are hosting her, she said that “they are very strict”, and “the rules are crazy out there”.

She eventually corrected Kimmel by saying that in Dubai “they are a little bit more lenient than anywhere else,” but undid the recovery by saying that she would not wear the perfectly charming little black dress she was wearing on the talk show.

In all, the interview could have been talking about Hilton going to Taliban-ruled Kabul, rather than the Las Vegas of the Middle East, Dubai.

See for yourself and let me know what you think.

Paris Hilton Talks About Her Former BFFs, and Filming in Dubai

Al Fajer Properties Scandal claim emerges amid media blockout

May 28. 2009
source Independent by Heerkani Chohan and PropertyWeek

Fake pictures allegations and a member of the ruling family , Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum, linked to a 429 pound million Dubai property row that has touched nerves across the city.

“Fake” pictures are at the heart of a property scandal that could harm the reputation of the once-booming real estate market in Dubai.

A major property development firm, Al Fajer Properies,  with links to the ruling family of the UAE city-state, and the firm’s marketing agency Dynasty Zarooni, are accused by investors, many of whom are UK citizens, of obtaining millions of pounds through the use of false construction photographs.

On Thursday, after local and regional media had been alerted to the situation by angry investors, news agencies across the city said they were silenced by senior representatives of the Government of Dubai, as orders were issued for reports of the storm to be pulled.

Around 500 property buyers of varying nationalities collectively purchased three planned tower blocks named Ebony 1, Ivory 1 and Ivory 2 in the Jumeirah Lakes Towers area of the Gulf city last year from property development firm Al Fajer Properties, at a total cost of £428 million.

The firm is part of the Al Fajer Group, ran by company president Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher Al Maktoum, brother-in-law to the supreme ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

But at the weekend it was claimed that Al Fajer Properties and its marketing agent Dynasty Zarooni misled their customers into parting with millions of pounds by presenting photographs showing construction of three buildings, purported to be Ebony 1, Ivory 1 and Ivory 2, up to the sixth storey.

In fact the photographs were of buildings on neighbouring plots. Today, the plots on which Ebony 1, Ivory 1 and Ivory 2 are to be built, are empty holes in the ground, as our photographs show.

“I only handed over my money because I was shown property under construction,” said UK-based Ebony and Ivory Investor’s group spokesperson Moses Oye. “That’s my simple gripe. It’s a black and white issue.”

Mr Oye, who has parted with a little over £1 million – 20% of his total purchase price – had made the seven-hour flight from London to Dubai specifically to chair a press conference to raise awareness of the mess, after official government channels failed to take action.

“We have not sought legal representation as yet,” My Oye said, “because we have tried to square this correctly. The next step will be to go legal.”

However, the press conference was cancelled at the last minute by the hotel where it was to be held, citing “health and safety reasons.” The hotel, Dubai’s Mina A’Salam, is owned by Dubai Holdings, a Dubai government-controlled holding company.

“I asked for the reason to be put in writing, but the hotel refused,” Mr Oye said. “So I asked for a suite. But they said they did not have anything. I personally believe that the powers that be cancelled the meeting.” When contacted, Mina A’Salam management did not respond.

The conference was called to highlight a petition signed by the 500-strong investor’s group urging the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera), the government body which oversees the Dubai property market, to force Al Fajer Properties to refund the £86 million that has to date been collected by the firm from investors in the three towers.

After the meeting was axed, news agencies were called to a

neighbouring hotel to be told of the escalating situation. But

when reports began to surface on news websites, news

agencies received phonecalls from senior Dubai

government figures ordering them to be pulled.

“I had written half of the article when I was told by my editor to stop,” said a Dubai-based national newspaper reporter who attempted to cover the story. “The investor’s group have records of payment, and it’s obvious that they have been shafted, but we can’t write about it.”

The lack of progress on the three towers is a source of deep concern for the investors. Many real estate projects across Dubai were put on hold or cancelled as the torrent of easy credit that fuelled rampant development in the city ran dry with the onset of the global financial crisis.

“Whether Al Fajer are still going to construct or not is neither here nor there,” Mr Oye said. “They would not have got my money if they had not shown me fraudulent pictures.” Al Fajer Properties also declined to comment.

Fellow investor’s group spokesperson Atul Patel, who has parted with £600,000 added: “A lot of people would not have bought had they not thought the project was in an advanced stage of construction.”

The pictures also appeared in an advertising campaign in a Dubai-based national newspaper last July, with the caption, “Shot at location on 10th June 2008. Ebony & Ivory – Jumeirah Lakes Towers.” The two page spread included the seals of Dynasty Zaronni and Al Fajer Properties. Dynasty Zarooni also neglected to comment.

The news will further dampen the spirits of the once-booming Dubai real estate market – a vital facet of the city’s economy. Last year a number of senior executives from major property developers across the city were arrested in a high-profile fraud clampdown as the government sought to clean up the property sector.

With it, the global recession has brought a host of new problems. Many construction firms operating in the city, some of which are UK-based, are owed millions of pounds by Dubai property developers struggling with a lack of liquidity.

Among them is UK engineering giant WSP. The firm’s finance director Peter Gill revealed that the firm is owed £28 million by Dubai-based developers, some controlled by the city’s government.

Dubai’s property market has been likened by some to a giant ponzi scheme, where bigger and more grandiose projects were announced in a bid to keep investment rolling in until the financial crisis tamed the city’s galloping development.

At Cityscape Dubai, a major property exhibition held last October, government-controlled developer Nakheel, responsible for the giant palm tree shaped islands off the coast of Dubai, announced it was to build the world’s first 1km high tower. The Nakheel Tower – if ever built – will eclipse the current world’s tallest building, Dubai’s own Burj Dubai.

Meanwhile, state-owned developer Meraas unveiled a mammoth £16.3 billion development called Jumeirah Gardens, to be built in place of an existing residential area in the city.

Today, the plot where the world’s new tallest tower should be under construction is little more than a sun-baked stretch of desert. Work on the Nakheel Tower was halted in January, and work on vast swathes of Jumeirah Gardens has also run aground.

The national media blackout over the Al Fajer case is unusual even in a country gripped by a harsh media law, and a pending new law, that has already drawn criticism for its prohibition of free speech.

A report by the US-based Human Rights Watch group into the UAE’s pending media law, Just the Good News, Please, was published last month. “(The pending law) includes troubling content-based restrictions on speech, draconian fines, and harsh registration requirements,” the report said.

It highlighted a number of the new law’s provisions, branding them: “Not only unlawful intrusions by the government into the right of journalists in the UAE to freely express their thoughts and opinions on any subject of their choosing, but also an unjustified attempt to control the independence of the media.”

Words that will do little to inspire confidence in Mr Oye. “This is going to define my faith in the country,” he said. “If I’m dealt with correctly, great. But at the moment, it’s not going that way. We’re in the witching hour now.”

Heerkani Chohan is the pseudonym of a journalist living and working in Dubai.

Dubai : Shuaa fails to agree bond deal

source Financial Times

A long-running dispute between Dubai-based investment bank Shuaa Capital and the government-linked Dubai Group erupted into the open yesterday as both sides failed to agree terms on a delayed convertible bond issue.

Analysts said the case was raising questions about both the investment bank’s solvency and the willingness of Dubai-related companies to meet their financial commitments as the emirate tries to deal with its $80bn debt.

In October 2007, Shuaa Capital, one of the region’s oldest investment banks, sold a Dh1.5bn ($408m) convertible bond to Dubai Banking Group, a subsidiary of Dubai Group, which is owned by the emirate’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

But on maturity in late October last year Dubai Group declined to convert the shares at the agreed price of Dh6 as the investment bank’s share price fell to Dh2.7 amid the financial crisis. Shuaa’s shares in February fell below par value of Dh1 and have since recovered to yesterday’s close of Dh1.7.

Shuaa has been negotiating with Dubai Group since October, but the deadline for resolution passed on Monday. Shuaa yesterday said it would go through with the 2007 agreement and asked the stock market to issue 250m new shares to Dubai Group, handing it a 32 per cent stake in the investment bank.

Dubai Group, which has been exposed to the real estate and financial services downturn, declined to convert and said it wanted “to redeem the note in accordance with laws”, demanding payment of the Dh1.5bn principal and interest.

At the end of the first quarter, Shuaa’s cash position was Dh400m and shareholders’ equity stood at Dh2bn, leading analysts to question the company’s ability to pay back the bond in cash.

Shuaa said it had been exploring every option to negotiate a resolution, but said the contract gives it the legal right to convert the bond into shares. It therefore does not face any solvency problems, it said.

Dubai Group, which disputes Shuaa’s interpretation, said it would continue to negotiate in the interests of both parties, saying “both companies are important for Dubai”.

The government controlled Dubai Financial Market, on which Shuaa is listed, briefly suspended trading in its shares yesterday and later said it would not issue the new shares to DBG unless both sides had come to an agreement.

Additional reporting by Robin Wigglesworth in Abu Dhabi

Al Fajer Properties-Aufgebrachte internationale Investoren verlangen Ermittlungsverfahren im Rahmen eines 630-Millionen-Dollar-Immobilienskandals in Dubai

June 16, 2009 Dubai

source

Dubai – Vereinigte Arabische Emirate

In Dubai braut sich sich derzeit ein bedeutender Immobilienskandal zusammen.

Nach Angaben der Ebony Ivory Investors Group fordern 500 aufgebrachte Käufer und Investoren des Ebony-Ivory-Towers-Projekts im Wert von 630 Millionen US-Dollar ein umfassendes behördliches Ermittlungsverfahren gegen den Bauträger
Al Fajer Properties und seinen Agenten Dynasty Zarooni Inc.

Irreführende Werbeanzeigen und Pressemitteilungen, Verkauf nicht existierender Quadratmeter und verschwundene Anzahlungen gehören zu den dokumentierten Vorwürfen der Käufer, erklärte Moses Oye, ein britischer Investor und Sprecher der Al-Fajer-Properties-Investorengruppe, der Anleger aus den USA, Großbritannien, Deutchland, Russland, Iran, Indien, Kanada und Pakistan angehören.

„Wir fordern die Immobilienaufsichtsbehörde von Dubai (RERA) und den Hof des Herrschers von Dubai auf, ein Ermittlungsverfahren gegen den Bauträger einzuleiten, das Ebony-Ivory-Projekt zu stoppen und eine Rückzahlung unserer geleisteten Anzahlungen in Höhe von 140 Millionen US-Dollar anzuordnen“, erklärte Oye.

Oye bezog sich auf eine Reihe von gefälschten Baufotos, die im Juli 2008 unter dem Logo von Al Fajer Properties in einer Lokalzeitung erschienen waren. Auf diesen Bildern war ein Rohbau mit sechs überirdischen Stockwerken mit folgender Unterschrift zu sehen: „Vor Ort am 10. Juni 2008 aufgenommen, Ebony Ivory, Jumeirah Lakes Towers.“

In Wirklichkeit seien diese Fotos bei einem anderen Bauprojekt von Al Fajer gemacht worden und beim Ebony-Ivory-Projekt sei im Moment nichts weiter zu sehen als ein Loch im Erdboden, so Oye. „Hätten wir gewusst, dass Al Fajer Properties falsche und irreführende Fotos ausstellt, dann hätten wir nie in dieses Projekt investiert“, fügte er hinzu. „In der Tat haben einige Anleger bereits bei der Staatsanwaltschaft in Dubai Anzeige wegen betrügerischer Darstellung erstattet.“

Im vergangenen Jahr habe die Baustelle nach Aussagen von Oye praktisch keinerlei Fortschritte gemacht. Außerdem hätten die Investoren erfahren, dass der Projektträger rund 250.000 Quadratfuß mehr Fläche verkauft habe, als nach der Baugenehmigung zulässig sind – ein weiterer Hinweis auf potenziell betrügerische Vorgehensweisen.

Und der wichtigste Punkt sei, dass Al Fajer Properties rund 55 Millionen US-Dollar der an Anzahlungen geleisteten 140 Millionen US-Dollar an Dynasty Zarooni Inc. ausbezahlt habe, anstatt sie in ein Treuhandkonto einzuzahlen, sagte Oye. „Wir verlangen unser Geld zurück und wir wollen wissen, warum Al Fajer diese Gelder an Dynasty Zarooni bezahlt hat, anstatt den Bau damit zu finanzieren“, setzte Oye hinzu. „Nach dem Gesetz wird die Unterschlagung von Geldern, die zu Bauzwecken für ein Immobilienprojekt bezahlt wurden, mit Gefängnis- und Geldstrafen geahndet.“

Bisher habe die RERA die Forderungen der Investoren bezüglich einer transparenten Ermittlung und der offensichtlichen Verletzungen der RERA-Bestimmungen und Strafgesetze der VAE zugunsten der Interessen von Scheich Maktoum Bin Hasher Al Maktoum und Al Fajer Properties gänzlich ignoriert, sagte Oye. „Was kann man machen, wenn die vom Herrscher von Dubai mit der Regulierung und Beaufsichtigung der Bauträgerleistung betraute unabhängige Regierungsbehörde in Wirklichkeit an einer Vertuschung beteiligt ist, mit denen die Investoren ihrer Rechte beraubt werden?

Was sagt das über die Sicherheit von Immobilieninvestitionen in Dubai aus?

Wo bleibt die vom Herrscher von Dubai angeordnete Transparenz und Rechenschaftspflicht?

Gelten die Gesetze nicht mehr, wenn Scheich Maktoum Bin Hasher Al Maktoum die Hand im Spiel hat?“

„Al Fajer Properties, das von Maktoum Hasher Juma Al Maktoum, einem Scheich aus einer Herrscherfamilie kontrolliert wird, der die Regierungsagentur als Plattform benutzt, führt die Öffentlichkeit weiterhin mit falschen Berichten über nicht vorhandene Bauarbeiten hinters Licht. w

Wie der jüngsten Pressemitteilung von Al Fajer Properties zu entnehmen ist, seien angeblich 15 Prozent der Bauarbeiten abgeschlossen , während es in Wirklichkeit ein verödeter Bauplatz ohne jegliche Bauarbeiten ist“, erklärte Oye.

In seiner Zusammenfassung des Falles brachte Oye ernste Bedenken über kürzliche Drohungen zum Ausdruck, die einige der Investoren in letzter Zeit erhalten hätten.

Er zitierte sodann Rechtsanwalt Salim Al Shaali, den Vertreter der Kläger in einer wegen betrügerischer Darstellung gegen die Ebony-Ivory-Verkaufsstelle anhängigen Klage.

In einem vor kurzem abgegebenen Interview sagte Al Shaali: „Wir haben volles Vertrauen in das Rechtssystem von Dubai. Ich persönlich garantiere allen Investoren, dass die Regierung von Dubai es nie zulassen würde, dass einige Personen ihre soziale oder amtliche Stellung für illegale Profite missbrauchen und das Ansehen der Marke Dubai als einen in jeder Beziehung sicheren Investitionsknotenpunkt der Region schädigen.

Wir warten auf eine Antwort der Staatsanwaltschaft.“

Die Ausgangssprache, in der der Originaltext veröffentlicht wird, ist die offizielle und autorisierte Version. Übersetzungen werden zur besseren Verständigung mitgeliefert. Nur die Sprachversion, die im Original veröffentlicht wurde, ist rechtsgültig. Gleichen Sie deshalb Übersetzungen mit der originalen Sprachversion der Veröffentlichung ab.

Ebony Ivory Investors Group
Moses Oye, +447956289390
Fax: +442084590202

Comment of the Day – Driven by good faith in the name ACI and its German CEO

Wirtten to 7Stars by James 16. Jun2 2009

Driven by good faith in the name ACI and its German CEO, I have entrusted ACI AED 750,000.00 with the INTENT to purchase an apartment/unit in ACI’s Project PALAZZO ARABIA Al-Furjan.

I have not signed any reservation contract/agreement, much less the Purchase/Sales Contract, since I did not consent to the conditions. Since the project entertains an escrow account with NBAD, I trusted that my funds will be sitting in that account.

In order to have access to information about that, I would have to register the Unit, which I “intended” to purchase with RERA. This would cost another up 3 percent of the offered sales price of some AED 2.6 million.

As per legal advise, I decided not to do that and instead file a very clear-cut criminal complaint based on allegations of potential embezzlement of funds and unjustified enrichment, after the legal department of ACI responded negative to the request of my attorney to refund my AED 750,000.00.

Question: would anyone, who read this comment, know of other formerly interested parties of the PALAZZA ARABIA project of ACI?

Al Fajer Properties – Angry International Investors Demand Investigation in $630 Million Dubai Real Estate Scandal

source Financial Post

Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum of Al Fajer Properties  is giving interviews about thesucess but a major real estate scandal ( Al Fajer Properties)  is unfolding in Dubai as 500 angry unit buyers and investors in the $630 million Ebony Ivory Towers project demand a full government investigation of developer Al Fajer Properties and its agent Dynasty Zarooni , according to Ebony Ivory Investors Group.”

Misleading advertisements and press releases, overselling of non existing space and the missing down payments are among the buyers’ documented complaints, according to Moses Oye, a British investor and spokesperson for the Al Fajer Properties Investors Group having investors from US, UK, Russia, Iran, India, Canada & Pakistan.

“We are calling on Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) and the Dubai Ruler’s Court to investigate the developer, cancel the Ebony Ivory project and compel a refund of our $140 million in down payments,” said Oye.

Al Fajer properties advertisement dubai with false construction status

Oye cited a series of fake construction photographs that ran in a local newspaper in July 2008 with Al Fajer Properties logo. The photos showed a structure rising six floors above ground with the following caption: “Shot on location on 10th June 2008, Ebony Ivory, Jumeirah Lakes Towers.”

In reality, the photos were taken at another Al Fajer site and currently there is only a hole in the ground at the Ebony Ivory project, according to Oye.

Real Situation of Ebony and Ivory Towers June 2009 Developer Al Fajer Properties Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum

“Had we known that Al Fajer Properties was presenting false and misleading photographs, we would never have invested in the development,” he said.
“In fact, some investors have already filed criminal cases for misrepresentation with the Dubai Public Prosecutor.”

In the past year, there has been virtually no construction on the site, said Oye. In addition, investors have learned that the developer sold approximately 250,000 square feet more space than the maximum built-up area allowed by government permit – another indicator of potential fraud selling air.

Most importantly, Al Fajer Properties paid Dynasty Zarooni Inc approximately $55 million of the $140 million collected in down payments that should have been deposited in an escrow account, Oye said. “We demand our money back and want to know why Al Fajer gave those funds to Dynasty Zarooni rather than use them for construction,” continued Oye.

“The law sets a punishment of imprisonment and fines for any person who embezzles payments made for the purpose of construction of real estate project.”

To date, RERA has ignored the investors’ demands of a transparent investigation and the evident violations of RERA regulations and UAE criminal laws in order to serve the interests of Sheikh Maktoum Bin Hasher Al Maktoum and Al Fajer Properties, said Oye.

“What do you do when the independent government agency trusted by the Ruler of Dubai to regulate and monitor the real estate developer’s performance actually participates in a cover-up operation that deprives investors of their rights?

What does that say to the world about the security of real estate investments in Dubai?

Where is the transparency and accountability Dubai Ruler ordered?

Are the laws not applicable when it comes to Sheikh Maktoum Bin Hasher Al Maktoum?” Stated Oye

Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum Al Fajer Properties Dubai

“Al Fajer Properties, which is controlled by Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum, a Sheikh from a ruling family using the government agency platform, continues to mislead the public about their non-existing construction with false reports as evident in their recent press release claiming 15% construction where in reality it is a deserted site with no construction at all.”

Summing up the case, Oye raised grave concerns about the recent threats some of the investors have received and quoted attorney Salim Al Shaali who represents plaintiffs in a criminal case against the Ebony Ivory sales agency for misrepresentation.

In a recent interview, Al Shaali said,

“We have full trust in Dubai justice system. I personally guarantee all investors that Dubai government will never allow a few individuals to abuse their social or official positions for illicit profits and damage the reputation of the brand Dubai as a safe and most secure investment hub in the region.

We are waiting for a reply from the prosecution’s office”

Dubai – UAE: Arbitration cases to touch Dh70 Billion – 80 per cent of them are real estate and construction-related

source Zawya – Business 24/7

Dubai, 15 June 2009

The value of arbitration cases in Dubai has more than doubled to Dh65 billion this year over the past year, and about 80 per cent of them are real estate and construction-related, said a top official from the Dubai International Arbitration Centre (Diac).

“Under the arbitration mechanism, we have for this year alone 140 cases in addition to the 100 cases we had last year. As of March, active cases under examination is worth Dh65bn but I think the number has already increased and the amount of disputes can reach Dh70bn this year,” Dr Hussam Talhuni, Director of Diac, told Emirates Business.

He expects the number of such cases to continue to increase “dramatically” due to the current adverse economic climate.

Disputes under the Diac is different from those lodged in Dubai Courts. Arbitration – a form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) – involves resolution of disputes outside the courts, in which a third party reviews the case and imposes a decision that is legally binding for both sides.

“We are not related to Dubai Courts, we are helping the ministry on a federal level to adopt modern systems for the courts… The increase in the awareness of the importance of arbitration has led to the more than double increase in the number of cases, 75-79 per cent of which are related to property and construction,” Talhuni said.

Unlike litigation cases, arbitration takes shorter period. “We usually finalise more than 60 per cent of the cases by the end of the year,” he said.

Dubai is now looking at speeding up the procedure further to be able to cut down the resolution period in one to three weeks, Talhuni said, adding that the centre is hoping to finalise the ADR mechanism by the end of the year.

Talhuni said the current economic situation requires quick and fast action from all parties to accelerate the process of economic reforms and one of the mechanisms to resolve trade disputes is by providing quick solutions which will lead to the reduction of the number of court cases.

He said the ADR mechanism will create an atmosphere of trust in the business community and will provide the investors, both local and international, the confidence about the efficiency of the UAE courts in resolving commercial disputes quickly and at a lower cost.

“The current system involves litigation, which involved the courts and all the rigid procedures, according to the national law, where a judge will hear the parties and give them years and years of procedures. Whereas in alternative dispute resolution, since they are alternative they aim to provide quicker solutions, in a less expensive process and more peaceful climate for the parties,” he said.

The centre is studying on whether to introduce this “new legal layer of mediation/reconciliation” in the courts. “Under the courts, they have this amicable settlement mechanism but if you compare that to the modern application of ADR, you cannot consider it as part of the modern applications.”

Legal experts say more than 90 per cent of the cases are resolved even before they come to court anywhere in the world. Despite this, Talhuni said, ADR is still much more needed in today’s times. “Mediation is the mechanism that will help parties settle the disputes… wherein maybe each party may give up some part of their rights and accordingly sign a settlement,” he said.

By Karen Remo-Listana

Investors of Indigo Properties’, a Dubai-based developer, are concerned by the developer’s proposal to take over their right

source Business 24/7

Investors of Indigo Properties’, a Dubai-based developer, are concerned by the developer’s proposal to take over their right to shift them to another cluster in one of their projects if they accept their re-pricing offer.

According to the re-pricing offer e-mailed to an investor, the company said it is offering a “considerable” discount [17 per cent] to the investor, reducing the price per square feet to Dh750 from Dh900 on its Indigo Ville project in Jumeirah Village.

Although the company has given a payment plan, it has not given a construction schedule.

