As the British Airways flight from Heathrow commenced its night-time descent through clear starry skies, Chad kept his eyes on a ribbon of bright light, a road, cutting almost straight from the distance to somewhere ahead of the aircraft. The aircraft banked, and, as it turned, there it was, Dubai, brighter than any city he had ever seen from the air. It was an absolutely smooth landing. Construction work was in progress at the airport, and passengers had to disembark on the tarmac and be shuttled in buses to the terminal.
Snyder was impatient and had moved fast. The principal shareholders of Citizenbank, an Arab and two Jews who together owned over half its shares, had consented to the scheme and promised Snyder and his team a substantial slice of the pie, percentages to be agreed when figures began coming in.
Chad had abandoned his desk as it was, leaving John Ridley fuming. It was Sunday, 17 January 1999.
The terminal was slow going, probably because of the construction, he thought, but finally he was at the immigration counter. An Arab in local dress, many idle ones hanging around, completed his entry formalities.
“Citizenbank, yes, good bank, very big bank. I have account there, also two credit cards,” said the Arab genially. “You are coming for holiday?” Chad said yes, passed through immigration, collected his suitcase and headed to the exit. A pretty Filipina in uniform greeted him as he stepped into the city.
“Welcome to Dubai,” she said.
There is a bank near Safa Park, a British bank, housed in a large white two-storied building, very imposing indeed, with this sign - ‘open Saturdays to Thursdays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.’. This is Dubai, the place to be in the Persian Gulf. Shopping malls are open from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. every single day of the year, and shops across the city seem to never close.
The country is the United Arab Emirates, UAE in short, and is a federation of seven individual emirates, the word coming from emir, which is like king, though it was Bahrain that had an emir while not being called an emirate, and the UAE has sheikhs who call sheikhdoms emirates. But the Bahraini ruler declared himself king, converted whatever to kingdom, and sorted out a part of that muddle.
The UAE is a fairly new country, created in 1971 by Britain, when it exited after having governed the region for a couple of centuries. Seven small sheikhdoms clubbed together to form a federation. Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven, is one of the world’s main oil producers, and its ruling sheikh is president of the UAE. Dubai ranks second, has a little oil and does its very public international thing, whereas the remaining five are placed on lower rungs, descending into poverty.
Arabs of the Lower Gulf, in comparison to the ones further up, are clearly more inclined to peacefulness, though that may have something to do with the load of oil money around. UAE tribes have survived through the centuries with a sea-faring tradition, trading with the Indian sub-continent, and absorbed some element of give and take into their bloodstream, besides actually absorbing a lot of foreign blood into their veins, though, as part of the status game, they robustly deny anything other than blood purity ,despite traditionally having acquired wives from the most-deprived classes of the sub-continent, Iran and Africa. That has changed now, and while the class from which they acquire women is pretty much the same, newfound wealth allows import of comelier females from as far afield as Egypt, Syria and Morocco.
Of the entire lot of big chiefs, the Dubai ones are considered the canniest. The ruler in charge when the federation got going, was a true visionary. This is also said of its current rulers, but the departed sheikh had to envision a future in what was then a tiny coastal village, whereas the current crop have been building on what he left behind – a trading hub, a World Trade Centre, Jebel Ali seaport, which is a massive manmade port, Jebel Ali Free Zone, and many things besides, plus a seemingly liberal, bustling city.
Thus, despite the fact that Rashid of Dubai, as Indian police knew him, was a wanted man in India, he was a visionary in the desert. He was wanted in India for smuggling. Dubai, under his rule, was a staging post for smuggling goods into India - gold, textiles, watches, electronics, cigarettes, liquor, and what not. India has now opened up and lifted restrictions on imports, and this market has more or less died, but Dubai is a brash new kid, and death has not come calling here.
The city’s traders are so good at supplying the needs of the region around it, that every demand was and still is met by Dubai-based traders. Helped at first by Indian import restrictions, then by the Iran-Iraq war, then the Iran-Iraq peace, the break-up of the Soviet Union, the First Gulf War, the Iraqi embargo, formation of Eritrea, lawlessness in Somalia, entry of Taliban, exit of Taliban, re-entry of Taliban, the Second Gulf War, and at one point even by the opening up of India, Dubai continues to thrive uninterrupted, driven by its lack of financial regulations and the aggressiveness of its trading community. And that is the heart and soul of Dubai – trading.