“If I accept the re-pricing offer, then they reserve the right to transfer my unit to another cluster. But if I am paying for it, then the choice must rest with me,” an investor said on condition of anonymity. “We have asked the company for a construction update, but we haven’t got any response from them. They need to link payments to construction milestones,” added the investor.

A senior Indigo Properties official told Emirates Business the developer is going ahead with all its announced projects. But as a short-term measure it is offering investors of Indigo Ville the option of switching over to clusters that are currently under construction.

“We are going ahead with all our projects and none of them are cancelled. We are offering revised payment plans to our investors, with Indigo Ville buyers being proposed a re-pricing offer. And for bulk buyers in the project, we are willing to take back 50 per cent of the stock they had bought.”

The company executive said they are not forcing investors to accept the offer, rather they are giving them the chance to switch over to a property that will be completed before theirs. “Those who do not wish to accept this offer can continue with their old contracts. We will build all the projects that we have announced, but our plans have been delayed.”

The developer is currently working on cluster four and six of the Indigo Ville project. Each cluster has 12 to 19 townhouses.

Meanwhile, a number of developers in Dubai have started to offer investors the option to move over to projects that are currently under construction. In February, the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera) had said it expected about 25 per cent of the projects in the emirate to be consolidated.

Where Are The Locals?

Forbes     March 11, 2009

Seven suspects have reportedly been singled out by the authorities, but all of them are foreigners.

Dubai’s anti-corruption probe seemed in full swing Tuesday, after seven expatriate businessmen were reportedly accused by prosecutors of taking part in a $500.0 million fraud at Dubai Islamic Bank. The suspects included three Britons, two Pakistanis, one Turk and one American, according to the Associated Press, raising concerns that local Emiraatis might not be held as fully accountable as the expat brigade.

“Some might say that it’s evidence of the anti-corruption drive, but again, where are the Emiraatis?” wondered Christopher Davidson, a British academic who has authored several books on Dubai and the United Arab Emirates. “There have to be the local sponsors, the line managers, the people whose desk at which the buck stopped.”

The alleged fraud involved a company called CCH, which according to reports was linked to some of the named suspects and may have forged documents to fraudulently obtain funds from Dubai Islamic Bank. The bank issued a statement on Tuesday claiming its exposure to CCH was around $330.0 million and that it was chasing down assets “in a range of countries.”

The former chief executive of Dubai Islamic Bank, Saad Abdul Razak, was reportedly taken into custody last year for questioning, as part of the authorities’ probe of the real-estate sector, but his name does not seem to have made the final list. Press reports claim that a handful of local Emiraati executives have also been interrogated, including Sami al-Hashemi, ex-CEO of real-estate developer Mizin, and Abdul Salam al-Marri, head of the Lagoons development on Dubai Creek.

Although Dubai’s defenders cite the example of a former cabinet minister, named in press reports as Khalifa Mohammad Bakhit al-Falasi, who was sentenced to two years in jail in February for an unrelated case of fraud and embezzlement, the truth is that very few local Emiraatis have been charged or punished as a result of such investigations.

Expatriate businessmen have also accused the Dubai authorities of torture and detention without charge, including Zack Shahin, ex-CEO of Dubai Islamic Bank’s real-estate subsidiary Deyaar Properties, and Shahram Abdullah Zadeh, former manager of developer Al-Fajer Properties. (See “Desert Storm In Dubai.”)

Zack Shahin is still behind bars and still has not been charged, according to one of his American lawyers, James Pitts, who told Forbes that there were around 40 other foreign businessmen in a similar situation in Dubai.

When asked whether Shahin might have provided names to the authorities in exchange for a lighter potential sentence, or exemption from the charge sheet, Pitts replied: “I am certainly not aware of any such arrangement.” 

Read also: Desert Storm in Dubai

Read also : Madoff of The Mideast Denies Charges 

Dubai Dream Villas show their ( not so old) age – Complaints of poor quality dream home owners

source The National UAE

DUBAI // Rama Hariharan wonders if her six-bedroom, Dh5 million (US$1.36m) dream home has begun succumbing to Mother Nature.

Sections of her villa, adorned with custom-made furniture from Indonesia, leak profusely when it rains, leaving behind permanent water stains. The walls in the stairwell leading to the second floor are crisscrossed with small cracks. So too is the building’s sun-baked facade.

“It’s a lovely place,” says Mrs Hariharan, 50, from India, as she gives a tour of her home in The Lakes. “But the construction quality, well, we’re a bit disappointed.”

Mrs Hariharan suspects that her three-year-old freehold villa may be prematurely ageing. She is not alone.

From The Greens and The Springs to The Lakes, homes in some of Dubai’s neighbourhoods built in the early stages of the construction boom have crumbling facades, peeling paint and sagging roofs.

As the nicks and cracks grow, residents’ concerns that their expenses will shoot up after their warranties – usually 10 years for a villa – expire are also on the rise.

Some blame poor craftsmanship, a consequence of rapidly building thousands of villas and apartments during a short time. Others point to poor maintenance standards. Mother Nature has also played a part, the extreme heat taking years off the lives of buildings, construction experts say. Most, however, agree the phenomenon is an eyesore.

“We’re not going to be living here forever, but you want a place that’s a better quality of living,” says Ahmed Ibrahim, 38, an Egyptian who lives with his family in a two-bedroom apartment in The Greens. The neglect “gives you the feeling that the area could be substandard, lower quality”.

He says his family enjoys the community-oriented design of The Greens, notably its swimming pools and barbecue pits.

But the ceiling in his apartment is crumbling away, and the development’s common areas are dotted with sheets of peeling paint. From the outside of the complex, entrances and tan-stuccoed walls appear to be in need of some tender loving care.

The culprit, Mr Ibrahim suspects, is neglect.

“To be fair, the community here, the facilities, they’re OK,” he says. “But from 2005 to today is just four years – that’s a short time to be experiencing these problems. When it comes to maintenance, to the quality of the buildings, there is room for improvement.”

In an e-mailed statement, Emaar, the master developer of these residential complexes, said its properties were “delivered to the strictest quality standards with appropriate warranties in place”.

Residents with maintenance issues can call Emaar’s hotline (800-EMAAR). “The normal signs of wear and tear in buildings,” the statement said, “are easily remedied via the planned preventive maintenance programmes and other remedial measures that are conducted on an annual basis based on the urgency of the requirement.”

But some residents, such as Nagham Hiraki, who with her husband rents a villa in The Springs 15, fear serious structural problems could cause certain parts of home to collapse.

“The place isn’t sound,” says Mrs Hiraki, 47, a Syrian national who says she has had difficulty getting her landlord and property management companies to address problems in the three-bedroom home. “For a while, I was afraid that the garage was going to fall.”

She estimates that she and her husband have paid Dh7,000 for repairs since they moved into their villa three years ago. That sum does not include a large crack that has gradually bisected her living room, or those that run along her stairwell.

The problems have convinced her to move, possibly to the Jumeirah Beach Residence apartment towers at Dubai Marina. “I wouldn’t want to live in this villa even if the rent was Dh10,000 a year,” she says.

In nearby areas, for example The Springs Four, residents also complain about a broad range of issues, including sinking driveways, sagging garages and shoddy plumbing.

In most cases, the structural integrity of villas and apartments in these residential areas is sound, says Martin Seaward-Case, a chartered surveyor who has observed construction in Dubai for the better part of a decade.

If there are issues, he says, they will probably be localised to certain sections of these communities. Because construction was delegated to hundreds of subcontractors with varying experience, it is possible that clusters of villas could have inferior build quality.

Between 150 and 300 subcontractor companies were involved in the building of these areas, he says, “so you’ll have sections that were just built better.” The Springs contains about 4,700 homes, according to the property research firm Landmark Advisory.

If anything, Mr Seaward-Case says, the “tenacious climate is more responsible than the actual build quality” for such issues as chipping paint and leaky roofs. Compared with structures in Europe, Dubai’s harsh weather probably reduces a typical villa’s life expectancy by a decade or more.

“Flat roofs are notoriously difficult to get right in this part of the world,” he says. “It only rains for two days a year, so for the other 363 days of the year it has got to deal with this incredible thermal shock that happens to it during the day.”

According to some property-management firms, the country’s unusually warm climate makes diligent upkeep all the more important.

But this is often neglected, Mick Dalton, general manager of Abu Dhabi-based Marafeq Facilities Management, says. “With the harsh environment here, it needs to be done on a regular basis.”

According to Adrian Quinn, chairman of Essential Community Management, unless the practice of property management in the UAE changes, it will be difficult to perform the necessary upkeep at residential areas.

In his native Australia, management typically repairs nicks and scratches within 24 hours, he says.

“The general philosophy here is that it sits there from month to month to month, until somebody says, ‘Oh, we’re going to repaint the building in another year, so let’s just wait and do it then’. And slowly the building degrades because they don’t have the budget to keep it looking new.”

Not until residents can form homeowners’ associations and vote on maintenance budgets and the awarding of maintenance contracts will the necessary incentives for proper property upkeep take hold, Mr Quinn says. Formal associations would grant them the authority to hire property management companies and collectively pool money to pay for expensive paint jobs and general property care. This would help relieve individuals of financial burdens, especially when home warranties expire.

“At the end of the day, for property, you must put money away for future maintenance,” he says, “because the owner will get hit with the cost of major capital works of repainting the building, caulking, waterproofing, etc.”

Comments:

“It is a disgrace that these developers use the excuse of the weather, to cover their inadequacies . We all know what the weather is like here, they knew before they built the properties, therefore they should build to a standard that can withstand the heat that the UAE gets.
this is the norm all around the world, property is built to suit local weather conditions.

also the excuse of “hundreds of subcontractors were involved” is just not a real excuse they were the master developer, they are responsible for who they use as subcontractors therefore the master developers should stand up and accept their responsibilities instead of blaming others.

as for Mrs Hiraki, to move from a Crumbling Villa to a Crumbling Tower will not solve anything for you. JBR is another example of poor design/construction and greed..”

“Can’t have said it better myself. After having lived in this country for over 15 years, I’ve absolutely no desire to buy property knowing what the substandard quality (or complete absence thereof) of preventative maintenance is like.”

Dubai – Nakheel merges with DMCC property arm

Nakheel the state-owned developer of Dubai’s palm-tree shaped man-made islands, has been merged with the property wing of Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC), a newspaper said on Monday.

source ArabianBusiness

“DMCC’s property-related operations have been integrated with Nakheel to better accomodate current market conditions and optimise resources and expertise,” a DMCC spokesman told The National.

Both companies are owned by Dubai World, which is in turn controlled by the Dubai government.
Nakheel said last month it received funds from Dubai’s government, some of which will be used to pay contractors as it looks to complete projects.

Dubai sold $10bn of bonds to the UAE Central Bank earlier this year to raise funds to support state-linked companies suffering from the financial crisis, and plans to issue another $10bn in bonds later this year.

The emirate’s once-booming real estate sector is suffering a sharp slowdown as prices have collapsed, developers slow or cancel projects and jobs are slashed.

HSBC said in a report on Sunday prices were stabilising but values could fall further.

Slumping demand would drag residential real estate prices in Dubai down between 50 and 60 percent this year from their 2008 peaks, EFG-Hermes said last month. (Reuters)

Dubai – Forbes – Al Fajer Properties Scandal – Battle over the Books – Behind the $870 million ”rescue” of a royal developer

original published Forbes

March 08. 2009 12:36AM UAE / March 8. 2009 8:36PM GMT

On Feb. 3, Al-Fajer Properties, a high-profile real estate development firm owned by the brother in law of Dubai’s ruling sheik, announced a 3.2 billion dirham ($871.2 million) restructuring of its operations. Under the leadership of its new president, Sheik Maktoum bin Hasher al-Maktoum–the eldest son of the company’s owner, and nephew of Dubai’s ruling sheik–the company explained it had liquidated its land bank and sold off its remaining inventory after a “rigorous” business review in order to strengthen its balance sheet.

But sources close to Al-Fajer tell Forbes that the restructuring was actually a wholesale “rescue” from financial ruin as an independent entity, after nearly three years of alleged mismanagement under former manager Shahram Abdullah Zadeh, a flamboyant, Iranian-born businessman who was fired last year and who claims to still be owed at least $1.9 billion by Al-Fajer.

Forbes has consulted documents–including bank statements, company contracts and employee interviews drafted by an auditing firm, which was called in to help conduct the business review last year–that purportedly tell the story of how Zadeh allegedly forged company contracts, kept fraudulent, unaudited accounts and moved money back and forth between Al-Fajer Properties and other companies owned by him.

Sources close to Al-Fajer say the new president, Maktoum, was called in by his father to fix the so-called “financial shambles” after an employee indirectly alerted the elder sheik to the company’s financial situation by requesting cash in early 2008. Documents show a cash balance of approximately $8.2 million when Maktoum arrived, which was restored to $163.4 million to $190 million 60 days later.

The sheik, say sources close to the company, did this by unwinding investments that would have saddled Al-Fajer with massive liabilities–in the “hundreds of millions” of dirhams–narrowly escaping the real estate slide that hit Dubai months later after the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in September. Since then, property prices have fallen an estimated 20% to 25%.

Al-Fajer’s cash balance as of February 2009 was not made available to Forbes, but sources close to the company hint that nearly all of it has been plowed back into construction projects.

Zadeh flatly denies any wrongdoing and claims that the so-called “rescue” was a full-blown theft of a company he had owned and financed alone throughout the course of its existence. Moreover, he denies that the company was a financial mess and claims that his erstwhile partner, Maktoum, breached his trust to take control of a successful firm.

Comment On This Story

“I was the sole investor, and Al-Fajer Properties was my company,” he says. “Sheik Hasher Maktoum has not invested a single dirham into the company; his only contribution has been the real estate license.”

The payment for this license, which cost $82,000, sat in a bank account from the company’s inception in 2004 and was not used as operational capital, Zadeh says.

Zadeh claims that Maktoum, his father and others together “cooked the books” and took control of Al-Fajer Properties while he was detained in jail by the authorities, without being charged, between February and April 2008. After being blindfolded, tortured and interrogated for weeks about unfounded bribery allegations and his operations at Al-Fajer in detail, Zadeh says he emerged from jail only to find a letter demanding he cease all involvement with the company.

Zadeh says he believes his detention was the result of a false report. Sources close to Al-Fajer say that any such claims did not come from them.

The battle has already spilled into the courts, a potentially embarrassing development for a company linked to Dubai’s ruling family. After filing two unsuccessful criminal complaints against Al-Fajer last year, Zadeh said his lawyers filed a civil lawsuit against the company on Feb. 26 at the Dubai Courts, claiming he was still owed $1.9 billion.

Although Al-Fajer Properties is said to have filed a criminal complaint against Zadeh in late February, alleging fraud and embezzlement of funds, the company’s lawyer would not confirm this. “I am aware of no suits against me,” Zadeh says.

Zadeh does not deny moving funds between Al-Fajer and other companies he owns, but claims that he put the money into the company’s account in the first place and later took it back as his “investment.” He said that no money was missing, though he admitted there had been no auditing of the company accounts because the firm was understaffed and had big ambitions.

Sources close to Al-Fajer also confirm that no money appeared to be missing; Zadeh is said to have made up the balance of withdrawn funds with later payments back into the firm.

The corporate tussle casts no direct shadow on the reputation of Dubai’s ruling family, even though Al-Fajer’s operators are one degree removed from Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. But it’s another example of the dark side of Dubai, one more blow to its image as a spectacular hub for global investment. After recently being forced to borrow $10 billion from the United Arab Emirates’ central bank in Abu Dhabi to help its enterprises pay short-term debts (see “Dubai’s Jolt Back To Reality”), Dubai is bracing for more bad news as its gross domestic product growth plunges from 8% or so in 2008 to an expected 2.5% this year.

read more about…

Dubai : A British Pilot of Emirates Airlines accused his british wife of adultery – Dubai police arrested Sally Antia

source DailyMail UK

The British mother accused of adultery in Dubai was left to languish in jail without a lawyer and without anyone knowing where she was after she was arrested at a hotel with her alleged lover.

Sally Antia, a 44-year-old businesswoman, was arrested for breaching the emirate’s strict morality laws on May 2.

It was only after her first court appearance was publicised a week ago that close friends realised what had happened to her.

Friends claim her husband Vince Antia tipped off the police about her adultery.

Mrs Antia led a busy expatriate social life, but it appears most of her friends had no idea she was having an affair. Any who did seemed reluctant to talk about the scandal and the events that led to her arrest at the five-star Radisson Hotel.

Mrs Antia, who has already pleaded guilty to the offence, is due back in court on 

Tuesday, alongside her alleged lover Mark Hawkins, who has entered a plea of not guilty.

Yesterday a friend of Mrs Antia’s told how people in her expat circle had become concerned after she failed to appear at parties and they could not contact her.

The friend, who did not wish to be named, said: ‘Sally disappeared off the scene a month ago and no one had any idea where she had gone.

‘She led an active social life and suddenly no one could get in contact as her mobile was switched off and there was no answer at her home. We assumed she might have gone back to England to visit. None of us had any idea she was in jail until we read about it in the papers.

‘She was in jail for 23 days before anyone could get help for her. Consequently she wasn’t represented in court a week ago, and didn’t have a lawyer to argue the case for bail.’

Pilot Mr Antia, from Lincoln, is believed to have told police that his wife was seeing another man before their divorce had come through – a crime in the United Arab Emirates.

Yesterday there was no answer at the couple’s £1million home where Mr Antia, 48, has been looking after the couple’s two daughters, aged 13 and 11, since his wife’s arrest.

The house is situated in a cul-de-sac on the exclusive Meadows estate, which is close to the Dubai Marina and popular with expat workers.

Neighbours were shocked to hear Mrs Antia was in prison. One said: ‘I can’t believe it. I haven’t seen her around for a while and often he’s away flying. We sometimes see them both with their children.’

Mr Antia, who works for the Emirates airline, was said to be distraught as he had never intended his wife to be imprisoned.

His lawyer, Alexandra Tribe, said: ‘He is horrified all this has come out and doesn’t want to comment. He wants to keep as much privacy as possible.’

Yesterday at their large Victorian house in Winsford, Cheshire, Mr Hawkins’s estranged wife Helen, 35, spoke for the first time about her husband’s imprisonment.

She said: ‘We are in the process of getting divorced but we still live together. It’s not as if he sneaked off without my knowing.

‘Of course I knew he was going over to Dubai. I don’t have a problem with it. I think this is the second time they have met. He has known her for about four years.’

Despite being told her husband could face up to 12 months’ imprisonment, when asked if she was going to visit him in jail, she smiled and shook her head, saying: ‘No.’

Mr Hawkins, 44, who has six children, married Helen in 2005 after getting divorced from his first wife. He met Mrs Antia through an internet auction, when he sold her some Turkish artefacts four years ago and kept in touch after discovering they were both Liverpool football fans.

The construction projects manager visited Mrs Antia after she invited him to Dubai – she has already admitted in court that she paid for his airline ticket.

Mrs Antia’s lawyer was only appointed on Friday and because it is the weekend in Dubai on Friday and Saturday was unable to visit her in jail.

Mrs Antia, who works for a corporate entertainment firm, is being held in the women’s section at the jail attached to Bur Dubai police station. Mr Hawkins is in the men’s section.

The couple, who had spent six days together, were arrested at 2.30am as they left the hotel. Police were lying in wait for them.

Mrs Antia was one of the so-called ‘Jumeirah Janes’ – expat wives who frequent Dubai’s shopping malls buying designer clothes, relaxing in spas, and holding drinks parties at their luxury villas. The name derives from the glamorous Jumeirah beach area.

The Antias have lived in Dubai for 14 years after leaving Hale, in Cheshire. They employ a live-in maid as a housekeeper, who can also look after the children, and a gardener looks after the grounds and swimming pool.

Under Emirates law, the maximum punishment for adultery is a year in prison followed by deportation.

Mrs Antia is accepting visits from her husband to keep in touch with her children.

Clouds over Dubai – Petitions – Demonstrations: Dubai Homeowners go on offensive

source TheNational

DUBAI // In an increasingly familiar display of discontent with the property market, two dozen residents of Discovery Gardens gathered yesterday to petition for more transparency and better property management services.

Homeowners in the community pay annual service charges of Dh30 (US$8.17) per square foot, among Dubai’s most expensive, but accuse its developer, Nakheel, of not fulfilling its building maintenance and service obligations.

Their complaints include broken door locks, frequently clogged toilets and unstable balconies, and slow repair service. Many also say they have not received apartment title deeds, which verify ownership, despite purchasing their units months ago.

“We want to make it very clear to Nakheel that if they don’t fulfil their agreement as to what is stipulated on their turnaround times for maintenance, then we want our money back,” said Michael Aldendorff, 39, an apartment owner in the 50,000-resident community who helped organise the demonstration.

“Either they serve us the next year for free, and they improve their maintenance substantially, or they give us back the money that we’ve already paid in maintenance fees.”

The group plans to get 400 signatures for two petitions to be delivered to senior officials at Nakheel and Tamweel, the country’s largest home lender by volume which has financed purchases at Discovery Gardens.

In the other petition, homeowners are demanding breakdowns of Dh32,000 in fees that have been added to their expenses but not clearly explained by Tamweel.

“Till now, I really don’t know which fees are for what – there’s absolutely no transparency,” said Doaa al Ghamrawi, 32, an Egyptian who purchased a one-bedroom flat financed through Tamweel.

Officials at Nakheel and Tamweel could not be reached for comment yesterday.

But in an e-mail sent on Thursday, a Nakheel spokeswoman said the responsibility for title deeds was not Nakheel’s but that of the building owner. “Nakheel, however, is assisting building owners in facilitating the registration of the titles with the Dubai Land Department,” she said.

She said the company had reviewed the existing service fee structure “to take advantage of recent reductions in cost of services” and that homeowners could expect a reduction.

Asked about the deficiencies in services alleged by residents, the spokeswoman said: “Nakheel is committed to providing the best possible service to all our customers. We have a 24 hour customer service call centre for residents, and we endeavour to address service requests in a timely manner.”

The spokeswoman, who declined to be named for unspecified reasons, did not give further details about the reductions.

Juergen Schmidhofer, a 41-year-old German flat owner in Discovery Gardens, said his maintenance and cooling fees were unjustifiably high, about Dh2,000 a month, for the quality of service he receives.

“Why don’t they use a normal electrical meter like they do in Germany to determine what you pay?” he said. “That would save us all money and energy.”

Meanwhile, Flo Weisweiler, 28, a German national who rents a one-bedroom flat in International City, said months of complaining by residents had essentially yielded nothing from Nakheel, the community’s developer. “We’re not asking them for miracles here,” he said. “We just want basic maintenance, security, proper paint on our walls.”

Hallways and façades in the 60,000-resident complex were crumbling and besmirched by dirt, he said, while odours from a nearby sewage-treatment plant continued to permeate the area. Municipal and federal rules were also not enforced, evidenced by the scores of labourers moving into studio flats or residents smoking in such communal areas as elevators or hallways.

“We told Nakheel that a lot of people smoke inside buildings, in the elevators, and that they set off alarms,” Mr Weisweiler said.

“We asked them to put up no-smoking signs, but they said they didn’t have a budget for that.”

In Jumeirah Lake Towers (JLT), Paul Vincent wonders why he and other homeowners are asked to pay high maintenance and service fees when basic amenities have yet to be built. Despite trying on several occasions to obtain a breakdown of the Dh25,000 in yearly fees, there has been no response from JLT’s master developer, Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC).

“You can’t go out in the night-time because there is no street lighting and no sidewalks,” said the 32-year-old Briton. “It’s still a construction site here – no supermarkets, no shops – you’re basically confined to your apartment.”

“We really don’t know what we’re paying for, so what we want to know is where this money is going, bearing in mind that we already pay electric and water separately. The only formal channels we have to communicate with officials in the development is what’s indicated on DMCC’s website.”

But Bryan Wilson, the executive director for property management at DMCC, said the company “had been completely transparent with all our fees.”

Some developers have launched programmes recently to improve customers service. Deyaar, which expects to deliver 3.6 million square feet of finished units in 2009, has introduced a newsletter for property owners and made its website more user friendly.

Still, many residents appear unappeased.

Softening rents have persuaded growing numbers to relocate to higher-end communities with better reputations in residential management. Others are pursuing a collective-bargaining approach, such as the Jumeirah Beach Residence homeowners group. They and other grassroots groups have banded together to call for transparency from authorities and more say over community management decisions.

Authorities have also sought to more thoroughly intervene in the ailing real-estate sector, most notably with the increasingly active role of Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency, or Rera. But falling property values and expected population declines, by as much as 17 per cent in Dubai this year, according to a March EFG-Hermes report, may require bolder intervention.

“My feeling is, looking forward, the Government is going to have to step in and take a bigger regulatory role in this market, because it has become uneven between different parts of Dubai,” said Hafed al Ghwell, the director of external affairs at the Dubai School of Government.

This may mean a painful but necessary break with Dubai’s long-standing preference for managing communities from a hands-off, private-sector-led approach, he said, mainly because “the private sector doesn’t run these things for any larger goals than making profit.”

“If you’re running your own company, you’re not really worried so much about the public good,” he said.

RERA Dubai freezes developer escrow accounts

source TheNational

May 28. 2009

The Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) has frozen the escrow accounts of some property developers as it awaits assurances that construction is progressing and that all homes sold have been registered with the Dubai Land Department.

This is the latest measure by the authority to safeguard the interests of property investors as the market grapples with a shortage of lending and declining property prices.

Marwan bin Ghalita, the chief executive of RERA, said some developers needed to provide technical reports to the authority’s trust account department detailing the progress of construction before they can withdraw money from the accounts.

“There can be no withdrawal until they have completed the technical report,” he said.

“Payment needs to be linked to construction progress. They also need to prove to RERA that they have registered investors rights with the Land Department.”

Mr bin Ghalita would not say how many accounts had been frozen. RERA introduced the escrow account law in February last year.

Dubai: Petitions over Petitions – and no Response – The sheikhdom`collapsing property market

source MaktoobBusiness

British government is being asked to help UK investors in Dubai who fear losing millions of dollars in the sheikdom’s collapsing property market.

A group of investors based in the UK have sent a petition to Prime Minister Gordon Brown asking him to intervene in what they claim are “harmful real estate practices” in the United Arab Emirates.

“We as investors have recently discovered the blatant embezzlement of our money by unscrupulous developers,” the petition, seen by newswire Zawya Dow Jones, says. The petition was referred by Downing Street to the Foreign Office.

“We have been contacted by individual investors,” a spokesperson for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office told Zawya Dow Jones. “The FCO takes this matter seriously.”

A near 50 percent fall in real estate prices in some parts of Dubai has spurred a rash of increasingly ugly real estate disputes between developers and investors. The industry accounts for 30 percent of the emirate’s economy.

The Dubai Land Department estimates that British investors own property worth 4.7 billion dirhams ($1.3 billion) in the emirate. British buyers now account for 12 percent of international property investors in the emirate, behind Saudis and Indian buyers, according to regional investment bank EFG-Hermes.

The involvement of the British government on behalf of disgruntled property buyers will further damage the reputation of Dubai as it struggles to clean up its financial image and attract foreign investment that’s vital for its economy.

The Foreign Office spokesperson said that while the British government would advise investors on how to resolve disputes “ultimately this is a legal matter between the interested parties”.

Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Agency, the government watchdog, did not respond to written questions from Zawya Dow Jones, but Thursday said it plans to set up new “real-estate communities” to increase transparency. 

British national Nick Jasani is one of a group of investors who is lobbying parliamentary representatives to put pressure on Downing Street to intervene in the rising number of disputes on their behalf.

Jasani, who bought a commercial unit from a developer in Dubai’s Business Bay district for 2 million dirhams in early 2007, is worried because construction at the project hasn’t started, even though he’s already paid 640,000 dirhams or 30 percent of the unit’s value.

He said the Dubai-based developer is still demanding payment installments even though they’re not working on the project.

A letter seen by Zawya Dow Jones and sent by a number of individual investors to Members of Parliament states that “even though projects have no hope of going ahead due to the current financial climate, the money (investors) they have put down may not be refunded.”

As the bottom falls out of Dubai’s once-soaring property market, developers are scrambling to respond. Many are being forced to cancel or delay projects amid falling sales and property prices.

Last month, a report by investment bank Morgan Stanley said the United Arab Emirates is delaying or canceling real-estate projects worth more than $260 billion. An earlier HSBC report said Dubai is delaying or canceling almost 60 projects worth $75 billion.

Amid growing uncertainty about whether they’ll see their money again, investors are organising themselves to take on the emirate’s sometimes unscrupulous developers and convoluted real estate regulations.

This week a group of more than 100 investors delivered a petition signed by more than 350 investors to Dubai developer Nakheel’s office urging the firm to reschedule payment plans for villas on Palm Jebel Ali because of delays.

This followed a petition to Emaar Properties, the Middle East’s largest developer, requesting the cancellation of three of its projects.

Nakheel did not respond to questions from Zawya Dow Jones.

“There are certainly a number of investors who seem to have claims with merit. Others simply have been caught out by a falling market and insufficient contractual protection,” said Matthew Hooton, head of real estate in the Middle East for law firm Ashurst.

Al Fajer Properties – Comment of the Day

To 7Stars from Court Expert May 26. 2009

1. Under UAE Law, Article 69, the presiding Judge MUST appoint an expert/auditor to look into the historical records of the company from the first day of establishment. The expert will rely on evidence and facts only. It is a very simple task. Any party who is afraid of the truth will try to block the court from appointing an expert auditor to examine the company account.

2. In this case, where the Iranianian Plaintiff had been detained illegaly for a period of 60 days without any charges, and in violations of a series of UAE Laws his rights have been deprived by the authorities, which indicate the facilitating the take over of the company by the sheikhs raises serious questions about the involvement of the various authorities as potential partners in crime.

3. The current false claims filed by the sheikhs in police are a tactic used to mislead the public/ court and to try to pressure the judge to close the lawsuit against the sheikhs. Although sometimes these tactics work, but normally it can backfire especialy if the other party can provide evidence that it is a false case. Which will result in a criminal prosecution of the sheikhs for creating false cases.

4. In my 25 years experience of complaex financial cases where I have been appointed as an expert , I can give my personal view that if FOR ANY REASON the judge does not appoint an auditor expert with a crystal clear mandate to look into the company records and determine who has invested capital in the company and what is the contribution (IF ANY) of the sheikhs, and hence determine who is the true owner of the company. Then I can conclude that the sheikhs have used their influence to close the case.

CONCLUSION: IF THE JUDGE DOES NOT APPOINT AN EXPERT AUDITOR AS PER THE LAW, THEN DUBAI JUSTICE SYSTEM IS QUESTIONED AND THE RULE OF LAW IS NOT APPLIED TO SHEIKHS.

Al Fajer Properties Sheikh plans counter claim

source Zawya (AFP)

DUBAI, May 25, 2009 (AFP) – A Dubai sheikh being sued by an Iranian businessman over 1.9 billion dollars in property investments plans to file a counterclaim demanding compensation for losses, his lawyer said on Monday.

Shahram Abdullah Zadeh, the former chief executive of Dubai-based developer Al-Fajer Properties, filed the initial lawsuit against the firm and  Sheikh Hasher Maktoum bin Jumaa al-Maktoum, in February, claiming he was the sole investor and real owner of the company.

“We have requested time to file a counterclaim to demand compensation from Shahram Zadeh,” lawyer Samir Jaafar told AFP following a fourth hearing in the case on Monday.

Zadeh accused the defence of “running away from responding to the lawsuit” against Sheikh Hasher, a brother-in-law of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.

He said Sheikh Hasher was registered as owning Al-Fajer PropertiesAl-Fajer Properties
Al Fajer Properties, because being a foreigner he could not register it under his own name.

He told AFP his defence had requested the appointment of an auditor to trace capital inflows into the company, and said despite claims that he was just an employee he never took a salary or had an employment contract.

“He was supposed to earn a share of profits made under his management. But the company did not make any profits,” Jaafar responded.

Al-Fajer Properties, which since February 2009 has been run by Sheikh Hasher’s son, Sheikh Maktoum, filed two complaints with Dubai police in February and March, accusing Zadeh of embezzling 114 million dirhams (31.06 million dollars).

A representative of Zadeh’s lawyer, Salim al-Shaali, called the two claims false and said a complaint about them has been lodged with the public prosecution.

Zadeh is demanding the recovery of all assets of Al-Fajer PropertiesAl-Fajer Properties
Al Fajer Properties, estimated in the lawsuit at seven billion dirhams (1.9 billion dollars).

The judge adjourned Monday’s hearing to June 17.

Al Fajer Properties – Dynasty Zarooni – Investors Petition – 500 signatures

Al Fajer – Ebony & Ivory – Petition – Ordered to Pay 500 Million

Dubai and Abu Dhabi: Be careful with cheques, police warn

source TheNational 
May 25. 2009

Bank customers in UAE must be careful while writing and signing cheques to avoid penalties that can include jail, according to Abu Dhabi Police.

Speaking yesterday at a banking workshop, Lt Col Abdulwahab al Hosani, head of investigations at the capital police section, said banks often make customers sign blank cheques when they apply for loans in a bid to speed up applications.

“Some people are in a hurry to get the loan to buy a car or property, so they sign without even knowing the conditions”, said Lt Col al Hosani. “Some banks would then issue monthly cheques for that person, which he or she cannot pay, and result in a number of bouncing cheques. A person could go to jail because of bounced cheques.”

Ismail al Bloushi, a senior official at the UAE Central Bank, said there were fewer returned cheques this year. When the economy was booming people used cheques more.

In the past four months, out of 9,742,073 cheques issued, almost six per cent were returned, less than last year, police say.

The bank will try to resolve the issue if a cheque bounces, and refer it to police if they fail. The police may also try to find a solution before going to court.

The Central Bank closes accounts with more than four returned cheques a year, and keeps a blacklist of customers with a history of bouncing cheques.

Britons face losing savings as Dubai property market collapses

source Telegraph UK  23 May, 2009

Britons who invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in unbuilt property during Dubai’s boom years face losing the money after a collapse in the market.

An 800-strong group of investors, from individuals who put deposits on holiday flats to property brokers, says hundreds of millions of pounds is at risk.

Work has slowed or stopped on swathes of building sites, including on a second “Palm Island”. The city was planning a series of artificial peninsulas in the shape of palm trees packed with seafront holiday villas, but only one is finished. 

Of all the world’s property crashes, Dubai’s has been among the most spectacular. According to an estimate from Morgan Stanley, projects worth £165 billion have been delayed or cancelled across the United Arab Emirates. Prices in Dubai have fallen by more than 40 per cent since September.

As prices soared, many investors bought off-plan, either because it was cheaper, in the case of small-time buyers looking for a home in the sun, or because they could “flip” or sell on for a quick profit without ever having to pay the full value.

Investors on the end of a chain of “flippers” have been hit particularly hard as prices fell while building was put on hold. But even those who bought from developers now face the dilemma of whether to keep paying or cut their losses.

The situation has been made worse by local authorities which are revising rules on repaying money for property bought “off-plan” which could mean investors cannot get their full investment back.

Adam Tordoff, a self-employed businessman from Sheffield, has already used his life savings to pay £150,000 towards a £500,000 villa and is facing demands for further instalments even though it has not been built.

“We just want to get our money back and get out of it,” he said. “The next best thing would be to have something actually built rather than the money going into thin air.”

Nick Jasani, from St Albans, bought two shops off-plan as an investment, paying a deposit of £100,000. He believes there is little chance of them being built but the project has not been cancelled enabling him to reclaim his money.

“I am totally fed up,” he said. He has written to the British government asking it to intervene.

The Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Authority has drafted new rules under which investors who pull out of contracts are refunded on a sliding scale, depending on how much has been built. But developers are still entitled to 30 per cent of the money paid even if nothing has been built at all, giving them an incentive to claim projects are still viable.

Nigel Knight, a spokesman for the investors’ group, said its members had bought property valued at around £1 billion, of which almost a fifth had already been paid over.

RERA is preparing further revisions. It may also order 27 projects to be cancelled with full refunds – if the money is left.

In some cases, deposits were used to buy the land, a practice now banned, while Mr Knight alleges some developers were using money paid down for one development to buy land for new projects.

RERA did not reply to questions but Alexis Waller, a lawyer at the Dubai offices of legal firm Clyde and Co, said it was trying to strike a balance between developers and purchasers.

She said many investors signed contracts which did not specify what would be built when. By law developers have to start work within six months of registering projects, but many investors signed contracts obliging them to keep up instalments even if developers failed to do so.

“Investors signed up to payment schedules that were in no way linked to milestones,” she said. “That’s how the market worked here, and purchasers didn’t query it because they were making so much money from property. It’s become an issue because they are no longer making money.”

Al Fajer Properties – Dynasty Zarooni – Ebony Ivory case – Dubai Court grants bail to Kabir Mulchandani

source GulfNews May 21, 2009

Dubai: Dubai Public Prosecution has granted bail to a senior executive of a real estate company who is being interrogated over alleged financial irregularities, Gulf News has learnt.

“The Dubai Public Prosecution granted bail to Dynasty Zarooni Real Estate’s Chairman Kabir Mulchandani. yesterday, but the interrogation continues over his alleged fraud and swindling charges,” a senior public prosecutor told Gulf News on Thursday.

Lawyer Eisa Bin Haider confirmed that his client was released on bail on Thursday.

The Case Dynasty Zarooni – Al Fajer Properties
Jumeirah Business Centre 7,8,9 -
Ebony Ivory Towers – Jumeirah Lake Towers

The Public Prosecution has been questioning Kabir Mulchandani., an Indian, and the firm’s president, an Emirati national, Hilal Al Zarooni, over alleged fraudulent charges.

Salem Al Sha’ali, the legal representative of investors who were reportedly swindled, said earlier some of his clients lodged nearly 30 complaints worth millions of dirhams against the suspects.

More about this case Dynasty Zarooni - Al Fajer Properties ( Jumeirah Business Centre – complaining investors) from the past

Dubai courts are suddenly finding themselve flooded with cases

source KippReport

Thanks to the credit crunch the number of trade disputes at the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCI) doubled in April 2009, reports The National. And the Dubai International Arbitration Centre (DIAC) received 40 trade dispute cases last month, compared with 20 a month earlier, taking the total number of cases in the first four months of the year to 80.

According to the DCCI, there were only 28 arbitration cases in the whole of 2008.

The DCCI legal services department received 156 cases of business mediation in April 2009, and 322 cases in the first four months of this year as compared to 182 cases for the same period last year, an increase of 80 percent.

The DIFC (Dubai International Finance Centre)-LCIA (London Court of International Arbitration), a joint arbitration centre formed in 2008, has also reported seeing an increase in the number of arbitrations in 2009. It has confirmed that it is increasing the number of case handlers to deal with the increasing caseload.

But it’s not just the arbitration courts which are being inundated; 520 cases have also been registered with Dubai’s Property Court this year. Chief Judge Mohammed Yousuf Sulaiman, deputy director of Dubai Courts, told Emirates Business last week that the court has already passed judgment on 145 property-related cases.

The Dubai Property Court was set up in September 2008, and will be getting a mediation centre soon. According to Sulaiman this will reduce the number of cases going to court. “In the mediation centre, there will be a panel of real estate experts who will screen cases and try and resolve them before they are passed to the court,” he said.

According to a recent report from Norton Rose, an international legal group, over 1,000 disputes have also been lodged with Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera) in relation to delayed or cancelled projects, and the centre reportedly resolved 95 cases during March 2009.

And it seems the number of cases is set to rise further.

The report says that in the past, contractors and consultants were reluctant to take action against developers in the region for two reasons. Firstly, the major developers in Dubai had a large number of significant projects on their books in which contractors were keen to remain or become involved. And secondly, many large developers are wholly or partially state-owned, and there was a perception that taking action against them might limit a company’s future business opportunities in the region.

But now, following numerous project cancellations and suspensions, cash-strapped sub-contractors are being forced to take action against main contractors in an effort to recover outstanding sums.

And, with investors and developers both defaulting on agreements, going to court seems like the only way to resolve the differences.

The rising number of legal cases will prove to be an acid test for Dubai’s legal institutions and frameworks, says Norton Rose, particularly with regards to the speed and efficiency of the dispute resolution processes, and in respect of the “effectiveness and enforceability of the judgments or arbitral awards obtained as a result of those processes.”

Will Dubai be able to pass the test?

Middle East’s rich and powerful may not be beyond the law any more

source Times UK May 22, 2009

When a crime is committed in the Middle East and nobody is punished, invariably the explanation is that the rich and powerful have proved once again that they are beyond the reach of the law.

For years the shady activities of Gulf sheikhs, powerful ministers and rich businessmen have been swept under the carpet. But something profound could be changing in the Arab world.

Thanks in part to the advance of technology, satellite news channels and internet blogs, the elite are no longer shielded from public scrutiny. Now they may also have to answer to the law.

First was the case of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a brother of the President of the United Arab Emirates, who was filmed apparently torturing a business associate. The footage was smuggled out of the country and aired on television last month. The incident caused a diplomatic spat with Washington and the sheikh was detained while the authorities investigated.

Now we have the case in Egypt of Hisham Moustafa, a businessman and member of Cairo’s elite being sentenced to death for ordering the murder of Suzanne Tamim.

The actions could give renewed hope to others seeking justice in the region, like the family of Martine Vik Magnussen, the Norwegian student who was murdered in London last year. Police want to question Farouk Abdulhak, the son of an Arab billionaire, who left Britain soon after the murder in Mayfair and is now in Yemen.

Questions and Answers with the Dubai Land Department

Source Zawya

There has been considerable debate in the real estate sector following the issuance of Law No 9 of 2009 amending Article 11 of Law No 13 of 2008 on the Interim Register in the Emirate of Dubai . This law concerns specifically the issue of termination of sale and purchase agreements (SPAs) for off-plan units and the damages payable.

Mohammed Kamal, Head of Real Estate-Middle East at Lovells’ Dubai office, recently met with Emad Farouq, Senior Legal Counsel at the Dubai Land Department (DLD)
and Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA).

Below is a summary of the question and answer session with Emad Farouq.

Law No 9 of 2009 is now in force. Can you please explain the main implications of this law and how it affects the termination of SPAs for the sale of off-plan units?
This law seeks to impose a new regime for the termination and payment of damages for SPAs for the sale of off-plan units which will apply retrospectively to all prior SPAs. It will amend the provisions of Article 11 of Law 13 which previously stated that upon termination the maximum damages payable to a developer would be 30% of monies paid to date.

The law will also override the administrative circular which was issued by the DLD
in 2008.

Under Law 9, the developer will be entitled to damages strictly according to the progress of construction for the project regardless of what has been agreed in the SPA. There are 5 categories of damages ranging from no damages (i.e. developer will refund all monies received), in cases where RERA cancels the developer’s project, to entitlement to retain all monies received and recover any shortfall if the developer has completed 80% or more of the construction. The intention behind the law is to create a balanced and fair mechanism for the termination of SPAs and assessment of damages. The vast majority of SPAs and arrangements in the market are either vague or unfair, or both. Therefore it was absolutely essential to intervene to provide certainty in the real estate sector going forward.

Can you explain the developer’s obligations under Law No.9?

Generally the developer is obliged to issue notices for termination of SPAs through the DLD
will assess the merits of the case and then decide on whether the developer is justified in terminating the SPA and will also assess the status of construction of the project in order to identify which category of damages will apply.
It is important to note that although a developer may be entitled to resell a unit, it must account to the purchaser for any surplus monies it receives once it has received any damages it is entitled to i.e. the developer cannot be unjustly enriched.

Under Law No 13 of 2008, there is a requirement for all sale and purchase agreements to be registered by 30 October 2008. Has this deadline been extended?

Yes, the deadline has been extended but will be confirmed through the Executive regulations which are being reviewed. Currently, the DLD will allow registration of SPAs after the deadline, provided there is a valid reason for the delay.

What is the Land Department’s view on the recent Property Court judgment concerning the master developer, Mizin?

In this case the Property Court (which is a division of the Dubai Courts) considered an agreement which was not registered on the interim register under Law 13 of 2008 as null and void and ordered Mizin to refund all monies paid by the purchaser. It is clear that the Property Court has taken a literal interpretation of Law 13 and in this case has made a decision which is in favour of the purchaser.

The DLD considers the decision to correspond with our understanding of the interpretation and application of Law 13. In particular, it confirms that if an agreement is not sufficiently registered under the law, then it will be considered null and void and is not enforceable as a binding agreement. Registration is conclusive evidence of rights relating to property, whether they are registered in the real register or the interim register.

Does Law No 9 cover terminations of SPAs for both sales of plots and off-plan units?

Law 9 is intended to cover sales of off-plan units only. SPAs for plots will not fall under the categories for damages under Law 9 and the parties will need to rely on the provisions related to termination and damages under the SPA and, if necessary, issue proceedings in the Property Court to settle any disputes.

Can you confirm what will be covered under the Executive Regulations following Law No 9?

The Executive Regulations under Law 9 are intended to provide guidance on the procedures and practical application of Law 9, amongst other issues. The Regulations will predominantly cover the procedure for termination of SPAs and payment of damages. They will also confirm the rights and obligations of a developer when reselling a unit upon termination and refunding any excess monies to the purchaser. The Regulations will also cover the grounds for cancellation of projects by RERA.
RERA may also request an independent third party expert report to assess the status of construction for a project.

What other laws and regulations can we expect to be issued in the coming months by
Dubai Land Department and RERA? e.g. Strata law regulations
The draft Strata regulations are being considered and will clarify the status of master community declarations, owners’ associations and the management and operation of common property.

We also expect further laws and regulations from DLD/RERA concerning Real Estate Investment Portfolios, Trust Law, Granted Land and Land Development laws and regulations on the restriction on developers collecting no more than 30% of the purchase price before commencement of construction and the requirement for developers to have paid for the land and obtained title and completed 20% construction before it can sell units off-plan.

The future…

Law 9 has been much anticipated by the real estate market and it now paves the way for a swift resolution to property disputes. The Executive Regulations must ensure that a fair balance is created between the rights of the developer and the purchaser and it will be crucial that the Property Court demonstrates consistency in the application of Law 9. Recent reports in the media have indicated that approximately 520 cases have been registered with the Property Court in 2009 and we expect many more to follow. It is expected that the Property Court will also be supplemented with a mediation centre in order to reduce the number of cases.

Lovells will remain at the forefront of new developments in the real estate sector and we aim to provide you with further updates on this topic as more information is available.

About Emad Farouq
Emad is the Senior Legal Counsel at the Dubai Land Department. Previously, he spent 15 years with the UAE Federal Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Emad has played a significant role in the last 5 years in the development of property legislation and regulations in Dubai. In December 2008, Emad was awarded “Best Government In-House Counsel” by the Dubai Corporate Counsel Group.