Its current rulers have succeeded in putting Dubai on the map in a big way, their declared intention being to convert it into a business and tourism hub - to which end they work ceaselessly - and Dubai is now, in all probability, the fastest growing city on earth, and quite possibly its number one construction site.
Emirates Airlines, poised to become the world’s largest carrier, belongs to Dubai; the world’s most innovative hotels are in Dubai; Jebel Ali seaport, already huge, is being expanded; the free zone is growing rapidly; Dubai hosts practically all meaningful trade exhibitions in the area, including an air show; it hosts the world’s richest horse race; it has become a leisure destination, with dozens of five-star hotels and hundreds of lesser star ones, huge malls, wild nightlife and many recreational activities; its airport is already the region’s busiest, and maybe the world’s busiest too; and when the many artificial islands currently under construction are completed, all figures will rise again. And, of course, the world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai, with its intended final height undisclosed, is under construction too.
A secret of Dubai’s success is, strangely, the failure of countries and cities around it - failure to create liveable, hospitable environments attractive to foreigners, who must take up residence to create busy, bustling, successful cities, as without foreigners no Gulf Arab country can do well. They simply do not have the skills to cater to the region unless they include foreign partners. In fact, supremacist and lazy to the core, they cannot even cater to themselves. Foreigners are essential – and there is no city, for foreigners, like Dubai.
Its population is reported to be about one and a half million, but Sharjah and Ajman, two neighbouring emirates, continue from its edge in an uninterrupted metropolitan area. That takes greater Dubai’s total population to nearer three million. Then there are additional tens of thousands daily in Dubai from other emirates, from Gulf countries, and from the rest of the world.
Less than a fifth of the population is local - the rest are foreigners, the bulk being from the Indian sub-continent, as most construction crews are from there. Indians also make up a major part of Dubai’s trading community, which includes Pakistanis and Iranians. There are hordes, too, of Western expatriates - British, French, Australian and, if oil crews are counted, American. Recently, someone made a statement to the press, in which it was claimed that Dubai has more nationalities resident than there are countries in the United Nations!
But there is a darker secret to Dubai’s success – crime.
It is the world’s foremost money laundering hub, and the primary transit point of contraband cargo. The Pakistani bomb was built through Dubai, the Iranian nuclear programme is supplied through Dubai, and huge consignments of narcotics pass through Dubai. Thousands of shipments of fake goods pass into and through Dubai every week. Gangs in Dubai operate VAT fraud and all sorts of global financial frauds. Copyright violations, pirated goods, fakes and duplicates are the norm.
It is a strange blessing, this free trade thing. It allows everything to go on. Thus the Indian mafia, confirmed terrorists, is resident here alongside Al Qaeda, Somali warlords and pirates, Russian crime bosses, global drug lords and fugitives from everywhere. Every Islamic terror chief has probably sited his family and bank accounts in Dubai. No terrorist explosions occur in the UAE, for, as local wisdom has it, why would terrorists attack home? Hawala, a system to transfer money unrecorded, moves vast sums through Dubai, possibly more than its banks handle. Businesses can be started up in a day, and, with no overt controls on business activity, dirty money can be rapidly washed spanking clean. So Dubai, if its self-promotion is taken at face value, is headed upmarket, while paradoxically hosting global lowlife and ill-gotten wealth.
Its uncountable new villa and apartment blocks are sold out but largely vacant - because owners are not really resident in Dubai, merely passing by from time to time to launder bags of loot. It helps a lot when international crooks and fugitives actually own property in a laundering country. They slip through its airport and slink into anonymity - not that easy were they to stay at hotels. Residence and property entitle them to permanent visas; they own cars; they own companies; they have employees. Dubai is extraordinarily user-friendly to crooks.
Dubai is a sheikhdom, which means dictatorship, and thus, as with any other dictatorship, its laws are particularly unfriendly to its non-criminal population. After all, its rulers are solely interested in their own betterment, and possibly that of their teams. Quite easily achieved, as rights are what ruling sheikhs confer by decree.
Dubai is all there, well promoted, booming, plain to see, and, in a concrete, metallic and glassy way, beautiful to behold – a bit like a good looking whore. If the outer covering is what one seeks, there she is, but when probed a little, dug a bit deeper, any number of flaws may be uncovered in the soul of the creature.