About Mohammed Kamal
Mohammed is the Head of Real Estate for the Middle East in Lovells’ Dubai office. He has been based in the UAE for several years and has been consistently involved with some of the largest real estate deals and projects in the region. Mohammed is recommended as one of the leading real estate lawyers in the region in Who’s Who Legal.

For further assistance please contact Mohammed Kamal, Head of Real Estate-Middle East.

© Lovells 2009

ACI – Alternative Capital Dubai Invest Fonds in Trouble

source DieWelt Germany May, 20. 2009

Dubai – Vier Dubai-Fonds des Gütersloher Initiators Alternative Capital Invest (ACI) sind offenbar in Schieflage geraten. Die Fonds II bis V könnten vorerst keine Ausschüttungen leisten, berichtet der Branchendienst Fondstelegramm.de unter Bezugnahme auf ein Schreiben der ACI an ihre Anleger. Zwar sei ein Verkauf der Fondsimmobilien vertraglich vereinbart. Jedoch habe der Erwerber entgegen einer früheren Zusage seiner Bank keine Kredite erhalten. Aus unternehmensnahen Kreisen wurden die Informationen der WELT gegenüber bestätigt. ACI-Geschäftsführer Uwe Lohmann war bis Redaktionsschluss nicht für eine Stellungnahme zu erreichen.
Mit einer Investitionssumme von insgesamt 474,5 Mio. Euro ist ACI nach der Marktstudie der Beteiligungsmodelle von Feri EuroRating der größte Anbieter von Dubai-Fonds in Deutschland. Auf ihrer Internetseite beziffert die Gesellschaft ihr Gesamtinvestitionsvolumen im Wüstenstaat sogar mit “über 550 Mio. Euro”.Investoren hatten in den vergangenen Jahren für Milliardenbeträge Bürotürme und Hotels in Dubai errichtet und damit eine gewaltige Spekulationsblase geschaffen, die mit der Finanzkrise platzte. Verbraucherschützer hatten schon im Jahr 2005 vor Engagements im Immobilienmarkt des Öl-Emirats am Persischen Golf gewarnt. rhai

_____________________

see also:

Mehrere Dubai-Fonds in Schieflage?

Deutsche ACI vertreibt Fonds seit 2008 auch in Österreich

Niki Lauda Tower , Boris Becker Tower, Michael Schumacher Tower, Dubai Star Tower and others by ACI Robin Lohmann, Dubai

Dubai Court to prosecute former State Minister in Deyaar case

source GulfNews Dubai

Dubai: A court is scheduled to prosecute on Sunday a former minister for reportedly abusing his powers as Deyaar’s board director and misappropriating Dh56.6 million, Gulf News has learnt.

The 52-year-old ex-state minister, M.K., has been charged with causing damage to Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) and Deyaar worth Dh56.6 million and will be tried before the Dubai Court of First Instance.

The Dubai Government holds a 30 per cent stake in DIB; and the bank holds a 45 per cent stake in Deyaar.

Deyaar’s former chief executive, a 43-year-old American, Z.S., will appear before the same court for allegedly receiving six million Deyaar shares, 380,000 Tamweel shares, 145,000 DIB shares and Dh17.9 million in cash as bribes for giving M.K. discounts and benefits worth Dh56.6 million from Deyaar.

Gulf News obtained a copy of the arraignment sheet in which the Public Prosecution charged M.K. with abusing his authority and unlawfully allowing Z.S. to misappropriate Dh53.5 million from Deyaar and Dubai Islamic Bank.

The Public Prosecution also charged Z.S. with aiding and abetting M.K.

The American has been additionally charged with abusing his authority as CEO and asking Dh500,000 from a businessman for selling property units worth Dh9.6 million.

Deyaar’s former operations manager, a 40-year-old Indian named J.D. who is at large, and Z.S. were jointly charged with accepting Dh20 million from a company for awarding it tenders to execute some Deyaar projects.

The murder case Suzanne Tamim Dubai – Death sentences for Suzanne Tamim murderers

source BBC UK

An Egyptian billionaire and former top political figure has been sentenced to death in Cairo for the 2008 murder of Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim.

Hisham Talaat Moustafa was found guilty of paying $2m to an ex-policeman to kill the singer. The killer Muhsin Sukkari was also sentenced to hang.

Ms Tamim reportedly broke off a secret love affair with Moustafa months before she was stabbed to death in her Appartment Dubai Jumeirah Beach Residence

The tale of sex, politics, money and show business gripped the Arab world.

The courtroom descended into chaos after the judge read out a short statement and ordered the sentences referred to the religious authorities for confirmation – as is normal in Egypt.

The defendants looked shocked at the verdict and relatives of Hisham Talaat Moustafa jostled with reporters to prevent them photographing his reaction.

Female relatives burst into tears and one of them fainted in the pandemonium.

Lawyer Samir Shishtawi called the verdict “severe”, adding: “I want to assure Talaat Moustafa’s family that this verdict will be overturned by the appeals court”.

Members of the Egyptian elite are often viewed in the country as being above the law, and there was massive public interest in the case.

The Dubai authorities applied such pressure on the Egyptians to bring the case to trial that he was eventually stripped of his parliamentary immunity.

But reporting of the case was banned in Egypt after the opening statements – a ruling which brought sharp criticism from the opposition.

Reporters from Tamim’s home area in the Lebanese capital Beirut said her family was “grateful for the verdict”.

Suzanne Tamim had risen to stardom throughout the Middle East as the winner of a pop idol contest in Lebanon in 1996.

But her career was marred by reports of a troubled private life.

Dubai Ruler replace finance chief – Top Dubai official defends decision to replace finance chief

source Arabian Business

The surprise dismissal of Nasser Al Sheikh as the emirate’s finance head on Monday triggered questions among some investors about Dubai’s economic future.

“The government is firmly committed to sustainable fiscal policies and to adopt actions that are appropriate for the current circumstances taking into account the scope of the global crisis, meeting Dubai’s financial obligations and future development requirements,” said Mohammed Al Shaibani, aide to Dubai’s ruler, in a statement issued late on Tuesday.

Al Shaibani is director of the office of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai and vice president and prime minister of the UAE.

Al Shaibani expressed his support for the new finance director, Abdul Rahman Al Saleh, as “the right man to lead the next stage of managing the economic situation”.

Saleh previously held a top position at Dubai’s customs authority and was in charge of the now shelved VAT plan.

The timing of the surprise leadership switch comes just three months after the Dubai government launched a $20bn bond programme, to ease liquidity difficulties at a number ofgovernment-related entities (GREs).

The emirate has said it has outstanding debt of around $80bn.

So far more than 50 percent of a first $10bn tranche of the bond, which was bought up by the UAE Central Bank, has been distributed to GREs, such as the property developer Nakeel. 

The second $10bn tranche is due to be released by the end of the year.

During his brief tenure, Al Sheikh earned a measure of respect from investors as head of the department for his efforts to navigate the difficulties created in the emirate as a result of the global economic crisis.

In his new position, Al Sheikh will serve as an assistant to the director of the ruler’s court for foreign affairs.

He also holds leadership or positions at a number of important Dubai companies. (Reuters)

Dissent upsets ruler’s court for Dubai investors

source FinancialTimes

“We know the company needs the money – but we need it, too.”

That was the refrain of one investor, summing up the attitude of many, as shareholders staged an unprecedented walkout at the annual general meeting of Dubai’s largest real estate company this month.

Emaar’s AGM has always provided fireworks, even during the good times when property values were rocketing. But with the credit crunch having demolished the real estate market, shareholder after shareholder grabbed the microphone to plead for a dividend payout.

The background to this is simple: Dubai has gone from gilt-laden boom town to debt-ridden globalisation victim in the space of only six months. The AGM offered Dubai’s citizens a rare outlet for public dissent in a country where political parties are outlawed and rallies require government approval.

The meeting, held in a hall usually reserved for trade exhibitions, was a corporate version of the ruler’s court – or diwan – where the emirate’s leader traditionally heard petitions by the clans and families allied to him.

Al Fajer Properties Case Comment of the Day

Comment of the day – to Al Fajer Properties by Journalist 2009

A FRAUD PAR EXELLENCE

Al Fajer Properties: FORCING ( Extort) an investor to sign a document and a unit ( Apartment)which is not existing in the way like describted in the letters of Al Fajer to this purchaser .

This acts happen in January 2008 and have been enforced (  after this email (January 2008, shown below)) again with extortion against the purchaser by Al Fajer Properties under the so called “New Management” in March 2008 ! Al Fajer Properties is holding until today( 2009) the 45 % payment made by the purchaser directly to Nakheel until mid 2006.

Al Fajer Properties terminate the rights of this investor in March 2008, which the purchaser several times rejected until today, than they start to talk again with him, after he didnt agree to a next taken agressive extortion by them, they start again to terminate his rights – this happen in 2008 – 2009 – not under the former CEO Zadeh, this happen in a direct way by Maktoum Hasher Maktoum over an english lawyer.
To force an purcahser who bought an APARTMENT in an RESIDENTIAL TOWER ( PLOT 3) – in which it is cle since a long time by the plans of Al Fajer ( but this was never uncovered to the purchaser) , that this RESEIDENTIAL BUILDING is not RESIDENTIAL – it is 100 % COMMERCIAL – to say it short – to force somebody to agree to a contract in which an object is mentioned which will never exist : How do you call an act like this ?

And using this not agreeing as the reason to terminate the rights of the purchaser – who hold offical confirmations from DMCC in which everything is very clear mentioned  – how do you call this ?

An email from Al Fajer Properties to this victim left from the former Falcon Tower , Plot H3, once  original purchased at Nakheel in 2005, transfered by DMCC in 2006 to Al Fajer Properties with the clear contractual agreement betweeen DMCC and the purchaser, that Al Fajer Proeprties will deliver an APARTENT in A RESIDENTIAL TOWER ( PLOT H3) JLT, like once purchased at NAKHEEL in 2005.  “NOTHING will change to the once original Purchase” ! … Completion 2008, crytsal clear lake view, 100 sqm luxury apartment – once named and launched by Nakheel as Falcon Tower Plot H3 , Jumeirah Lake Towers !!!!!!

Those victims of the Al Fajer game never hold a so called signable Contract in their hands. It was a Draft full of mistakes and blanks, with no floor plan with no attachments about the apartment…. only an inclomplete draft …. on which they forced ( extort)  them to agree and sign by writig them  the following email , early 2008
___________________________
email: January 2008 ( an email full of lies !!!!!!!)
Dear Mr ……..

Thank you for your email dated 31 January 2008 in relation to the typing error on your statement.  I have pleasure to attach an amended statement for your records which clearly shows your funds have been assigned to your unit on Plot H3.  Please be advised that despite the error showing the name of the tower, you have and will remain in Plot H3, in the same floor, in the same unit, as per the contracts in your possession.

I would also like to apologise for the delay in responding to your email 23rd January 2008, however this was due to the fact that this was incorrectly addressed to sharam@hhfajer.ae, instead of shahram@hhfajer.ae.   For all future email correspondence, we would be grateful if you could please send directly to my email leighjones@alfajerproperties.ae to ensure a prompt response.
Whilst writing, I would like to draw your attention to our email dated 17 January 2007 (copy attached) as we have still not received a response nor the required documentation.  As discussed, we are still awaiting your formal agreement to proceed with the contract for the Apartment in Plot H3 – Unit …, where we had provided an extended deadline for return of 24 January 2008, as these contracts have been in your possession since October 2007.

As a gesture of goodwill, we would like to hereby once again extend the deadline of 5 days from the date of this email (namely Tuesday 5 February 2008).   Unfortunately failure to provide the required documentation and agreement to proceed by this date, will be taken as your decision not to proceed with the purchase, whereby we will organise the immediate refund of your original booking deposit together with the cancellation of your rights in the property.
For the avoidance of doubt, we are continuing to act in good faith by once again extending deadlines, but cannot continue without the signed contracts being returned.

I trust the above answers your queries in detail and I look forward to hearing from you shortly, however in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly should you require any further clarification or assistance.

Kindest regards

Leigh Jones Al Fajer Properties

Al Fajer Properties – Dubai Court Case – Lawyer rubbishes lawsuit against Dubai sheikh

source BusinessMaktoob and  Zawya

Dubai Monday, May 04, 2009

The defence lawyer( Samir Jaafar) for a Dubai Sheikh ( Hasher Maktoum bin Juma Al Matoum, brother in law of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum) being sued by an Iranian businessman over $1.9 billion property investments  on Monday rejected the lawsuit as baseless.

“All his allegations and the sums that he claims to have pumped into the company are unfounded,” lawyer Samir Jaafar told news agency AFP after the third hearing in the case.

Shahram Abdullah Zadeh has filed the $1.9 billion case against Sheikh Hasher Maktoum bin Jumaa Al-Maktoum and the Dubai-based real estate developer Al-Fajer Properties.

Zadeh insists he was the real owner and sole investor in Al-Fajer, which is registered under the name of Sheikh Hasher, a brother-in-law of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid al-Maktoum.

“There are surprises in the documents that we have presented to the court which will turn the case upside down,” Sheikh Hasher’s lawyer Samir Jaafar said, declining to elaborate.

“We believe that the lawsuit will be rejected after the court goes through the documents that we have presented,” Jaafar added.

Legal sources close to the case, asking not to be named, said the defence has charged that the sums which Zadeh says he invested in the company were in fact the “company’s money that he misused to appear as if it was his own”.

Zadeh, for his part, demands the “recovery of all material assets of Al-Fajer Properties“, according to legal documents obtained by AFP.

These include liquid assets and property, which are estimated at 7 billion dirhams ($1.9 billion), and 9 percent interest since the suit was filed.

His lawyer Salim al-Shaali, who asked the judge for time to study the defence document, said that at the next hearing on May 25 he will ask for an auditor to be appointed to look into the company’s accounts.

“The expert would decide who pumped capital into the company and … whether the defendants paid any money,” he told AFP.

Zadeh charges Sheikh Hasher made no investment in Al-Fajer and that he acquired the licence under the sheikh’s name only because Emirati law does not allow non-Gulf citizens to register real estate firms under their own names.

“For every dirham that Sheikh Hasher can show the court he has invested in Al-Fajer Properties, will give him the company and an extra $10 million bonus,” Shahram Zadeh told AFP after the latest hearing, which he did not attend

Shahram Zadeh said he started up the company from scratch, pumping in cash “as and when the company needed”, and that he only withdrew part of his initial investments after the company expanded from property sales.

“The Sheikhs claim I was an employee,” said Zadeh.

“My question to the court is what employee (can be) the sole investor, work for four years with absolute single authority signing billions of dirhams on cheques, contracts … but work without a salary or an employment contract?”

In addition to Sheikh Hasher, Zadeh is suing his daughter, Sheikha Maryam, a partner in the company, and son Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher Juma Al Maktoum, who was made president of Al-Fajer after Zadeh was sacked in February.

Zadeh said he was detained by Dubai police after he was sacked and then held without charge for 60 days, and that his passport was confiscated and is still being held.

“I still don’t know why I was arrested,” he said.

The case comes as several executives from high-profile Dubai firms are being held on suspicion of embezzlement and as the once-booming regional business and tourism hub struggles to stave off the impact of the global economic crisis.

Dynasty Zarooni

Al Fajer Properties

GulfNews The first report about this case in the local UAE press

„Folter geht uns alle an“ – German Press – Torture – Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan

source German Press Merkur

Dietramszell , Germany, 18.05.2009

Mit Applaus ist am Sonntag die Predigt von Pfarrer Franz Burgey quittiert worden. Er hatte die Machenschaften von Skeikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan kritisiert.

Die Kirchgänger beklatschten die Stellungnahme des Ortsgeistlichen von Lochen und Linden, der sich ausdrücklich von den Machenschaften von Prinz Issa Bin Zayed al-Nahyan distanziert hatte.

Pfarrer Burgey, emeritierter Professor und Hobby-Historiker, ist bekannt für seine tiefschürfenden Predigten. Gestern nutzte er die Gunst die Stunde, um manchen Stammtischparolen eine klare Absage zu erteilen. Immer wieder wird in Dietramszell argumentiert, der Scheich sei nun Mal aus einem anderen Kulturkreis. Das Sprichwort „andere Länder, andere Sitten“ ist nach Burgeys Worten aber „völlig unzutreffend“. Unter Berufung auf islamische Gelehrte sagte der Ortsgeistliche: „Mord, Blutvergießen und das Stiften von Unheil, Unordnung und Zerstörung gelten als schwere Verbrechen. Niemand hat das Recht, Leben und Eigentum anderer Menschen zu schädigen oder wegzunehmen.“

Selbst wenn Mordversuch und Folter in anderen Ländern erlaubt wären, sagte Burgey, „erwarten wir von einem Mitbürger, der hier in Deutschland unter dem Schutz der deutschen Gesetze lebt, dass er sich auch anderswo entsprechend benimmt, sonst ist er als Nachbar nicht tragbar“. Landesweit sei mit Empörung aufgenommen worden, dass Dietramszeller die Folterungen mit dem Verweis auf die Landessitten in Abu Dhabi gleichmütig hingenommen hätten. „Es geht mir nicht darum, Leute wegen unglücklicher Äußerungen zu schimpfen“, predigte Burgey. Wenn man plötzlich vor der Kamera oder einem Mikrofon stehe „kann leicht etwas Falsches herauskommen“. Er müsse aber richtig stellen: „Es geht uns sehr wohl etwas an, wenn der Scheich in Abu Dhabi foltert.“ Demokratie bestehe wesentlich im Hinsehen, nicht im Wegsehen.

Mesner Johann Mayer begrüßte die Erklärungen von Pfarrer Burgey. „Es ist schwierig für den einfachen Bürger die Sachverhalten zu erfassen und zu verstehen.“ Aus diesem Grund sei die „aufklärende, sachliche Predigt“ des Pfarrers sehr hilfreich gewesen. Die Rede habe „den Horizont erweitert“ – schließlich solle und könne man sich nicht auf das Gerede anderer verlassen. (xb/ee)

ZDF Heute Journal Germany 10.May. 2009 , Report Torture Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan

German ZDF Heute Journal May 10, 2009 TV Report about the Torture Video Issa Nahyan

ZDF Heute Journal Germany 10.May. 2009 , Report Torture Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan

UAE ‘torture’ case seen as critical test of justice

source FinancialTimes  May 16.2009 by Andrew England Abu Dhabi  and Simeon Kerr in Dubai

The footage begins with an assault rifle allegedly being fired by a member of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family. Bullets throw up clouds of sand as they smash into the desert, inches from a cowering Afghan grain trader.

It moves on to the Afghan being beaten with a cattle prod and a plank of wood, and concludes with a 4×4 vehicle being driven over his battered body.

The video lasts just minutes and was recorded more than three years ago. But, for the UAE, an oil-rich nation desperate to hold itself up as a model international business hub, it has thrown up a critical test.

The man alleged to have carried out the assault in the so-called “torture video” is Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a half-brother of the UAE’s president and of the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the capital and wealthiest of the seven city states that make up the emirates.

In the past, scandals involving the Gulf’s large ruling families were dealt with in-house and its members were seen to be above the law and almost any form of public scrutiny.

But this time it is different. The video has been leaked, broadcast by American television, posted on the internet and widely distributed to politicians in the US, a key ally with which the UAE is hoping to negotiate a deal on civilian nuclear trade.

In the wake of the international outcry, Abu Dhabi authorities announced that they had detained Sheikh Issa and launched a criminal investigation into the allegations, the first move of its kind in the UAE.

With the world’s eyes increasingly on the oil nations of the Gulf, image-conscious Abu Dhabi appears to have accepted that it had no choice but to act amid the scrutiny.

“The UAE is clear on its desire to be global and be measured by best of international standards,” says Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political scientist at Emirates University. “And if it wants to measure itself with the best of international standards, it has to apply it across the board.”

In recent years the UAE has grown more engaged with the outside world and has moved to quell international censure. It has reimbursed child camel jockeys, improved labour rights and worked out principles for sovereign wealth funds to follow.

Dubai expatriates have long passed on stories of foreigners who ended up in jail – the “Hilton Jumeirah”, as some dubbed the city’s old prison – for crossing the wrong sheikh or wellconnected national, usually over a failed business deal.

Lawyers say some individuals can still pervert the course of justice by wielding influence before a trial. But once cases go to court, it is generally more difficult to influence the judiciary.

The decision to prosecute a former finance minister, Mohammed bin Kharbash, for alleged fraud at a state-linked real estate company, seems to back the proclamation last year by Dubai ruler’s that no one is above the law.

Most locals argued that Mr bin Kharbash was too powerful to face trial and the move sent shockwaves through the community. Another former minister had a month earlier been found guilty of embezzling assets from a business partner.

However, there are some foreign complainants in commercial cases who continue to argue that they are not getting a fair hearing.

With the case of Sheikh Issa – one of 19 sons of UAE founding father Sheikh Zayed – many will want to see if the judicial process produces tangible results.

Human Rights Watch argues that, while his detention is significant, “much more needs to be done to restore faith in the country’s police and justice system”.

But Mr Abdulla said it shows that no one – whether it’s “a regular man or superman or a ruling family man” – is above the law.

“We should not be in the habit of hiding our mistakes,” he adds. “The sooner we deal with them in a transparent way, the more we will measure up [as] a transparent and a civilised nation.”

Jumeirah Beach Residence standoff

source: Xpress GulfNews

Dubai : The Real Estate Regulatory Authority (Rera) has taken the sting out of a 129 per cent increase in service charges for unit owners of Jumeirah Beach Residence – sort of.

In a letter obtained by XPRESS, Rera has given what it calls “preliminary approval” that Salwan Property Management rescind its original annual service fee hike of Dh21.75 per square foot to Dh15.32.

The decision means that instead of an owner of a 1,000 square-foot flat in JBR paying Dh21,750 per year, he/she will now pay Dh15,320 per year.

In its letter, Rera tells Salwan that “we have agreed” to the lesser service charge which is split between Dh8.32 per square foot for maintenance and service charges and Dh7 per square foot for electricity and water consumption.

Not enough

Celia Reinaldo, a member of the JBR Residents’ Association, said unit owners are glad, but noted that some owners believe even the latest compromise doesn’t go far enough.

“It’s good news but it’s still more than it was last year,” said Reinaldo. In its letter, Rera has informed Salwan that it “must take into consideration” management fees, a building reserve fund and an infrastructure amount as part of the service fees cost.

The letter said, “Developers must deposit collected charges into private account and undertake not to spend the money unless [they] get Rera approval.”

The JBR Residents’ Association, meanwhile, has hired a professional company which had determined in a initial study that the Dh15.32 per square foot cost is also not justified.

In a letter to members, the association executive said that “based on this initial study, the maximum cost for JBR in terms of service charges should not exceed Dh12.4 per square foot”.

Dubai Criminal Court – Saudi bank also a victim in Dubai Islamic Bank scam

source TheNational UAE
May 14, 2009

DUBAI // A Saudi bank was among the victims of the scam in which the Dubai Islamic Bank was defrauded of US$501 million (Dh1.8bn), it was disclosed in court here yesterday.

A DIB employee testified yesterday before the Dubai Criminal Court of First Instance that $120m of the embezzled money belonged to the Saudi Hollandi Bank, of which DIB was a local agent.

The seven defendants are charged with presenting falsified documents to DIB to take possession of funds to finance non-existent projects. Five of them appeared in court yesterday.

The DIB employee told the court that one of the defendants, CR, had met with a special committee set up by DIB in 2007 to settle the matter out of court and pay back the money owed by CCH International, the British-based financial company into whose account the embezzled funds went. He said CR told the committee that the funds were used for “other purposes than intended” and that the bulk of the $501m was transferred to projects and companies in Pakistan and Bahrain as well as to The Plantation project in Dubai.

He said the bank had approved the settlement initially after numerous meetings with CR, who agreed on a repayment schedule and offered the bank properties in Bahrain and in The Plantation project itself as guarantee but that the payments stopped when the defendants were arrested.

Judge Hamad Abdullatif adjourned the case until May 28.

Nakheel will pay only 65 percent of its debts

source KippReport

May 14, 2009
 
Dubai-based property developer Nakheel is offering consultants and contractors only 65 percent of what they are due, the New Civil Engineer reports.

“One of the offers on the table is for firms to get 65 percent of their consultancy fees, with the understanding that in doing so, they waive their legal rights [to further payment],” said Nelson Ogunshakin, CEO Association for Consultancy and Engineering.

Nakheel received an undisclosed cash injection from the Dubai government in early May, as part of Dubai’s $20 billion bailout plan.

According to the publication, Nakheel refused to comment on the issue.

What next is the question now being asked by investors as one of the Middle East’s largest property developers Nakheel

source The National UAE, May 12, 2009

ABU DHABI // Nakheel made headlines around the world with its Palm island projects and the planned Hong Kong-sized Waterfront development, while its advertising billboards dotted around Dubai asked “What next?”

What next is the question now being asked by investors as one of the Middle East’s largest property developers contends with a US$3.5 billion (Dh12.85bn) Islamic bond due in December, which helped fund projects that included the world’s biggest man-made islands.

How the sukuk is handled will serve as a key test for the credit ratings of state-controlled companies in the emirate and could affect their ability to raise money on international markets. It is also widely seen as an indicator of how Dubai will cope with its overall debt burden, estimated at $70bn.

“The clock is ticking, so something has to be done,” says Abdul Hussain, the chief executive of Mashreq Capital.

Nakheel issued the three-year sukuk in 2006, when the Dubai property market was still in a fever and the likelihood of a downturn seemed impossibly remote. The bond came with a profit rate – the Sharia-compliant equivalent of an interest rate – of 6.345 per cent per year. To ease its cash flow, however, Nakheel arranged to pay just half of that, or 3.1725 per cent, during the life of the bond. It would pay the rest at maturity, which seemed a sensible strategy given the rapid rise in property prices in Dubai and the healthy profits the company was booking.

As a further teaser, Nakheel added an option for sukuk holders to buy shares of Nakheel at a 5 per cent discount should it stage an initial public offering and become a listed company. It also backed up the sukuk with significant collateral: land and other assets worth more than twice the value of the sukuk.

At first, international investors eagerly snapped up the offering. Initially, just 30 per cent of the shares were sold to investors in the region, according to a source involved in the deal. The rest went to overseas investors.

Almost three years later, the economic climate could hardly be more different and Nakheel, like many other companies in Dubai, is busy working out how to settle its debts amicably while continuing to build and invest. The company recently undertook a round of cost-cutting and is said to be asking its contractors to take discounts on payments due to them. A source at a building contractor in Dubai that has worked on a number of Nakheel projects said all construction companies associated with the company’s Waterfont development had been asked to take discounts ranging between 30 and 40 per cent.

Yet among the many ways in which Nakheel must cope with the changing economic tides, its $3.5bn sukuk probably ranks as the most significant – and most urgent. The uncertainty surrounding the sukuk has caused its price to rise and tumble rapidly. It was recently trading at a heavy discount, with a yield of about 58 per cent. Low prices and high yields mean investors demand to be compensated with a high return for taking an increased risk that their money may not be paid back in full. “The market obviously believes there is a significant risk of some form of restructuring,” Mr Hussain says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to earn a 50 per cent yield. We are now waiting to hear what sorts of strategies are going to be put in place.”

Nakheel has a range of options for the sukuk, analysts say. It may simply pay off investors in full using an injection of funds from the Dubai Government, received as part of the first instalment in a planned $20bn bond programme. Nakheel said recently it was receiving assistance under the programme.

It could also sell part of itself to a private equity firm in order to raise some of the cash. Analysts have suggested that money raised from a possible sale of part of DP World to a private equity firm could be redirected through Dubai World – which owns both DP World and Nakheel – to help pay off the sukuk. Abraaj Capital, a buyout firm managing $6bn in assets, has approached Dubai World about acquiring a “significant minority stake” in DP World, a source with knowledge of the discussions said earlier this week.

Nakheel could also go to banks for loans to refinance part of the sukuk, or it could try to buy back a chunk of the Islamic bond by extending a tender offer to existing owners.

Another option is for Nakheel to partially restructure the sukuk, giving most of investors’ money back and converting the rest of the debt into a new longer-term loan. This route could also involve one or both of Nakheel’s other sukuk, which are smaller and due in 2010 and 2011.

Rumours of such a restructuring began to surface about a month ago, when Nakheel hired a market intelligence firm to identify the owners of its sukuk shares. Many investors saw this as an indication that the company was trying to find out what portion of the sukuk was owned by investors who would be sympathetic to an attempt to restructure.

The possibility of a restructuring led Standard & Poor’s, a major ratings agency, to put numerous Dubai companies on watch for a credit downgrade.

A Nakheel spokeswoman said in a statement that “a number of options” were currently on the table and declined to elaborate. Bankers said that a restructuring that left investors with a loss was probably Nakheel’s least desirable option, aside from a fully fledged default. If Nakheel were to allow many of its investors to take losses, they said, the cost of raising money in the future – for Nakheel and other government-linked companies in the UAE and the broader GCC – might go up.

“Nakheel has a large volume of public debt, much of it held by international investors, so a lot is at stake regarding international credibility of Dubai corporates that will likely at some point seek to borrow again in the global capital markets,” says Khalid Howladar, a vice president and senior credit officer for structured and Islamic finance at Moody’s, another ratings agency.

What seems most likely, investors and observers say, is a combination of some of these options. Nakheel may buy back some of the sukuk shares using subsidy money, for example, offering an above-market price for them. If some investors are unwilling to sell, the company could then try to refinance a portion of the debt with bank loans and sell some of its equity to a private equity firm.

Bobby Sarkar, an analyst at Al Mal Capital in Dubai, believes Nakheel is also considering selling some of its assets, such as its stake in the Atlantis Hotel on the Palm Jumeirah and properties in Discovery Gardens, both in Dubai. “They are looking at a combination of asset sales, some inflow from the Government, some restructuring and a partial sale to Abraaj.”

Whatever options it chooses, a source familiar with the sukuk says, a full default or even a serious restructuring is highly unlikely, given the value of the collateral that Nakheel has provided and the negative message such a move would send to international markets.

Moreover, Dubai’s government-linked companies have so far succeeded in paying off or refinancing large loans and bonds as they come due. In February, for example, Borse Dubai – the company that owns Nasdaq Dubai and the Dubai Financial Market – was able to refinance a $3.4bn bank loan, albeit with major help from local sources of funding.

Last month, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority refinanced a $2.2bn Islamic loan with 18 international, regional and local banks.

Nasser al Shaikh, the director general of the Dubai Department of Finance, said a week later there was a “shift in the overall mood” in the international credit markets when it came to Dubai’s debt.

Nakheel confirms receiving funds

source Business24/7

Nakheel has started receiving funds from Dubai Government, confirmed its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Chris O’Donnell in an exclusive interview with Emirates Business. However when asked if the figure stood at Dh2 billion, the chief executive said: “The actual figure is confidential and so are all the other details. But yes, Nakheel is receiving funds.”

The developer is also talking to its contractors and re-negotiating payments plans and contracts. “Yes, we are trying to help them and ourselves through our current situation. We are at the stage of commercial settlements and negotiations. Rather than detail on percentages, it is a true statement to say that construction costs are falling and there is definitely a reduction,” said O’Donnell.

“Part of our obligation to our customers is to ensure that we get them the best buildings. Hence, we are talking to our contractors to get cost-effective solutions.”

O’Donnell said the developer does not issue credit notes and warned investors against any such fraud. “When the market recovers, the focus will be on people buying serviced land. Hence, the built form in Nakheel’s projects is definitely going to be linked to the provisions of infrastructure, which will be on an incremental basis,” he added. Speaking about the latest on the status of Nakheel projects, O’Donnel said that work on Palm Jebel Ali has slowed down while the Palm Deira and the Universe projects are on hold.

However, construction on Jumeirah Village and Al Furjan is progressing, he said.

Nakheel Jumeirah Palm home prices hit new three-year low – Dubai May 2009

source ArabianBusiness

House prices on Nakheel’s Palm Jumeirah project have fallen below AED800 per square foot for the first time in over three years – and nearly 60 percent down in the past five months, Arabian Business can reveal.

Agents are now looking to offload three bedroom apartments covering 2,184 square foot for just AED1.7 million, representing only AED778 per square foot.

And experts suggest even that figure could fall further.

“The 1.7m (dirham) is the listed price, and we all know that nobody is selling for a listed price. There are people who may be willing to take even 1.5million, which would less than 700dhs per square foot,” said one agent.

Other experts suggest that the continued falls are linked to the exchange rate between the pound and dirham.

“With the rate have fallen to around five dirhams to the pound, landlords based in the UK can afford to take nearly 30% less than they were asking based on last year’s rate and still end up with the same amount of sterling in their bank. That factor is definitely pushing the market down more,” said the agent.

The decline in sale prices comes as a new rental index for Dubai to be published this week will show a 30 percent fall in rents since March for Palm Jumeirah villas.

The Landmark Advisory index is expected to show declines in other residential hotspots in Dubai such as apartments in Jumeirah Beach Residence (JBR) and townhouses in the Springs – with rental falls of eight percent compared to Landmark’s last index.

“Since our last price map published at the end of March, we’ve seen a shift towards leasing. Owners are unable to sell their units and they are unwilling to lower their prices. They are adjusting their investment horizons and turning to leasing to generate revenue,” said Jesse Downs, director of research at Landmark Advisory, the consultancy division of Landmark Properties.

RERA – Dubai mulls cancellation of 27 projects

source ArabianBusiness

Dubai is considering cancelling 27 projects, the head of its real estate regulator said on Monday, as the emirate’s property market slumps in the global downturn.

A decision whether to cancel or not would be made by the end of the month, said Marwan bin Ghalita, the head of the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA).

“The decision has not been done. They are projects all over Dubai – third party projects (sub developers),” he said.

Earlier this year, Ghalita said he believed 25 percent of projects will be cancelled in Dubai as a result of the global economic slowdown.

“It’s almost the same,” he said when asked if that figure had changed. The Dubai Land Department and RERA set up a committee last week to cancel projects in the emirate that are not feasible.

German economics minister meets UAE interior minister

source

Abu Dhabi

German Economics Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said Sunday that the United Arab Emirates government would soon publish the results of an investigation into a torture case in which a member of the emirate’s ruling family has been implicated.

Guttenberg said he was told this in talks with UAE Interior Minister Shaikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The Berlin minister said that the Emirates’ government had an interest in assuring that the country’s rule of law reputation is not damaged. Guttenberg said he had made a point of bringing the case up for discussion.

Read more: http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1476195.php/German_economics_minister_meets_UAE_interior_minister_#ixzz0F94ZJHTe&B

Comment of the Day – RERA Dubai

by Joe May 10, 2008

You are not alone there. Probably there are thousands of investors in this moment who invest in off plan property and now balancing on the edge of precipice.

What is very sad that authority doesn’t do their job. They have established RERA and Laws around but RERA does not act in accordance with responsibility that they have. By their passiveness they actually support developers to make with investors what every developer would like. But this is like huge boomerang that will devastatingly  hit entire Dubai project.

I am simply stunned how authority is looking peacefully while full crowded ship sinking in front of their eyes.
By Law No 9 it is evident that RERA would like to help developer rather than helping investors. Where will be our investment place after Law No.9 just God knows.

What will be rules and conditions to cancel project will probably depends on color of skin, distance from Sheikhs, residency, are the owner  of Developer  domestic or stranger etc.

And do you think that investors are asked to participate in panel? Or when composing rules for categorize project to what “Sliding Scale” to place it?

I think that without pressing from outside they will still think that they can do whatever they would like and manipulate with foolish investors as much as they want.

UAE is not alone in the Earth. Their life depends on world community. Without respect to all of us who wanted to participate in Dubai story they do not have future.

One lesson was recently reached UAE by freezing permission for using nuclear power for civil purposes caused by incident from royal family.

I think that there has to be more lessons if outside investors are going to lose their invested money. We have to ask our government to protect our interest in Dubai.

Dubai Lawyer Samir Jafaar: ‘Ex-UAE Minister of State Had No Intention to Cheat’

source KhaleejTimes by Zawya

08 May 2009

DUBAI

The verdict in the fraud case filed against former UAE Minister of State Dr Khalifa Bakhit Al Falasi will be pronounced on May 28 by the Court of Appeals.

Both defence lawyers of the ex-minister, his son and the other two defendants, Samir Jaafar and Abdelmonem Suwaidan, stressed in their arguments that the former minister did not swindle the Lebanese businesswoman (the plaintiff). They pleaded that she was aware of the legal status of both her late brother and Dr Al Falasi before she signed the disputed settlement bond in which she relinquished her 49 per cent shares in the Global Information Technology Company that she inherited from her brother.

“The audit reports and financial and budget statements of the company are some of the evidence that she was aware of the business relationship between the minister and her brother,” Jaafar said. “What sustains our pleas is that my client (the ex-minister) was running the information company in due course when the plaintiff’s brother was in the US for health reasons. Dr Al Falasi signed personal banking security bonds which is a clear revelation of his good intentions,” counsel Jaafar pleaded.

Jaafar added, “In the documents we had access to, there was one particular contract signed by the ex-minister and the plaintiff’s brother saying that the latter collected a monthly salary of Dh2,000. This proves that my client is a real partner in the company.”

Jaafar pointed out that the plaintiff collected Dh28 million for her part of the family shares which does not mean that she was victim of cheating.

The 51-year-old ex-minister pleaded not guilty to the charge of cheating the Lebanese businesswoman to unlawfully take the Global Information Technology Company, she inherited from her brother by pretending he was a partner with 51 per cent of the shares, rather than a paid sponsor.

He pleaded not guilty to the fraud and breach of trust charges. His son, the American director general of the company and the Indian financial manager also pleaded not guilty to the charge of criminal complicity in defrauding the plaintiff.

The Court of Misdemeanours awarded on February 23 the former minister two years in jail, as he was found guilty of fraud. Dr Al Felasi was acquitted of the charge of breach of trust.

Defence lawyer Jaafar also highlighted in his pleas a letter from the Economic Department proving that Dr Al Falasi was the original owner of the company since 1995 and that late brother joined in as a shareholder in 1996.  The former minister’s 26-year-old son was acquitted in February from the criminal complicity charge.

The company’s director general and the financial manager were awarded two years in jail each for assisting in swindling the plaintiff. They would be deported after serving their jail terms, the court ordered. The civil case was referred to the relevant court whereas the plaintiff is claiming Dh500 million in compensation.

The Lebanese woman is also prosecuting the former minister for hiding from her the fact that her late brother was investing in a real estate in Al Qusais area.

Royal Sheikh Issa Zayed Al Nahyan Detained by UAE Over Torture Tape Allegations

source ABC News 08, May 2009

A member of the royal family in the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, has been “detained” in Abu Dhabi by authorities investigating a chilling videotape that shows him torturing an Afghan grain dealer, according to officials in Washington.

UAE officials told American diplomats the Sheikh was put under “house arrest” this week and prevented from leaving the country as the UAE Ministry of Justice conducts a criminal investigation of the incidents on the videotape, the officials said.

The 45-minute torture tape, first broadcast on ABC News Nightline two weeks ago, shows the Sheikh, the brother of the UAE crown prince, beating his victim with an electric cattle prod and a wooden plank with protruding nails. Men in police uniform are seen on the tape restraining the victim, who has sand shoved down his throat and is later repeatedly run over by a Mercedes Benz SUV driven by the Sheikh.

Dubai: Construction firms owed billions

source The National

Construction firms in Dubai say they are having to either accept reduced payments, or risk not getting paid at all. The National

‘Egypt’s Madoff’ faces trial in UAE

source TheNational

ABU DHABI // Nabil al Boushi, an Egyptian businessman sentenced in absentia to 15 years in jail in his home country after he was convicted of fraud, will have to stand trial in Dubai before any thought can be given to his extradition, the Ministry of Justice said yesterday.

Four charged with fraud in UAE-Europe VAT case

source The National

RERA Dubai – Panel to identify unviable projects for cancellation

source Business24-7

Dubai Thursday, May 07, 2009

The Dubai Land Department and the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera) have set up a committee that will decide on cancellation of “unviable” projects, senior department officials said yesterday.

Addressing an investors’ meeting, officials said a committee has been formed to study and analyse non-feasible projects.

“It is a tedious task and requires a lot of paper work. But the committee has been created to address the issue,” a senior official said.

Ludmila Yamalova, Partner, Mac Davidson Legal Consultants, who was present at the meeting, told Emirates Business that officials admitted project cancellations were not under their purview earlier, but amendments to Law No13 regulating the Interim Real Estate Register in Dubai now allows them to cancel projects that they deem not feasible.

In February, Rera Chief Executive Officer Marwan bin Ghalita said he believes 25 per cent of the projects will be cancelled, as developers did not start them or don’t have an intention to begin. However, he could not be reached for comment on the number of developers requesting cancellation.

The officials further told investors that the detailed regulations for Article 11 of Law No13, which lays down the terms for cancellations of “off plan” properties, will be announced soon and will explain terms such as “beyond developers control” in detail.

According to Yamalova, the authorities said developers will no longer be allowed to retain any money on reselling of units on termination of investors’ contract.

“Developers will no longer have any incentive to cancel contracts, as the money received on the resold unit will have to be deposited with the trust account of the Land Department,” she added.

Besides, Rera is also ensuring all amended payment schedules from developers need to be approved by them, with it planning to upload all payment plans on their website.

According to Rera statistics, 31,003 and 43,880 units will enter the market in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

However, it believes 20 per cent of residential units may not enter the market this year.

In February, it said the number of developers has come down from about 870 to 427.

Torture-tape Gulf prince accused of 25 other attacks

source Guardian UK

New York, Sunday 3 May 2009

US lawyers claim they have videos implicating Abu Dhabi royal in more cases of torture, a week after outcry over his assaults on Afghan businessman.

“I have more than two hours of video footage showing Sheikh Issa’s involvement in the torture of more than 25 people,” wrote Texas-based lawyer Anthony Buzbee in a letter obtained by the Observer.

read the full story Link

Off plan sales in Dubai ‘practically non-existent’

source ArabianBusiness May 03, 2009

Off-plan property sales in Dubai are “practically non-existent”, according to a new report released this week.

“State of the Market 2009”, published by Better Homes and Investment Boutique, warns that “off plan sales across the emirate are practically non-existent, and finished product is in demand mostly by end-users.”

The report adds that “there is still substantial room for price depression in order to meet true affordability levels.”

However, on a more positive footing, it suggests that “by the last quarter of 2009 prices are expected to hit a trough and the market is expected to gradually stabilise.”

The 100-page report was compiled over the past three months, and contains detailed analysis of the residential, commercial, retail and hospitality sectors.

“The report shows that we are going through very challenging times, where prices, targets and ambitions will have to be dramatically altered. This is a painful process,” said Better Homes managing director, Ryan Mahoney.

Dubai Property Court – Realty developers, agent told to pay Dh1.77m to couple

source GulfNews

Dubai: Two property developers and a real estate promoter have been ordered to repay Dh1.77 million paid in by a couple for a 26th-floor-flat overlooking Dubai’s Business Bay.

The Dubai Real Estate Court ordered the Dubai-based promoter and property developers to repay the couple, a businessman and his wife, Dh1.77 million which they had deposited as a first instalment for the flat in a high-rise tower project.

Lawyer Dr Habib Al Mulla, of Habib Al Mulla and Co Advocates and Legal Consultants, who represents the couple, lodged the civil lawsuit against the defendants after they refused to collect the remaining instalments and write a contract then deliver the flat.

Presiding Judge Shehab Ahmad Al Shehi also ordered the defendants to pay the above-mentioned amount plus nine per cent legal interest.

Dr Al Mulla argued in his lawsuit that his clients purchased the flat for Dh17.7 million, out of the first payment was made to the promoter. “They collected a receipt for the first instalment. When the second instalment was due, the promoter asked my clients to pay it for the sake of one of the property developers based in Dubai.”

Dr Al Mulla said since the deal was made, it was his clients’ first encounter with the Dubai-based property developer.

“The claimants asked the promoter why should they pay the second payment to the Dubai-based developer before, they later agreed to pay & surprisingly, the promoter informed my clients that they stopped receiving payments for that project,” he continued.

He said his clients were asked to follow up with the Dubai-based developer and a Kuwait-based developer.

The Dubai-based developer met with the claimants and informed them that there were no problems and they would be collecting their contract within a week, according to the lawsuit.

“Since then, the plaintiffs had been avoiding the claimants, refused to collect any instalments and didn’t process the contract. Since my clients didn’t get the flat, the price of which tripled after sometime, they lodged this lawsuit and claimed Dh1.77 million plus Dh500,000 in financial and moral compensation for the damages they incurred by the plaintiffs’ act,” argued Dr Al Mulla.

Presiding Judge Al Shehi further ordered the plaintiffs to pay Dh3,000 in lawyers’ fees. The primary verdict is still subject to appeal.

Confusion over RERA Rental Index

source 7Days

A new feature of the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) web site caused confusion over the expected Rental Index update today, as it seemed to indicate a fall of up to 50 per cent in rental rates.

The new ‘Rental Increase Calculator’ on the web site showed significantly lower rents across Dubai, in what many media reported as an indicator of the updated version of the Rental Index, expected before the end of April.

However, a spokesperson from RERA told 7DAYS that the authority was still working on the index and there was no official update as yet.

The ‘Rental Increase Calculator’ on the web site today showed that a three-bedroom villa in the Springs would now be priced at between dhs140,000 and dhs160,000 a year down by up to 50 per cent from the previous guideline of dhs250,000 to dhs280,000.

A studio apartment in Dubai Marina had fallen to dhs65,000 to dhs70,000 from dhs80,000 to dhs90,000, which would be a discount of up to 28 per cent, while a two-bedroom apartment in Discovery Gardens fell up to 37 per cent, from dhs130,000 to dhs145,000, to dhs90,000 to dhs125,000.

The calculator only recommends any increase in rent if the tenant is paying from ten per cent or more below the low end of these ranges, and in that case, it gives the maximum rent increase as five per cent. In no scenario is the maximum rent increase more than 20 per cent.

RERA had said it would release an updated version of the index first released in January, which was criticised at the time for showing prices nearer to 2008 peaks rather than prices impacted by the global economic slowdown.

The RERA spokesperson today could not confirm when the update would be released.

Go to  www.rpdubai.com

to see the ‘Rental Increase Calculator’

Dubai’s soon to be official April Rental Index – RERA Dubai

source ArabianBusiness

This website has unearthed new rental data from RERA that looks certain to form the basis of the next Dubai Rental Index.