About that bank near Safa Park? With utter contempt for its employees’ well-being and human rights, it forces them to work a 60-hour week. The fabulous glittering shopping malls better even that - with a slaving rate of 91 hours weekly.
The city is being built, as it has been up to this point, on slave labour. Poor foreign workmen routinely commit suicide because they are not allowed to leave their jobs. Held against their will in truly appalling conditions, many forced to live without electricity and running water, they are transported to and from work sites in conditions amounting to captivity, and made to toil incredible hours for almost nothing. The minimum wage by law is barely US $3 per day, and even this pittance is often withheld or altogether stolen by employers - with the Sheikh’s blessings.
Practically every foreigner is a hostage here. In order to confer upon themselves every conceivable advantage and authority over employees, they have laws preventing change of job. Dubai is greedy, crooked, prejudiced, racist and cruel indeed.
Behind its gleaming new towers, lie squalid shanties in which its richest men hide enslaved labourers. Concealed under the overalls they are made to wear is the fact that they are more slave than employee, with rights routinely vandalised by their masters, for what could be the shape of human rights in a state where the only Human Rights Department is an affront to sensibility, headquartered in police headquarters, staffed by policemen and headed by the chief of cops? Dubai is all about money, howsoever acquired. It is far from the great economy that glancing at its concrete and glass structures makes one believe. That is the investment opportunity of crooks. Dubai’s total trade is under 100 billion US dollars annually, and mainly in re-export - consignments heading into its ports destined for consumption elsewhere.
But much money can be made by hosting crooks and facilitating illegal activities. For that, one needs banks, and Dubai most definitely is a banking centre. Banks are powerful in Dubai, with laws in place to help them help themselves to a sizeable chunk of the goings-on. Although banks have frequently and routinely proven to be most prolific law-breakers, Dubai knows different. Laws are concocted to make every worthwhile crime lawful, for Dubai is where crooks call home.
The next morning, a driver came to Chad’s hotel to take him to the regional headquarters of Citizenbank, which, he was surprised to see, was an entire building purpose-built by the bank. He did not then know that the growth of Citizenbank had been so spectacular that its five-year-old building had already become too small, offices sprouting up in nearby buildings, entire floors in most cases.
George Warner, Citizenbank’s Regional Director, met Chad in the office of the Director of Credit Cards. Warner had been with Citizenbank for almost ten years. He was forty-three, with one divorce and two children from that union under his belt, and was now married to a Lebanese woman with whom he had a six year old boy. He was extremely good at his work, and under his stewardship Citizenbank had begun to emerge as the dominant bank in the region. Indeed, Citizenbank had begun to move to the very top internationally too.
Warner had been informed that Chad Durbin’s posting to Dubai was for the introduction of a new credit card product. It was some top-secret item, and he, Warner, would be in the guidance committee. However, Durbin would manage the product entirely on his own, consulting the guidance committee whenever he saw fit, but generally reporting on its progress solely to New York. Warner wondered why his own people were considered incapable of launching a product, and why someone needed to be sent down from New York.
One other Citizenbank man, a good-looking, fair, affable Lebanese, attended the meeting. Michel Chamoun, Warner’s senior-most deputy, was Director of Credit Cards for the Gulf region, and the other member of the guidance committee. He spoke good English, with an American accent acquired during his university years in the USA. He, too, was forty-three, and was very comfortably settled with his wife of fifteen years and two young daughters. Warner and he went back a long way, having worked together at other banks, Warner always coercing him to follow whenever he changed jobs.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Introductions over, coffee in hand, they talked on a variety of subjects in Michel’s office, as Warner made his point on rank by not directly receiving Chad. He had decided he was not going to take the boy’s abilities too seriously, no matter that he had been sent by New York. Probably related to one of the top chaps there, or maybe a political appointee, he figured. He did not care - for the moment, anyway. Warner was a tough cookie, and, if the boy’s placement interfered with his work, he was more than capable of screwing New York and London combined. He was not planning to upset any applecart though. Let them run any goddam program they want, he thought, as long as the kid did not step on his toes.
“So, you’re here to introduce a new product, huh?” queried Michel, his curiosity driving him up the wall. Any credit card product in his territory should have been handled by him, and he felt extremely vulnerable at the thought that someone in New York had been looking closely at his operations. Unfavourably too, he reasoned, if they had to send someone out rather than ask him. “What the hell is it?”