A new service on the the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Authority’s
web site allows landlords and tenants to enter details of their type of
accommodation, current rent, and the name of their residential
district. The web site then gives a guide price for how much rent
should be paid.

However, the RERA web site stops short of publishing a full table of
rents, so Arabianbusiness.com has put in the leg work to produce what
is, in effect, the April 2009 Rental Index.

Having created the table, we then looked at the change in rents for
every applicable area since the Index was last published in January
2009.

For villas, we compared median prices for three-bedroom homes; for apartments we compared median prices for two-bedroom units.

The results are startling. In the four months since the Rental Index
was last published, rents have plummeted by almost 50 percent in some
parts of the city.

Freehold developments have been worst affected, with two-bedroom
apartment rents for Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai Investment Park and
Dubai Silicon Oasis all registering price drops of well over 40 percent.

Villa rental drops in the freehold areas have also been battered.
Rents for a three bedroom villa in The Springs fell by 45 percent.
Green Community, The Meadows and Arabian Ranches have all seen rents
fall by one-third.

Table 1: Rental Index for Apartments (AED,000 per annum).
Residential Areas are ranked according to the price change for a
two-bedroom apartment.

	Studio	1-bed	2-bed	3-bed	4-bed	Change
Jumeirah Lakes Towers	60-70	65-100	90-125	140-170	170-190	-44.9%
Dubai Investment Park	40-45	55-60	70-80	…..	…..	-43.4%
Dubai Silicon Oasis	40-55	50-60	75-80	90-100	…..	-42.6%
Al Buteen	50-65	65-80	98-110	80-90	…..	-34.6%
Al Muraqqabat	50-65	65-85	80-120	105-140	…..	-31.0%
Al Riqqa	50-60	65-85	80-120	105-140	…..	-31.0%
Al Garhoud	50-60	65-75	80-110	95-105	…..	-30.8%
Mirdif	45-65	65-75	80-100	105-115	…..	-28.0%
Al Jafeliah	40-45	45-55	65-85	90-120	….	-26.8%
Greens	55-70	90-110	120-140	160-200	220-240	-25.3%
Al Huamriya	45-60	60-80	80-100	110-150	150-170	-25.0%
Al Hudaiba	45-55	60-70	80-100	100-130	130-150	-25.0%
Discovery Gardens	45-50	60-70	90-125	…..	…..	-21.8%
Rigga Al Buteen	45-65	65-90	70-110	105-120	…..	-21.7%
Al Qusais	42-47	58-68	70-95	90-105	…..	-21.4%
Al Muteena	45-60	55-65	80-95	90-110	…..	-20.5%
Palm Jumeirah	…..	95-135	160-200	175-210	280-300	-20.0%
Green Community	55-60	80-90	110-125	150-170	…..	-19.0%
Port Saeed	45-55	65-75	70-100	95-115	…..	-19.0%
Al Nahdah	35-45	53-65	68-78	80-90	…..	-18.9%
Al Refaa	45-65	60-80	90-105	105-140	130-160	-18.8%
Al Warqaa (Buildings)	35-45	46-66	70-80	80-150	…..	-16.7%
Dubai Marina	65-75	80-120	120-160	160-200	220-240	-15.2%
International City	35-45	45-50	70-80	…..	…..	-14.3%
Hor Al Anz East	45-60	57-85	90-100	110-130	…..	-13.6%
Al Badaa	40-50	55-70	70-90	….	….	-13.5%
Hor Al Anz	40-50	50-60	70-80	75-100	…..	-11.8%
Abu Hail	40-50	50-70	70-80	95-105	…..	-11.8%
Trade Center 2	60-70	80-90	100-140	135-165	….	-11.1%
Trade Center 1	60-70	80-90	100-140	135-165	….	-11.1%
Al Souq Al Kabeer	45-55	60-70	75-85	100-130	….	-11.1%
Al Musalla	45-55	60-70	75-85	100-130	….	-11.1%
Al Muhaisna Fourth	35-45	50-60	60-70	80-90	…..	-10.3%
Jumeirah Beach Residence	75-90	100-125	140-160	160-200	230-250	-9.1%
Dubai Tower / Downtown	80-85	100-165	175-200	200-260	220-280	-8.5%
Al Murar	35-45	50-60	60-70	75-85	…..	-7.1%
Al Sabka	40-45	50-60	65-75	90-100	…..	-6.7%
Satwa	40-50	55-70	70-110	….	….	-2.7%
Gardens	…..	70-75	100-115	130-140	…..	0.0%
Al Baraha	35-45	45-60	65-75	85-95	…..	0.0%
Ayal Nasir	40-50	60-70	70-80	75-85	…..	0.0%
Umm Hurair	50-60	60-90	85-115	120-140	….	0.0%
Al Mankhool	45-65	70-80	85-125	120-150	150-170	0.0%
Oud Metha	55-65	65-95	95-125	105-140	….	2.3%
Al Ras	40-50	55-70	70-80	80-85	…..	3.1%
Al Barsha	50-55	65-85	95-115	110-140	….	5.0%
Al Daghaya	35-45	45-60	70-80	75-85	…..	6.7%
Naif	35-45	46-58	65-75	80-90	…..	13.3%
Al Karama	45-55	65-85	100-110	105-135	140-160	16.7%

Table 2: Rental Index for Villas (AED,000 per annum).
Residential Areas are ranked according to the price change for a
three-bedroom villa.

	2-bed	3-bed	4-bed	5-bed	6-bed	Change
Springs	100-130	140-160	160-180	…..	…..	-43.4%
Jumeirah Islands	…..	…..	270-290	300-320	…..	-37.8%
Green Community	…..	160-190	180-210	230-240	250-270	-36.4%
Meadows	…..	190-210	220-240	260-280	…..	-35.5%
Arabian Ranches	120-140	150-200	220-250	250-350	330-400	-34.0%
Umm Suqeim	145-175	200-240	260-320	290-360	…..	-32.3%
Palm Jumeirah	…..	250-280	300-350	375-420	…..	-29.3%
Al Barsha Residential	130-160	170-200	200-240	240-280	…..	-24.5%
Jumeirah	140-170	180-240	250-310	280-350	…..	-20.8%
Al Quoz Industrial	130-140	140-170	180-210	200-240	…..	-18.4%
Al Safa	130-160	160-200	200-240	240-280	…..	-18.2%
Al Badaa	120-150	140-180	180-220	210-250	…..	-18.0%
Al Mankhool	110-130	140-170	200-250	240-270	…..	-17.1%
Al Manara	135-165	170-200	200-250	250-290	…..	-15.9%
Umm Al Sheif	135-165	170-200	200-250	250-290	…..	-15.9%
Al Rashidiya	…..	120-150	150-170	175-185	…..	-15.6%
Hor Al Anz	…..	100-120	140-160	160-190	…..	-15.4%
Al Warga	…..	130-150	150-170	175-205	…..	-15.2%
Al Mezhar	…..	130-150	150-170	180-210	…..	-15.2%
Al Muhaisna First	…..	130-150	150-170	165-200	…..	-15.2%
Al Tawar	…..	130-160	155-175	195-205	…..	-14.7%
Al Muteena	…..	110-130	140-160	180-200	…..	-14.3%
Nad Al Hamar	…..	140-160	160-240	190-220	…..	-14.2%
Al Garhoud	…..	180-200	210-250	240-280	…..	-13.6%
Al Khawaneej	…..	130-160	160-170	190-210	…..	-12.1%
Al Wasl	130-160	170-200	200-240	240-280	…..	-11.9%
Al Wahaida	…..	115-135	135-145	160-180	…..	-10.7%
Al Jafeliah	100-120	110-140	130-160	150-180	…..	-7.4%
Nad Shamma	…..	150-150	150-170	175-185	…..	-6.3%
Abu Hail	…..	115-135	145-165	170-180	…..	-3.9%
Al Qusais	…..	120-140	130-150	150-170	…..	0.0%
Al Hudaiba	105-125	130-160	150-180	170-200	…..	0.0%
Mirdif (Complexes)	No data available from RERA
Mirdif (Individuals)	No data available from RERA

More tapes depicting Sheikh Issabin Zayed Al Nahyan torturing victims exist.

source CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A videotape of a heinous torture session is delaying the ratification of a civil nuclear deal between the United Arab Emirates and the United States, senior U.S. officials familiar with the case said.

On Wednesday, an Abu Dhabi government agency issued a statement deploring the video and promising a full investigation.

“The Government of Abu Dhabi unequivocally condemns the actions depicted on the video and will conduct a comprehensive review of the matter immediately,” said the statement issued by the Judicial Department’s Human Rights Office, which promised to make its findings public.

Abu Dhabi to probe royal torture claim

source Financial Times

Abu Dhabi 29, April 2009

Abu Dhabi said on Wednesday it would investigate allegations that a
senior member of the ruling family tortured an Afghan citizen.

Toture Sheikh Issa Al Nahyan owns Luxury Villa near Munich Germany

source Tz-Online Germany
The German Press reports about the torture, done by Sheikh Issa Al Nahyan, shown on ABC News.

Reports also say, that Sheikh Issa Al Nahyan often visit his luxury Villa in Dietramszell, Bad Toelz, near Munich.

The most Comments left on this Report say:
Sheikh Issa Al Nahyan – you are not longer welcome here in Germany.

UAE: Prosecute Torture by Royal Family Member

source HRW

Independent Body Should Investigate Abuse of Afghan Grain Dealer, Police Role and Flawed Ministry Review

(New York) – The United Arab Emirates should investigate and prosecute the torture of an Afghan grain dealer by a royal family member, Shaikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, and the police, Human Rights Watch said in a letter today to the UAE president (http://www.hrw.org/node/82751 ). Videotaped evidence appears to show Shaikh al Nahyan and the police beating, using electric cattle prods on, and driving over the Afghani man.

Human Rights Watch called on the government to immediately establish an independent body to investigate both the torture of the man, Mohammed Shah Poor, and the Ministry of Interior’s failure to bring those involved to justice. A videotape of the attack was shown on an ABC News program on April 22, 2009 (http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7407186 ).

“The government’s failure to prosecute those involved in this undisputed incident of torture and abuse at the hands of a royal family member and the police is an appalling miscarriage of justice,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “What’s even more shocking is the government’s insistence that it investigated and found no violation of UAE laws.”

According to credible information, including the videotape featured on the ABC News segment, Shaikh al Nahyan tortured Poor in October or November 2004, with the assistance of police and others, using whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails. Shaikh al Nahyan also poured a large container of salt on Poor’s bleeding wounds. Near the end of the video, Shaikh positioned Poor on the desert sand and then drove over him repeatedly; the sound of what appears to be breaking bones is audible on the tape. Poor survived, although he still had to spend months in hospital with broken bones and internal injuries. The acts shown on the video constitute clear violations of the UAE’s Constitution as well as international human rights law.

Human Rights Watch received a copy of a letter sent by the UAE’s Ministry of Interior on April 8, 2009 to ABC News, in which the ministry did not characterize the abuse in question as torture, but simply as an assault that the parties subsequently settled “privately.” It further concluded that its investigation found that the police “followed all rules, policies and procedures correctly.” Neither the police department nor the Ministry of Interior has made public the findings of the police review and investigation of the matter, or the basis for their conclusion of proper police conduct.

In its letter, Human Rights Watch urged UAE President Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan to establish an independent body with authority not only to investigate the torture episode but to also recommend disciplinary steps or criminal prosecution of persons implicated in abuse.

“Law enforcement officials become criminals when they inflict or tolerate torture,” said Whitson. “The UAE government needs to act now if it is to restore public confidence in the country’s criminal justice system and to show that the rule of law, and not impunity for its violators, is the policy of the country.”

The Human Rights Watch letter urges the UAE government to publicly and unequivocally renounce the use of torture and physical abuse by the police, others in positions of authority, or private citizens, and to reaffirm its commitment to abide by international law provisions banning the use of torture and other cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Human Rights Watch called for police training on the acceptable use of force under international law.

The torture incident also highlights why the UAE should revise its draft media law (http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/04/06/just-good-news-please ) and, among other things, remove Article 32, which provides a fine of up to 5,000,000 dirhams (US$1,350,000) against anyone who “disparages” senior government personnel or members of the royal family. Despite receiving international news coverage, media in the UAE have been reluctant to report on the incident.

ABC News Exclusive: Torture Tape Implicates UAE Royal Sheikh

Dubai contractors still concerned over payments

source Reuters

GOVERNMENT OBLIGATIONS

Dubai’s government said on Monday it would continue to meet all its contractual obligations, including to contractors, and would not limit the number of construction firms licensed to operate in the emirate.

Emaar Properties EMAR.DU, in which the state is the largest stake holder, said payments for contractors and consultants were based on a credit cycle agreed with each firm.

“All payments that meet the criteria have been honoured and will continue to be cleared, in line with our contractual agreements,” Emaar said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

State-owned Nakheel declined to comment. no one at Dubai Properties and Sama Dubai were not immediately available for comment.

London-based MEED has reported that contractors who are owed money would not be paid for work they have carried out on Dubai government-backed schemes as the emirate will only settle debts with contractors it wishes to work with in future.

The government denied the MEED report but said it would not decide how firms that had received aid would use the funds.

“We are still waiting for payments from a government-linked firm,” a source at an international contracting firm said. “I am expecting a call from them in the next few days … until we speak to them I don’t know what the situation is for us.”

Nasser al-Shaikh, the head of Dubai’s department of finance, said last week the government would not reveal the names of the firms receiving support from the first bond proceeds, although key beneficiaries were developers and companies in which Dubai’s government holds some ownership stake.  Continued…

Abu Dhabi ruling family linked to ‘torture’ video

source Telegraph UK

The emergence of a video purporting to show a senior member of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family co-ordinating the torture of a businessman has threatened to tarnish the reputation of the pro-Western, oil-rich Gulf state.

The video purports to show Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, the half-brother of the Manchester City owner, Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, participating in the torture of an Afghan grain dealer with whom he had had a disagreement.

The al Nahyan clan’s position as rulers of Abu Dhabi, the biggest of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, means they have also acted as hereditary rulers of the state since it was founded in 1971.

At a desert location under cover of darkness the torture victim, Mohammed Shah Poor, is held down and has sand stuffed down his throat.

Bullets are then fired near his feet in the sand and he is beaten with a plank of wood from which nails protruded. Salt is then rubbed into his open wounds. An electric cattle prod is also used on part of his body while his genitals are soaked in lighter fluid, which is then set alight.

The coup de grace comes when Mr Nahyan appears to drive a Mercedes SUV over the victim, accompanied by what seems to be the sound of breaking bones. Mr Nahyan is heard on the video seeming to co-ordinate the torture assisted by uniformed members of what seem to be the UAE police force and army.

The tape, broadcast last week by the American television channel, ABC, has already led to calls for the United States to reconsider its commercial ties with the UAE, the tiny but wealthy state that includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

James McGovern, a US congressman, has called for a freeze on government aid to the Emirates.

He also called for Mr Nahyan to be refused a US visa.

In a letter to Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, Mr McGovern said: “I cannot describe the horror and revulsion I felt when witnessing what is on this video … I could not watch it without constantly flinching.”

ABC put up a section of the video on its website, although sections containing the most shocking material, including the use of the cattle prod, were not released.

The tape was given to ABC by Bassam Nabulsi, a US citizen and Houston businessman, who has begun a legal battle in the American courts against Mr Nahyan for alleged maltreatment and loss of earnings after a business deal went sour.

The UAE government has confirmed Mr Nahyan is the man in the video, although it issued a statement saying the matter had been investigated by its police but no charges were deemed necessary.

The statement said the video was not “part of a pattern of behaviour” and, as permitted under Abu Dhabi law, “the parties involved … settled the matter privately by agreeing not to bring formal charges against each other â ” ie theft on the one hand and assault on the other”.

The ministry of the interior said police followed all necessary procedures when investigating the incident.

Read also:

The Guardian UK

ABC News

Financial Times

Open Letter

German Press Bild Zeitung

Compensation for breach of contract – How to Avoid Court? Here’s how…

source Rootsland
Over the last 10 years, Dubai has gained international attention due to its extensive growth and progress, particularly in the projects and construction sectors. During that period, deals were often done and contracts entered into quicker than if those deals were being carried out in less dynamic markets.

 It seems that commercial parties relied heavily on their ability to negotiate solutions to any dispute rather than relying too heavily on the terms of their contracts or resorting to litigation or other formal dispute resolution procedures. The same parties may have also taken comfort from the obligation on contracting parties to act in good faith imposed by the UAE’s Civil Transactions Law (the Civil Code).

 Of course the current economic climate is very different. Now financing is more difficult to obtain. This has reduced confidence that negotiation alone will resolve disputes. As companies compete for the limited credit available, contracts are being more extensively negotiated and scrutinized by all parties (including lenders). Parties are no longer relying on the market’s continued growth to push deals through or their obligation to act in good faith. The focus is shifting towards identifying what dispute resolution procedures should apply and what remedies are available if the other contracting party breaches its contractual obligations. One of the remedies receiving greater attention is the damages payable if a contracting party is in breach of a contract. Of course, the protection provided by damages will depend heavily on the offending party’s ability to pay in this market.

Time to review

 Most contracts should have provisions dealing specifically with what will happen when a breach of contract occurs. Often an overarching termination provision exists, in addition to provisions relating to curing defaults, damages and events such as force majeure or change in law, and these all play a role in determining the options available to contracting parties in a variety of circumstances.

 The current environment highlights the need for solid contractual provisions and should be taken as an opportunity for all players in the project and construction sector to regroup and focus on contracts that they have entered into and those that they are about to enter into. Everyone involved in project and construction deals should be asking themselves what they are entitled to if the contract is breached by the other party.

 

Consideration should be given to whether contracts yet to be entered into should specifically address these issues. But what if the decision is taken not to do so or an existing contract does not address damages? The Civil Code provides an entitlement to compensation for breach of contract even where the contract itself does not provide for such compensation.

Damages under UAE Law

The purpose of damages is to compensate a party for any loss suffered as a result of default by counterparty to a contract. If damages for a breach of contract are not fixed under a provision of the law or in the contract itself, the Civil Code gives the court discretion to assess compensation “in an amount equivalent to the damage in fact suffered at the time of the occurrence”. The focus here is on the actual loss suffered by a party and gives the court a broad discretion to determine an appropriate award of damages on the basis of the facts and evidence before it. However, how is the ultimate determination made and what limits are imposed on the amount of compensation that may be awarded?

Other provisions of the Civil Code that do not specifically relate to contractual damages may give some guidance as to how compensation may be assessed by a court: “In all cases the compensation shall be assessed on the basis of the amount of harm suffered by the victim, together with loss of profit, provided that it is the natural result of the harmful act”.

 The key element of this provision is that a party suffering loss will be compensated for that loss, including any loss of profit, which flows naturally from the default. The explanatory memorandum to the Civil Code says damages are payable in respect of the actual loss suffered as well as loss of expectation (that is loss of an opportunity to obtain a benefit under a contract or to avoid a loss).

 Each type of damages claimed will need to be substantiated and shown to result from the breach. Consequential (or indirect) losses will generally only be recoverable where it can be shown that the party causing the loss did so with a malicious intent. While it is important to keep in mind the award of damages is always at the court’s discretion, a specific damages regime in a contract can have the benefit of providing greater certainty as to a party’s right to contractual damages and can assist parties negotiate ways of avoiding recourse to court in this challenging environment.

Jailed Dubai mum Marnie Pearce to be freed by pardon tomorrow

source Mirror

Marnie Pearce, the British mum jailed in Dubai for adultery, has won a dramatic pardon and will be set free tomorrow.

Marnie, 40, was locked up after her Egyptian husband falsely claimed she cheated on him. She was supposed to be deported back to Britain after her sentence – which could have meant never seeing her two young sons again.

Now, in a dramatic U-turn by the authorities in Dubai, Marnie is being pardoned and allowed to stay to fight  her ex-husband, Ihab El Labban, for custody of the boys.

In an emotional phone call from prison on the eve of her release, Marnie told the Sunday Mirror: “I didn’t dare believe I would ever have the chance to hug my babies again.

“When I first heard the deportation order was going to be lifted I just felt numb. When the news did sink in I cried tears of joy.”

The U-turn comes after a long-running campaign by the Sunday Mirror and human rights charity Amnesty International, who describe Marnie as a “prisoner of conscience”.

Under the terms of her pardon, the conviction for adultery – which Marnie vehemently denies – will still stand.

But a ruling ordering deportation at the end of her three-month sentence, cut short for good behaviour, has been scrapped.

CAMPAIGN

It means she can stay to fight for custody of sons Laith, eight, and Ziad, four, who were wrenched sobbing from her in heartbreaking scenes filmed on a mobile phone.

El Labban won custody by accusing his wife of adultery – a serious crime punishable by jail under Sharia law – after she exposed his affair with an American woman.

Marnie, from Bracknell, Berks, said: “All I have ever wanted is to stay in Dubai and fight for the chance to see my boys. No mother should be kept from their children.

“It’s a child’s right to see their mother and I’ve got to fight to make sure the boys have the chance to be with me, for their sake as much as mine. I am holding on to the thought that I will be able to hold them, cuddle them and tell them how much I love them and how much I have missed them.”

Marnie’s reprieve came moments before campaigners were due to hand in a petition, signed by 5,000 people, to the United Arab Emirates embassy in London.

he hand-over was cancelled when senior officials at Dubai’s judiciary agreed on Thursday that Marnie’s deportation should be reviewed.

It is believed the decision followed a series of meetings with Foreign Office officials.

On Thursday afternoon a message was sent from the Dubai authorities to prison officials at Central Jail al-Awir, where Marnie is being held, to say that she was not going to be deported.

Marnie, who wed El Labban in the Seychelles in 1999, said: “I want to thank the British public for all the support they have given me – it has really kept me going.

“And I want to thank the Sunday Mirror for helping to raise awareness of my case and keeping it in the public eye.”

POLICE RAID

Marnie, who was not allowed to speak in court to defend herself, was arrested last March along with British ex-pat Brian Clark after El Labban claimed they were having an affair.

When officers raided Marnie’s home they found the pair fully clothed, having a cup of tea.

Yet both were arrested and Marnie was charged when her husband suddenly produced used condoms which he claimed were evidence.

But last month a Sunday Mirror investigation revealed that pharmacist El Labban, 41, was the real love cheat. He had an affair with American businesswoman Tonya Thompson, 46, a mum of two who he met at a sales conference in Dubai.

When Marnie found out she threw him out of their home. Fearing he would lose custody of the children, he then reported Marnie as an adulteress.

Before she was jailed for three months in February, Marnie was forced to hand over her children to El Labban in harrowing scenes captured by a passer-by and posted online.

Marnie said yesterday: “The last few months have been a very dark time for me. But knowing that the deportation order has been lifted it is like a light has come back in my life.

“It has been very tough in jail and hard to stay positive. I was completely heartbroken at the thought of not seeing my sons again. Now at least I have some sort of chance of access.”

Dubai Public Prosecution – Indian CEO Dubai based Estate Agent loged a libel case against 3 Journalists

source GulfNews

Dubai: The chief executive officer (CEO) of a Dubai-based realtor has lodged a libel case against a newswire and three of its journalists for publishing incorrect news about him, Gulf News learnt on Thursday.

The Public Prosecution started questioning the newswire’s two British journalists, 30-year-old S.B., 29-year-old A.G. and 29-year-old Lebanese journalist M.H., over alleged libel charges made by the Indian CEO, identified as K.B., earlier this month.

K.B.’s lawyer Eisa Bin Haidar, of the Bin Haidar Group of Advocates and Legal Consultants mentioned in his complaint to the police: “The newswire and the suspects publish business news on the internet and they are specialists in investment and business news. The suspects published on the newswire’s website [earlier this year] malicious and incorrect news about K.B. who was reportedly libelled and defamed before his clients and partners and incurred financial, moral and emotional damages. K.B. lost a number of partnerships following the untrue news. The suspects claimed in their story that my client was arrested for alcohol-related charges and a bounced cheque the amount of which they didn’t disclose”.

Bin Haidar mentioned in his complaint that the suspects reportedly aimed to ‘malign and harm his client’.

“The suspects published a second defamatory story against K.B. sometime later. The defendants reportedly libelled my client hence violating article 372 of the Federal Penal Code which stipulates that any suspect who libels someone publicly faces a maximum two years imprisonment or a maximum fine of Dh20,000,” said Bin Haidar.

K.B.’s legal representative will also be suing the suspects (if proven guilty) for Dh20,001 in temporary compensation against his client’s allegedly incurred losses.

A senior prosecutor told Gulf News that the case is still under investigation and has not been referred to court.

In keeping with the media code of ethics, Gulf News will not name the suspects.

Shahram Zadeh against Al Fajer Properties Maktoum Hasher Juma Al Maktoum – Comment of the Month

April 10, 2009 comment from Salahudin

I am a lawyer & familiar with such disputes known as financial cases.

Its actually very simple, the judge has to appoint an Accounts Expert (Court Appointed Auditor), to examine the accounts of Al Fajer Properties, and it will be very clear if Sheikh Hasher Maktoum has invested anything. I believe the lawyer of Sheikh Hasher Maktoum, Sheikh maktoum Hasher & Al fajer will do their best to close the case before the court appoints an Expert to avoid the embaressement.

If Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Al Maktoum succeeds in closing the case without the court Auditor examining Al fajer accounts, then it will be a big loss to dubai justice system because it shows they are afraid the truth will come out!!!

Sheikh Hasher Maktoum should be smart and try to settle the case with Dr.Zadeh Shahram before it becomes a nationalembaressement for Dubai ruling family.

__________________________________________________________

April 10, 2009 comment from Tom

If the sheikhs win this case, it will be the end of foreign investor’s trust in dubai. This will be a test for dubai, is it really a safe & secure investment hub as they portray it???? Or the laws are not applicable to the ruling family?

__________________________________________________________

April 10, 2009 comment from Al Fajer Victim

This is going to be a test case for dubai. This will reveal the depth of the corruption & behind the scenes torture, illegal arrest, fabrication of cases, all to protect the few sheikhs like sheikh hasher maktoum & his well known crook son who just thursday threatened me in front of my wife that if I complain about al fajer “it will have very bad consequences, I don’t want you to disapear” Shame on you sheikh maktoum hasher, you are nothing but a thief with everyone.

Schon Properties Dubai – Back in the Headlines with negative News

source Xpress4Me

Investors suffer due to massive delay in project Dubai Lagoons

Anita Henry, a British teacher who has invested in a one-bedroom apartment at Dubai Lagoons, now faces a double whammy. So does Purvi Beri, an Indian advertising executive, and many other investors.

The units they bought are delayed for two years and the developer, Schon Properties, is “stonewalling” them.

“It now costs me Dh8,000 per month to rent, as they have delayed this build,” said Henry. “Now, they have advised me of a December 2010 completion – how disgusting is that?”

She said her one-bedroom unit at Dubai Lagoons – a 52-building project at the Dubai Investments Park (DIP) – was scheduled for a June 2008 handover.

“They have no intention of compensating anyone. I had planned my kids’ schooling around this,” she said.

Major payment

“In 2007, I sold my house in the UK and invested that money in a one-bedroom unit at Dubai Lagoons for Dh480,000,” said Henry, who has paid more than 63 per cent of the property price.

Purvi Beri is in the same bind due to the delay. “I am stuck. I took out a bank loan for Dh250,000 to be able to buy this unit. I sold property in India to survive and take care of my son’s fees. Since my property has not been handed over as promised, I was forced to move to my sister’s place. Now, the developers are asking me to pay more, but I’m not going to because the construction hasn’t even happened.”

Asher Schon, Vice-President of Schon Properties, said, “The project has been set back a little, due to numerous reasons,” he said.

“Firstly, the expansion of the two-lane road into a six-lane highway took out about 40 metres off our plot. Secondly, there was an internal feud between partners of our first contractor so we replaced them. We negotiated with the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), who were cooperative. We are also working with investors to move them into zones that will be completed earlier,” said Schon.

 

Al Fajer Properties – April 8 , 2009 – Dubai court postpones 1.9 Billion Dollar case against Sheikh Maktoum Hasher bin Juma Al Maktoum, Sheikh Hasher Maktoum Juma Al Maktoum and Sheikha Maryam

DUBAI, Apr 08, 2009 (AFP) –

A Dubai court postponed on Wednesday a 1.9 billion dollar lawsuit by Shahram Abdulla Zadeh ( Iranian) gainst members of the ruling family over an allegedly lost property investment to give the defence time to prepare.

Lawyer Hussein al-Jaziri asked for a “long period of time to respond to the case,” but the judge set May 4 as the date for the next hearing.

No one represented the defence during the first hearing, on March 11.

Iranian Shahram Abdullah Zadeh claims he invested the 1.9 billion dollars as the sole capital of a company, Al-Fajer Properties

Under United Arab Emirates law, only UAE and Gulf citizens may register property firms, and ruling family member Sheikh Hasher Maktoum bin Jumaa al-Maktoum is listed as the owner.

“I was the sole investor. Al-Fajer Propertiesis my company. Sheikh Hasher’s only contribution has been the real estate licence as a sponsor,” he said in March.

Zadeh, who was sacked as company president last year, is demanding the “recovery of all material assets of Al-Fajer Properties,” according to legal documents obtained by AFP.

These include liquid assets and property, which are estimated at seven billion dirhams (1.9 billion dollars), and nine percent interest since the suit was filed.

“We have enough documents to prove he was the sole investor,” Zadeh’s lawyer Salem al-Shaali told AFP after the first hearing.

Sheikh Hasher is a brother-in-law of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. Also named in the suit are his daughter, Sheikha Maryam, a partner in the company, and son Sheikh Maktoum, who was made president of Al-Fajer after Zadeh was sacked.

Their names were only made public on Wednesday.

Zadeh said he was detained by Dubai police at the time he was dismissed last year and held without charge for 60 days, and that his passport was confiscated and is still being held without explanation.

The case comes as several executives from high-profile Dubai firms are held on suspicion of embezzlement and as the once-booming regional business and tourism hub struggles to stave off the impact of the global economic slowdown.

ak/al

More about the case Al Fajer Properties
which must be seen also in relation to the pending case Dynasty Zarooni

Dubai Financial Crisis – Is Nakheel not paying?

source Kippreport

According to a media report, the property developer owes UK engineering firms more than $290 million. Nakheel has declined to comment.

A report in the UK-based magazine New Civil Engineer quotes analysts as saying that real estate developer Nakheel has not paid debts amounting to more than $290 million. The money is owed to engineering companies in the UK such as Atkins, Mouchel, Scott Wilson and WSP.

Nakheel has declined to comment, saying only that it “doesn’t disclose confidential information about supplier contracts.”

Earlier this month, Atkins revealed that delays in payment for its Middle-Eastern projects had forced the company to use around $36 million of its own cash to keep operations running over the past three months. “We expect that cash collection will remain challenging for at least the next few months,” the company said.

According to the report in New Civil Engineer, WSP also released a statement recently, stating that it was making “appropriate and prudent provisions in respect of potential impairment of trade receivables and unbilled amounts due on contracts” in the Middle East.

Like most developers in the region, and around the world, Nakheel has been hit hard by the financial crisis. Last month it announced that its $3 billion mall expansion program would be delayed by 12 months.

In February this year, it indefinitely delayed the start of construction of the Worlds of Discovery theme park project. The development, which will include four water theme parks, is being undertaken in partnership with the US-based Busch Entertainment Corporation.

In January, the developer announced that it would halt work on its one kilometer tall tower, the Nakheel Harbour & Tower, for a year. And in December last year, Nakheel confirmed that work on the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Palm Jumeirah had stopped, and that the project would be delayed indefinitely. It also postponed work on Frond N villas, Gateway Towers and The Universe. In November, the developer laid off 15 percent of its workforce – 500 employees.

Around the world, real estate has been one of the sectors hit hardest by the financial crisis. Deutsche Bank estimates that in the US, up to half of the $1.3 trillion in commercial property loans dues for repayment by 2013 could be ineligible for refinancing – a potential time bomb for developers, many of whom will not be able to repay the debt.

Being a government-owned company, Nakheel is eligible for a slice of the $10 billion raised by the Dubai government through a sale of bonds to the UAE Central Bank. Earlier this week, Nasser al-Shaikh, director general of Dubai Department of Finance, said that more than half of the $10 billion has been distributed to government-owned firms. He did not disclose names, but said the situation at these companies had improved. “All of the state-linked real estate developers have already started paying their bills,” he told Dubai Eye radio station.

UAE laws translated into English

source TheNational

ABU DHABI // In a major step towards improving transparency in the legal system, the Ministry of Justice yesterday announced that every federal law passed since the UAE’s founding in 1971 has been translated into English and will soon be available online.

The ministry has also begun translating 1,500 federal court decisions, 500 international treaties signed by the UAE and 2,000 official fatwas issued by UAE muftis, to create a centralised, easily accessible body of case law and statutes in both Arabic and English.

The Government says the translations will give legal practitioners, businesses and scholars unprecedented access to the country’s lawbooks. The aim is to improve understanding of the UAE’s laws and legal system internationally, as well as foster the transparency sought by international companies and investors.

“There are more people that speak English than Arabic in the UAE and our goal is to make the laws available to them,” said Abdulla al Majid, the Minister’s Adviser and the director of the translation project.

All the documents will be posted online at www.elaws.gov.ae

The website will initially be free for public access for three months, but the ministry is contemplating eventually charging users a subscription fee.

We are looking for feedback at this stage from the public to wage which direction we will go. We are considering creating different levels of memberships, such as academics and corporations,” Mr al Majid said.

More than 80 people working in the US, Lebanon and the UAE, including various ministries and courts, have worked on the project for two years so far.

“This is a three-step programme. First we had to gather all the relevant laws, then put them on the website in Arabic and then translate them in an ongoing programme,” Mr al Majid said.

The programme also aims to centralise the federal laws, treaties and fatwas and decisions taken by the Federal Supreme Court.

“Our goal was to get every single law created and amended since 1973,” Mr al Majid said.

Although the country was founded in 1971 with the passage of the Constitution, the first federal laws were not passed for another two years.

“This is clearly a wealth of information that for the first time is available to the public directly from the Ministry of Justice and not from a law firm,” Mr al Majid said.

“The best feature about this is the search engine which allows you to find even one word amid a sea of legal documents. That changes the face of research for academics, lawyers, judges, businesses and the public. You can imagine the kind of impact this will have on the overall justice system.”

The English translations are just the beginning, Mr al Majid said.

“We are also considering translating them into other languages, and translating specific laws within each emirate. At this point our focus is on English. This opens new doors for us and boosts our credibility further.”

He said the UAE’s diverse population meant that English had become the language of business. The project “will encourage people to learn more about our values and law even from their own countries before they come here,” Mr al Majid added.

Several sources have already translated many UAE laws.

The most prominent effort has been undertaken by a company called Affinitext, which has translated more than 3,000 laws and made them available in Arabic and English on the internet for specialised users.

The project was initially an undertaking for DLA Piper, one of the largest law firms.

“There are over 3,000 laws with no central repository,” said Graham Thomson, founder of Affinitext.

“Each law resides with a different area: free zones, ministries and so on. To collate just the Arabic is a major logistic challenge. Then translating it, then putting it on the best available programme on the internet,” He said.

However, the translations by Affinitext are available online for a license fee for companies and law firms, and are not meant for private use.

From the Financial Times

source Financial Times

RERA Dubai – New Law for settling Property disputes

sourche Xpress4me

Full refunds will be given to investors of real estate development projects that are officially cancelled by government property regulators under a pending law, XPRESS has learnt.

Under Law No 9 of 2009, Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera) has stipulated that if – after a thorough government review – a project is cancelled, all cash paid by buyers will be returned by developers upon termination of contract.

Effectiveness

Law No 9, which provides a sliding scale for refunds, has been signed and approved. The law however, only becomes official and legally binding once it gets published in Dubai’s official gazette.

Rera will apply the law and give directions to developers on what steps to take. Mohammad Kamal, Head of Real Estate

Rera officials couldn’t be reached for comment by press time. The new rules amend previous laws and will frame new procedures for “terminations of sale and purchase agreements for off-plan units and will set the damages payable to the developer depending on the progress of construction”, according to Lovells law firm.

Lovells stated that if a “developer’s project is cancelled by Rera” the “purchaser shall be refunded all monies paid to date”.

The changes may help unravel months of uncertainty by investors who have faithfully continued to pay instalments to developers who failed to begin any construction on projects to which buyers legally signed contracts.

“Law 9 will provide significant guidance to the real estate market and will clarify the uncertainty on terminations and damages,” said Lovells.

Mohammad Kamal, Lovells Head of Real Estate Middle East, said the final version of the new law contains the full refund provision for cancelled projects only.

Kamal was part of a Rera working group that helped draft the new rules.

“Rera will apply the law and give directions to developers on what steps to take,” Kamal said, noting that arbitration won’t be needed because “the disputes would be settled under the law”. Compensation rate

As previously reported by XPRESS, the new law contains a sliding scale that spells out the rate of investor compensation to be paid by developers based upon the amount of construction completed.

Roughly 875 projects are now being visited by government inspectors across Dubai to determine the progress of each development.

The new law, meanwhile, dictates that all terminations “must be served through the Dubai Land Department and the purchaser shall be given 30 days to rectify a breach”.

Sliding scale

The following is the percentage of refunds as provided for in Law No 9:

• 80 per cent completed: Buyer forfeits 100 per cent of cash he/she has paid to date
• 60 per cent completed: Buyer forfeits 40 per cent of purchase price
• Less than 60 per cent completed: Buyer forfeits 25 per cent of purchase price
• Construction hasn’t started: Buyer forfeits 30 per cent of cash he/she has paid to date
• When project is officially cancelled by Rera: Buyer shall be refunded all cash he/she has paid to date.

(Source: Lovells)

UBS downgrades UAE Property Sector – 70 % Pricefall

source WallStreetJournal

DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones)–Swiss Investment bank UBS (UBS.AG) Tuesday downgraded the U.A.E.’s real estate sector, citing a possible 70% fall in prices and significant oversupply as its main concerns.

“We believe the recent run up in equities with positive global market sentiment, U.A.E. government bailout as a backdrop is unsustainable,” the bank said in a research note. “We don’t yet see fundamentals improving, hence we view overall systematic risk as mispriced.”

Despite shares in Abu Dhabi’s Aldar Properties, and Dubai’s Union Properties and Emaar Properties rising 84%, 40%, and 33% respectively over the past month, UBS downgraded Emaar and Union Properties to sell, from neutral rating and Aldar to neutral, from buy.

Dubai property prices have been sliding since September when the ongoing global financial crisis and a fall in oil prices ended the Gulf region’s economic boom.

UBS expects Dubai’s population to fall 10% over the next two years due to job cuts, with residential vacancy rates reaching up to 30% by the end of 2010 due to an oversupply.

It says that this could cause the average house price to fall to as much as 500 U.A.E. dirhams ($136.1) per square foot from a peak of AED1850 in the fourth quarter of 2008.

“In our view we are still in relatively early stages of the property down cycle in the U.A.E.,” UBS said. “We believe risk-reward profiles are not yet compelling for investors to consider market reentry hence continued price declines are expected.”

PRICES TO FALL FURTHER?

UBS said average property prices have already fallen at least 25% to approximately AED1400 per square foot, but anticipates that prices will become even more attractive in the second half of the year.

“We believe the majority of investors would prefer to stay on the sidelines and revisit potential purchase opportunities in second half of 2009,” the bank said in its note.

Amid the slump, many large developers have been scaling back projects to survive the downturn.

UBS estimates that between 60% and 70%, or $300 billion worth, of new projects have either been canceled or delayed amid the slump.

The bank said Dubai’s total liabilities currently stand at $112 billion, which includes a $42 billion cost to finish all residential properties.

The emirate’s exposure to mortgages last year is approximately $30 billion, UBS said, and expects this to rise over the next year.

“With ramping job losses and loan-to-values of various properties rising above 100%, implying negative equity, we believe mortgage default rates will pick up over the coming quarters, potentially in the mid to high single digit range,” it said.

Emaar shares closed Wednesday 2.8% higher at AED2.61, while Union Properties rose 2.3% to AED0.90. Aldar shares gained 2.7% to AED3.78.

Dubai Jailed Brit mum Marnie Pearce’s ex husband tells her she’ll never see kids again

source mirror uk

The British mum jailed in Dubai for adultery has been told by the ex-husband who framed her: “You will never see your children again.”

Marnie Pearce – still in prison for a “crime” she vehemently denies – was told the news in a cruel phone taunt from her former husband Ihab El Labban.

She rang begging him to bring their sons – Laith, eight, and Ziad, five – for a final prison visit before she is deported to the UK. But he refused.

A friend, who spoke to Marnie moments after the call, said: “He coldly told her, ‘I am not bringing the boys to see you’. Even when she begged and screamed for him to change his mind he just laughed and kept saying, ‘No, no, no’ over and over again. He said she will never see the boys again.

How cruel can one man be?” The news has left Marnie, 40, from Bracknell, Berks, totally devastated and struggling to cope with prison life even though her three-month sentence is almost over. She is due to be freed at the end of this month.

The friend added: “Marnie is now at her lowest ebb. She spends most of her time crying. All that has kept her going over the last few weeks is the thought of a last meeting with her sons, but she has been denied that.”

This is the latest twist in a disturbing case first exclusively revealed by the Sunday Mirror last year. Marnie – the only British woman ever to be jailed in Dubai for adultery – was convicted on suspect evidence and without an opportunity to say anything in her defence.

She now faces more heartache as El Labban, 41, has been handed permanent custody of the couple’s children. The only hope she has of ever seeing them again is if he travels to the UK which he has refused to do.

It has left her with no option but to mount a legal battle to win back custody of the boys. But that is likely to take many years.

Marnie is being supported by human rights campaign group Amnesty, who are demanding her immediate release.

She was arrested last March along with a British expat friend after El Labban tipped off police in the Arab state that they were having an affair – punishable by jail under Dubai law.

When officers raided Marnie’s home they found the pair fully clothed having a cup of tea. The friend insists he was only there to use her computer. But both were arrested and Marnie was charged when her husband suddenly produced used condoms which he claimed were evidence.

Last month a Sunday Mirror investigation revealed that pharmacist El Labban is the real love cheat as he had an affair with American Tonya Thompson, 46, in Dubai in October 2007.

When Marnie found out she threw her husband out of their apartment. Fearing he would lose custody of their children he framed Marnie as an adulteress.

Dubai law pins down property defaulters – If the developer has not been able to start construction “without any negligence or omission on the developer’s part”, the developer may keep 30 per cent of the money paid by the buyer to that point

source The National

The Dubai Land Department is planning to issue an amended property law that will determine refunds for investors who default on their payments based on construction progress of the project, according to lawyers briefed on the matter.

The move will bring clarity to the property market in Dubai, where a credit squeeze and the effects of the global financial crisis have led to defaults by home buyers. But some investors have criticised the amendment for being too heavily in favour of developers.

Lawyers say the amendment to article 11 of Dubai Law 13 of 2008 will stipulate that in cases where a buyer defaults and the developer has constructed at least 80 per cent of the project, the buyer loses all money paid to that point. The home can then be auctioned to compensate the developer for the rest of the cost.

If a developer has completed at least 60 per cent of the project and the buyer defaults, the developer is entitled to keep 40 per cent of the purchase price.

But if a developer has completed less than 60 per cent of the project, it can only keep 25 per cent of the purchase price.

If the developer has not been able to start construction “without any negligence or omission on the developer’s part”, the developer may keep 30 per cent of the money paid by the buyer to that point.

Developers would have to refund any money due to the purchaser within one year, or within 60 days of the resale of the home.

A legal briefing from the law firm Clyde & Co said the amendment “provides much anticipated clarification regarding the procedures required to be followed by developers in respect of defaulting purchasers, as well as the rights of developers to retain purchaser monies upon cancellation”.

The original law specified that if a buyer defaulted on payments to the developer, the buyer would be able to recover 70 per cent of any money they had turned over to that point.

But when the property market started to face difficulties last autumn, the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA) issued an interpretation of the law that said the developer could retain 30 per cent of the total price of the property. In some cases, this meant the developer could keep all payments a buyer had made to them.

Officials from RERA later admitted that the interpretation was an emergency measure intended to prevent a wave of defaults that would cripple the property sector.

The new amendment, called Dubai Law No. 9 of 2009, will not only provide more specific terms but be retroactive for all property contracts signed in Dubai. If a contract between a buyer and a developer has a contrary clause, it will be rendered void, according to the Clyde & Co briefing.

Emad Eldin Farouq, a senior legal counsel with the Dubai Land Department, told a panel last week that the amendment had been signed into law and would soon be published in the official gazette of Dubai, according to an article in Xpress, which first reported the story. The amendment would “maintain the confidence of investors and safeguard the real estate of Dubai”, Mr Farouq said, according to Xpress.

But some investors said the amendment did not go far enough in protecting investors from developers who had delayed construction indefinitely.

“It is taking away our rights from the way the law was originally written,” said Nigel Knight, a homebuyer and member of the Dubai Property Investors Group.

The investors’ group handed the Land Department a petition last week asking for a meeting to discuss concerns it has with the amendment.

A Dubai Land Department spokesman could not be reached yesterday.

Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum: “The life-span of lies is always short.”

source EmiratesBusiness24/7
The UAE has acted as a cohesive federation to face the global financial meltdown with a fast, well-thought-out response and has overcome the crisis with the least amount of losses, the nation’s Vice-President and Prime Minister said yesterday, adding that “the worst is already behind us”.

In his first large-scale online interaction with the media, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, said categorically the nation’s economy would post positive growth this year and added: “I can safely say that we have succeeded in containing the risks of the global financial crisis in a record time.”

In response to a question by Emirates Business, Sheikh Mohammed said the panic phase is now over: “Our position is far better than other countries, and encouraging economic indicators have just started to emerge.

“Enhanced liquidity levels across the banking sector, banks’ resumption of credit operations and increased number of investors eager to seize investment opportunities in the realty and financial markets are among the many positive and encouraging indicators,” he said.

“I believe that no preventive measures, neither in the UAE nor any other country in the world, would have provided the desired immunity from the ramifications of the global financial meltdown.

“The UAE’s solid economic structure, efficient establishments, adoption of a balanced model of conservative banking policies and liberal economic approach were the key elements that enhanced the country’s ability to survive the negative implications of the global crisis and prevented any case of bankruptcy in any of the country’s banks or major corporations,” he said.

“The impact of the crisis on our economy was significant during the last quarter of 2008, yet it was not as harsh as on other economies.”

He took on critical international media reports that “weave rumours and negative speculation” saying: “We have been very transparent with all measures over the past few months to counter the impact of the global financial crisis. The life-span of lies is always short.”

In what can be termed a benchmark for transparency, he also commented on diverse issues including human rights, federalism, healthcare, education, women’s empowerment and the welfare of SMEs.

Sheikh Mohammed’s interaction took place through his website, www.uaepm.ae, where he hoped “my responses will generate positive discussion about the issues and values that Dubai and the UAE care about… Dubai is not only a catalyst of change; it is an exemplar of change.”

Thai ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra leave Dubai for Africa

source Zawya

DUBAI, Apr 16, 2009 (AFP) – Exiled former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has decided to leave Dubai for an undisclosed destination in Africa despite the cancellation of his passport, local newspaper 7Days reported.

A spokesman for the former Thai strongman, who faces an arrest warrant in his home country, told the daily: “The government can say what it wants but it will not stop us. Every Thai has the right to a passport which cannot simply be cancelled.”

Thailand revoked Thaksin’s passport after his supporters forced the cancellation of an Asian summit at the weekend, but Nicaragua said on Wednesday it has granted a diplomatic passport to the fugitive former leader.

Thaksin is to be accredited as an ambassador with a “special mission” to help bring investment to the country, the Nicaraguan government said in a statement.

7Days said Thaksin had been due to leave Dubai late on Wednesday.

“We are going somewhere in Africa. Obviously I cannot say where,” the spokesman told the newspaper, adding that Thaksin expected foreign countries still to accept his Thai passport, despite its cancellation by Bangkok.

Thaksin was ousted in a military coup in 2006 and lives in exile to avoid a two-year jail term for corruption. He has made a series of speeches to his supporters in Thailand in recent weeks calling for a “revolution.”

A Thai court on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant for the former PM and 12 associates, accusing them of having fomented demonstrations in recent days which have left two people dead and 123 wounded in Bangkok.

Protestors loyal to Thaksin, known as “Red Shirts” because of their trademark attire, say his allies were unlawfully pushed from power last year and they want current premier Abhisit Vejjajiva to step down and hold fresh elections.

Comment of the day

Comment by “Criminology Professor” to Al  Fajer Properties – April 8, 2009 – Dubai court postpones 1,9 Billion Dollar case against Sheikh Maktoum Hasher bin Juma Al Maktoum, Sheikh Hasher Maktoum Juma Al Maktoum and Sheikha Maryam

In criminology, state crime is activity or failures to act that break the state’s own criminal law or public international law. For these purposes, A “state” is defined as the appointed officials, the bureaucracy, and the institutions, bodies and organisations comprising the apparatus of the government. In this situation the sheikh is not alone, the role of the state as one of the possible perpetrators of crime whether directly or in the context of state-corporate crime must be examined.

One way of examining state crimes is to study the occurence of a trend by the state security forces, whether the state respects human rights in the exercise of its powers.

A classical situation is when, the state is directly involved in excessive secrecy and cover-ups, disinformation, and unaccountability which often reflect upper-class, royalty and nonpluralistic interests, and infringe human rights and the state laws. One of the key issues is the extent to which, if at all, state crime can be controlled. Often state crimes are revealed by an investigative news agency resulting in scandals but, even among first world democratic states, it is difficult to maintain genuinely independent control over the criminal enforcement mechanisms and few senior officers of the state are held personally accountable. When the citizens of second and third world countries which may be of a more authoritarian nature, seek to hold their leaders accountable, the problems become more acute. Public opinion, media attention, and public protests, whether violent or nonviolent, may all be criminalised as political crimes and suppressed, while critical international comments are of little real value.

In a state where there is dictatorship and reoccurence of State Crimes, it will result in fostering organized crime, corruption, and authoritarianism. In some third world countries, this political atmosphere has encouraged repression and the use of torture.

JUDGING THIS CASE AGAINST THE SHEIKHS:
THIS IS A CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF A STATE CRIME, WHERE THE STATE INSTITUITIONS BREAK THE RULE OF LAW TO SERVE THE ROYAL FAMILY MEMBERS

Moscow Says Dubai Keeping Silent on Yamadayev Attack

source MoscowTimes

Prosecutor General Yury Chaika said Monday that his office was in the dark about whether Chechen strongman Sulim Yamadayev was killed last month and whether Dubai police wanted to arrest State Duma Deputy Adam Delimkhanov as the suspected mastermind.

Chaika’s comments raised questions about the level of cooperation between the United Arab Emirates and Russia in the attack on Yamadayev in Dubai on March 28.

Chaika told reporters that the Prosecutor General’s Office has had no contacts with Dubai authorities over the attack. “All exchange of information goes through the Foreign Ministry,” he said, RIA-Novosti reported.

Russia’s consul in Dubai, Sergei Krasnogor, said Monday that the Foreign Ministry in the United Arab Emirates has kept quiet about the Yamadayev case. “We sent a note to the Foreign Ministry of the United Arab Emirates more than a week ago,” he told RIA-Novosti. Russian diplomats have not received a reply, he said.

Dubai police chief Dhahi Khalfan Tamim has said two men are being held in connection with the attack, and international warrants will be issued for four others, including Delimkhanov. Delimkhanov has denied complicity.

Yamadayev’s younger brother, Isa, maintained in an interview published Monday that Sulim was alive and being protected by Dubai police. He said his brother was recovering from injuries and would soon return to Russia, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported.

Damac back in the headlines – Property developer`s victims surface Cairo

source zawya

13 April 2009
JEDDAH: The Damac Properties, a Dubai-based developer that has not been doing well in the face of the current global financial crisis, is caught in a new row involving its staggering real estate projects in Egypt after allegedly victimizing a number of investors in the Kingdom, Al-Madinah newspaper reported yesterday.

According to the daily, more than 170 Saudis and expatriates were recently discovered to have bought housing units in the company’s defaulting Hydepark project in the Egyptian capital Cairo.

The newspaper said the victims of the Cairo project were in addition to those who invested money in the company’s Al-Jawhara Tower project on the Jeddah Corniche.

Units in this prestigious project were sold to Saudi homebuyers, who were impressed by the company’s “unparalleled standards” of architectural detailing and interior design.

The newspaper said all attempts to obtain a comment from the company on the claims of the investors have so far failed. Hussain Sajwani, the company’s CEO, and its media relations manager had not been returning calls.

Al-Madinah quoted an official source at Damac, who did not want to be named, as saying that the leadership of the company had been evading questions from journalists because it did not want its problems to be publicized.

“This would help the company exert more pressure on its foreign and local investors,” the source added.

According to the newspaper, the questions the company was evading to answer included: When would the actual implementation of the projects start? When will the funds be reimbursed if the projects were not executed? How much would be the compensation for the customers?

Al-Madinah said the company was putting pressure on investors to pay their remaining installments in the projects on time saying unless they pay up it would take action on them for breach of contract.

The contract gives the company the right to abrogate the agreements with its buyers without any prior notice if they fail to pay rest of the installments.

Just the Good News, Please: New UAE Media Law Continues to Stifle Press”

source The National UAE

UAE media law ‘falls short’

DUBAI // The UAE’s draft media law represents “significant” improvements, but does not go far enough and will continue to restrict press freedoms, according to a Human Rights Watch report released yesterday.

Representatives from the US-based rights watchdog were in Dubai for the launch of the report entitled “Just the Good News, Please: New UAE Media Law Continues to Stifle Press” based on an analysis of the pending law.

“The law is a step in the right direction, but does not go far enough,” said Samer Muscati, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher. “It shows positive reforms, but falls short.”

The law, which would replace existing 29 year-old legislation, has yet to be ratified by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, the President of the UAE. The 45-article draft document was endorsed by the Federal National Council on Jan 20, but since then has sparked debate with proponents saying it will protect journalists, and critics contending it will only continue to stifle free expression.

Mr Muscati said that passing the draft law would present a “missed opportunity”, calling parts too vague and that it could perpetuate restrictions and self-censorship in the UAE’s media.

However, in a statement released yesterday, the National Media Council (NMC) said the HRW report did not represent a “fair assessment” of the law.

“The HRW comments and recommendations are based to a large extent on a failure to understand fully a number of significant aspects of the draft Media Law,” the NMC statement said.

“[The draft law] has not been designed for application in other societies, with different value systems, but is only to be applicable within the context of the United Arab Emirates.”

In its statement, the UAE media’s regulatory body stated that it welcomes “informed discussion and debate” on the draft law, before addressing specific concerns raised in the report.

The HRW report acknowledged positive aspects of the draft law, including an article which stipulates that journalists should not be coerced into revealing their sources. There are now just three areas which could result in penalties, as opposed to 16 in the 1980 law.

However, one of main areas of concern outlined in the report are the high fines prescribed by the law, including Dh5 million for journalists found to have personally insulted the President, other senior federal Government officials or crown princes.

Similarly, fines imposed for other “content based restrictions” including information that could harm the economy, are also cause for concern, the report stated, as well as what HRW described as government controls on the registration of media outlets in the country.

“The need to provide security deposits could discriminate against small and independent media and might lead to an absence of independent voices in the mix,” Mr Muscati said.

However, according to the NMC, the security deposit is necessary to insure that media outlets are financially viable. Furthermore any news deemed harmful to the economy would only be against the law if it was “misleading or erroneous and is known to be such by the writer”.

The 1980 media law includes scope for journalists to be jailed for their work. However, a 2007 decree issued by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, the Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, protected journalists from such punishments.

Nevertheless, HRW said there is a need for an explicit reference in the draft law stating that journalists will not be jailed or face criminal prosecution for their work.
The NMC statement pointed out that many of the issues, including those raised by HRW, will be clarified in regulations that will be issued once the law has been passed.

Earlier this year, a group of over 100 journalists, academics, lawyers and activists petitioned Sheikh Khalifa to reject the draft law. Ahmed Mansoor, an Emirati blogger and activist, was among the signatories and was present at the HRW report launch yesterday.

“One thing that is of most concern to me is that the imprisonment for journalists is not clearly prohibited in the law,” he said. “Also the need for media outlets to advance money for future penalties.”

The HRW report was compiled through consultation with journalists and activists from and based in the UAE, the Journalists’ Association, as well as with the NMC itself, which also met with the HRW representatives earlier this week.

The organisation has published reports in the past on press freedoms in countries including Sudan, China, Morocco and the US. However, the UAE’s case is particularly important, Mr Muscati said, because it is a “leader in the region,” and a law that protects the press could set a “good example”.

The rights group has previously focused on conditions for migrant workers in the UAE and their latest report on the subject is expected to be released in the coming few weeks.

ACI Real Estate Dubai Niki Lauda Tower Project – Define Properties executive detained

source The National

DUBAI // A principal shareholder of Define Properties has been detained by Dubai authorities on provisional charges of fraud, prosecutors said today.

The arrest of the executive comes in the middle of negotiations with Alternative Capital Invest Real Estate (ACI), a Germany-based property developer operating in Dubai, to take over some of Define’s assets.

The major shareholder was arrested in mid-March after complaints were filed by an investor in Define Properties, said Tarek Daoud, the administration director of the company. He said the amount being sought by the investor was close to Dh30 million (US$8.1m).

“He is arrested and in Bur Dubai police station,” Mr Daoud said. A lawyer for the detained executive did not return messages today.

Robin Lohmann, the managing director of ACI, said the arrest would not disrupt his company’s negotiations with Define Properties.

“It is not affecting our deal,” Mr Lohmann said. “We are negotiating over a different part of the company that is unrelated to this case.”

Earlier this year, ACI took over the Niki Lauda Twin Towers in Business Bay from Define Properties after construction stalled and the future of the project appeared to be in jeopardy.

ACI had marketed and sold units in the building last year, but Define Properties was still responsible for building it.

Omniyat Properties Management released from duty

source Zawya

Official Statement from Onmniyat Dubai, UAE, 7th April 2009:

It is with regret that we confirm that Mr. Peter Walichnowski, the Chief Executive Officer of Omniyat Properties, the real estate arm ofOmniyat Holdings, will step down at the end of his contract on the 1st June 2009. The group appointed Mr. Walichnowski last June to lead the company and spearhead its expansion plans both in the UAE and internationally.

“Peter has contributed significantly to Omniyat since he joined us, and we have greatly benefited from his experience and knowledge. However, the global financial downturn demanded a shift in strategy from growth to consolidation, and to the delivery of our existing projects. Thus, Mr. Walichnowski and Omniyat Properties have reached a mutual agreement for him to leave at the end of his contract,” said Mr. Mehdi Amjad, group founder and Executive Chairman.

Omniyat also confirmed that Mr. Alex Andarakis, Managing Director – Sales and Marketing was released from duty on February 12th 2009.

Mr. Amjad, who will now resume the role of Omniyat’s CEO, will address the media in the coming weeks to outline the company’s key milestones, new contract awards and the extensive progress the company has made on the delivery of its first projects.

Prior to joining Omniyat Mr. Walichnowski had his own real estate company in North Asia. He also held senior management positions in a number of leading property companies around the world, including CEO of Majid Al Futtaim Investments.

The detention of Zack Shaheen, former CEO of real estate developer Deyaar, has been extended again for a month.

soruce Khaleejtimes

The detention of

Shaheen has been in detention for about a year in connection with alleged financial ir
egularities in Deyaar.

The detention extension comes almost two weeks after Dub
i Attorney-General Eissam Issa Al Humaidan announced that the investigation into possible involvement of Shaheen in corruption was nearing completion.

Al Humaidan also listed the charges framed against Shaheen and other suspects, i
cluding forgery, embezzlement, fraud and possible money laundering. The Attorney-General had told Khaleej Times on the sidelines of the third Judicial Forum held on March 26 that an announcement would be made soon regarding Shaheen. “Within 10 d
ys, the Public Prosecution will take an action regarding Shaheen’s case as we have completed most of the
investigation.”

According to the UAE law, a suspect is detained for 21 days upon beginning an investigation, after which the case file is referred by the prosecution to the relevant judge who would decide whether to extend
the detention or not, based on the probe findings.

Al Humaidan said each time,
he detention could be extended for a month. After the end of that month, the file has to be referred again for another
month’s extension.

The Public Prosecution has contacted financial institutions abroad seeking information and evidence on alleged illegal transfer of embezzled funds.

“Care should also be taken not to inhale the air after a wave hits the shoreline. This can prove hazardous to health” – Two beaches in Dubai closed as traces of Red Tide surfaces

Source Zawya – GulfNews

06 April 2009
Dubai: Beaches near Burj Al Arab and another one located close to the Umm Suqeim Park have been closed by the Dubai Municipality as traces of Red Tide in these two beaches have surfaced again.

Mohammad Abdul Rehman Hassan, the head of the marine environment and wildlife section, told Gulf News that there were no traces of Red Tide found on Dubai shores in the morning during water testing.

Red tide is the result of an influx of a type of algal bloom; it is so named because it turns the water a reddish colour.

“They have surfaced again and so we have decided to close the beaches to ensure the safety of beachgoers. People are advised not to venture into these two beaches. They should make no contact with the water, nor consume the dead fishes that are washed ashore. Care should also be taken not to inhale the air after a wave hits the shoreline. This can prove hazardous to health,” he said.

Hassan did not rule out the possibility of shutting down more beaches if the Red Tide continues to frequent the area.

Dubai Police Accuse Lawmaker In Chechen Exile’s Killing

source RadioFreeEurope

Authorities in the United Arab Emirates say a member of the Russian State Duma who is a close relative of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has emerged as the chief suspect in ordering the assassination of a former Chechen general in Dubai.

Dubai’s police chief, Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan bin Tamim, told a news conference on April 5 that he would put out an international arrest warrant through Interpol for Adam Delimkhanov, deputy chairman of the State Duma’s Federal and Regional Affairs Committee, in connection with the killing of Sulim Yamadayev last month.

Yamadayev, who was shot in the head outside his Dubai apartment building on March 28, was the latest in a spate of Chechens killed after challenging Kadyrov.

Delimkhanov released a statement through his press secretary, Tamerlan Mezhidov, denying any involvement in the killing. “I am a politician who has battled terrorists for most of my life,” Mezhidov read. “I am prepared to assist any law enforcement authorities in this situation, including authorities in Dubai.”

In the statement, Delimkhanov said he doesn’t “understand the basis for [the Dubai authorities'] suspicion,” and called the announcement an “attempt to destabilize the situation in Chechnya.”

Tamim, the Dubai police chief, revealed new details in the slaying, saying the assassin ambushed Yamadayev outside his apartment in the city’s Jumeirah Beach district.

After shooting Yamadayev in the head, the killer threw away the weapon near the crime scene. Tamim said the weapon was a gold-plated Russian-made Makarov pistol similar to those used by Delimkhanov’s bodyguards.

Tamim said two suspects, an Iranian and a Tajik, were arrested shortly after Yamadayev’s killing. Four other suspects are still at large in Russia, he said.

Russian prosecutors say Russian law forbids them from extraditing Delimkhanov, who also enjoys immunity from prosecution as a Duma deputy.

“I am a bit disheartened and perplexed by this,” says Ruslan Kutayev, head of the International Committee for Problems of the North Caucasus, says. “At the same time, I don’t have any reason not to believe the United Arab Emirates police chief’s announcement.”

‘Chosen Successor’

Political analyst Yulia Latynina says Kadyrov has made it clear to his inner circle that he wants Delimkhanov to take over as president should anything happen to him, “as one of his most trusted confidants.”

Kadyrov’s father, Akhmed-haji Kadyrov, was killed by a bomb blast in May 2004 during ceremonies marking the anniversary of the end of World War II.

Delimkhanov served in a series of posts under Kadyrov before joining the Duma. He headed a police force protecting oil facilities and served as deputy prime minister in charge of security services in the republic. In 2007 he was elected to the State Duma on the pro-Kremlin Unified Russia party list.

Umar Israilov, another Chechen exile, in written statements filed with the European Court of Human Rights accused Delimkhanov of involvement in illegal detentions and torture in Chechnya. Israilov was assassinated in Vienna in January.

Another prominent Chechen, former Duma Deputy Ruslan Yamadayev — Sulim’s elder brother and a Kadyrov rival — was shot dead near the Kremlin in Moscow in September 2008.

RFE/RL’s North Caucasus and Russian services contributed to this report

Dubai police accuse Chechen vice-PM in murder case

source AFP

DUBAI (AFP) — Dubai police on Sunday accused Chechen Vice-Prime Minister Adam Delimkhanov of ordering the assassination in the Gulf city state of the former Russian army commander from Chechnya, Sulim Yamadayev.

“Adam Delimkhanov is the man behind the assassination of Sulim Yamadayev,” head of Dubai police Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim told reporters.

Tamim said Delimkhanov was “wanted in the (United Arab) Emirates, and we will demand his arrest by Interpol.

“The weapon (used in the assassination) belongs to the guards of the Chechen vice-prime minister,” he added.

In a first reaction Delimkhanov rejected the allegations.

“The statements by the Dubai police chief are provocative and aimed at destabilizing Chechen society,” Ria Novosti news agency quoted him as saying.

Yamadayev, a bitter foe of Chechen leader Ramzam Kadyrov, was shot and killed on March 28 in a parking lot outside his apartment at Dubai’s Jumeirah Beach Residence complex.

“The crime is of Chechen making… It is a dirty settling of accounts… a cheap operation,” Tamim said.

The Chechen representative in the Russian upper house of parliament, Ziad Spassibi, said the police statements were “only aimed at covering up the total failure of Dubai police in the investigation.”

“These statements are aimed at aggravating the situation in Chechnya and in southern Russia,” ITAR-TASS news agency quoted him as saying.

“The killers should be hunted down where they are without pointing a finger at politicians.”

A source at the public prosecutor’s office in Moscow meanwhile said that whatever the outcome of the investigation Russia would not extradite any Russian nationals should there be any such request.

Two men, Mahdi Lournia from Iran and Tajik national Makhsud-Jan, are being held for questioning over the killing.

Tamim said Lournia was a main suspect but stressed that Iran and the Iranian intelligence service were not involved in the affair, and no other authorities had assisted Dubai police.

He said other than Delimkhanov, two Russians and a Kazakh were also on the wanted list. They left Dubai soon after Yamadayev’s murder, Tamim said. “Russia must move and take a firm position to rein in these killers,” he said.

Tamim did not clarify whether the suspected killer was among those arrested, but said they had a man in custody who had confessed to having said “Sulim has arrived,” in an apparent reference to recorded phone conversations.

Mystery over Yamadayev’s death engulfed the emirate last week, with Dubai police issuing a statement on the Saturday of the attack that he had been killed, a report which relatives denied.

“He was buried in Dubai,” Tamim said at the press conference.

On Wednesday, Spassibi came out and said Yamadayev had indeed been killed.

“Unfortunately, he is dead and has been buried in Dubai,” said Spassibi. “He was buried on Monday in Al-Kuz cemetery in Dubai at 3:00 pm local time (1100 GMT).”

A former Chechen separatist, Yamadayev switched sides in the late 1990s and became the commander of Vostok, an elite battalion which fought the rebels. He was honoured with Russia’s top decoration, the Hero of Russia award.

He was dismissed from the military late last year amid bitter rivalry with Kadyrov, and Russian police issued an arrest warrant against him over the kidnapping of a Chechen businessman in 1998.

Yamadayev left Russia and moved to Dubai four months ago for fear of his life after a brother was assassinated in September 2008, according to the Russian media.

“Exporting the conflicts of warring gangs in Chechnya to us is not acceptable… We will strike with an iron fist anyone who dares to violate our country’s security,” Tamim said.

Dubai Jumeirah Beaches stay open as red tide approaches

source The National

Dubai // As a potentially harmful algal bloom approached Dubai’s shores, it seemed like business as usual over the weekend for hotels, beachside cafes and ocean-goers.

Callers to the Hilton Dubai Jumeirah Resort, the Mina A’ Salam hotel, at Madinat Jumeirah, and the One&Only Royal Mirage were told that beaches were still open for swimming. An employee at the One&Only Royal Mirage said: “We are unaware of the issue.”

Despite partly cloudy weather, residents could be seen swimming at the public beach and near the Jumeirah Beach Residence.

Callers to the Atlantis hotel on the Palm Jumeirah were also told the beach area was open.

On Friday, residents on the Palm awoke to see warnings about the algal bloom posted on lifts and in lobbies. The notices, signed by Abdulmonem Almarzouqi, manager of environmental regulations at EHS-Trakhees, the area’s environment agency, advised the public to “avoid contact with affected water”.Government scientists were testing the emirate’s waters for algal bloom as swimmers were warned not to go into the sea. It was observed by sailors over the weekend in small blots off the Palm and in significant patches near the World archipelago.

Residents living on Palm Jumeirah in Dubai have been advised to stay out of the sea following reports of algal bloom in the UAE.

source ArabianBusiness

Letters, dated Thursday, from Palm developer Nakheel were sent to people with homes on the man-made island to warn them to steer clear of the water, following advice from environmental health and safety officials.

Algae are microscopic organisms which serve as an important marine food source. They can multiply so rapidly that they form dense patches in the water, known as blooms which have become more common in the region.

A spokesman for Trakhees-EHS told Arabian Business: “Some blooms are harmful called Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) and can cause risks to human health as well as the marine life. Currently, UAE is experiencing blooms in some coastal areas including Dubai.

“Further investigation on the toxicological implications of this algae species is still on-going. In line with the potential risk due to direct exposure to algae we advise the public to avoid contact with affected water.”

Last November, Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (SEWA) suspended the operation of the new water desalination plant