“Relax, Michel, relax,” said Warner. “Let’s first make our newly arrived team member comfortable. Remember, we’re in the guidance committee.” He screwed his mouth up, not bothering to hide it from Chad. “Let him set up house, get a feel for our city, see how we work here. He must be quite overwhelmed - Dubai is a far cry from New York. How do you like the place, Chad? First impressions, I mean?"
Chad said it was fine. They were friendly and chatted long with him, which would normally have been strange, as Chad was quite seriously outranked by Michel Chamoun and utterly inferior in position to Warner, but it was not that strange, as, instead, those two were extremely curious about Chad and his unprecedented posting.
They agreed that he would begin work after setting himself up, taking a few days to acclimatise, finding accommodation and furnishing it, buying a car and sorting out his residence visa. It did not amount to much work really, but, unlike recruits from the east, who are made to commence work immediately on arrival, new employees from the west are routinely given a couple of weeks to settle in.
Race matters.
An Unlikely Criminal Crossroads
From Egypt to Afghanistan, when terrorists and gangsters need a place to meet, to relax, maybe to invest, they head to Dubai, a bustling city-state on the Persian Gulf. The Middle East's unquestioned financial capital, Dubai is the showcase of the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich federation of sheikdoms. Forty years ago, Dubai was a backwater; today, it hosts dozens of banks and one of the world's busiest ports; its free-trade zones are crammed with thousands of companies. Construction is everywhere--skyscrapers, malls, hotels, and, soon, the world's tallest building.
But Dubai also serves as the region's criminal crossroads, a hub for smuggling, money laundering, and underground banking. There are Russian and Indian mobsters, Iranian arms traffickers, and Arab jihadists. Funds for the 9/11 hijackers and African embassy bombers were transferred through the city. It was the heart of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's black market in nuclear technology and other proliferation cases. Half of all applications to buy U.S. military equipment from Dubai are from bogus front companies, officials say. "Iran," adds one U.S. official, "is building a bomb through Dubai." Last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents thwarted the shipment of 3,000 U.S. military night-vision goggles by an Iranian pair based in Dubai. Moving goods undetected is not hard. Dhows--rickety wooden boats that have plowed the Arabian Sea for centuries--move along the city center, uninspected, down the aptly named Smuggler's Creek.
U.A.E. rulers have taken terrorism seriously since 9/11, but Washington has a half-dozen extradition requests that they refuse to honor. The list includes people accused of rape, murder, and arms trafficking, and the last fugitive of the BCCI banking scandal. The country has put money laundering controls on the books but has made few cases. Interior Minister Sheik Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan told U.S. News the U.A.E. has made great strides in cracking down, but he insists that the real problems lie elsewhere. "We are a neutral country, like Switzerland," he says. "Give us the evidence, and we will do something about it. Don't blame others." Not everyone agrees. "All roads lead to Dubai," says former treasury agent John Cassara, author of Hide and Seek, a forthcoming book on terrorism finance. Cassara tried explaining U.S. concerns about Dubai to a local businessman but got only a puzzled look: "Mr. John, money laundering? But that's what we do. "
This story appears in the December 5, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
al-Qaeda isn't the only organization that has found Dubai useful. The father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has acknowledged heading a clandestine group that, with the help of a Dubai company, supplied Pakistani nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Goods from UAE to be physically examined
KARACHI, Dec 8: The customs authorities have put all consignments originating from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) under strict physical examination to check rampant mis-declaration and under-invoicing.
The Dubai port is widely used as a ‘third country’ for a contravention objective, and strict physical examination is being made after detection of large-scale misdeclaration and contravention cases on consignments originating from the UAE.
The pirates are earning millions of dollars. A lot of that is invested in businesses in the United Arab Emirates. A pirate network is believed to stretch from Europe to Dubai, identifying targets and feeding intelligence to the gangs based along Somalia's long coastline.
Ahmed Dahir Suleyman is cagey as he talks about the global network that funds and supports piracy off the coast of Somalia.
"We have negotiators, translators and agents in many areas ... let me say across the world," said Suleyman, a pirate in the harbor town of Eyl, where scores of hijacked ships are docked.
"These people help us during exchanges of ransom and finding out the exact person to negotiate with," he told The Associated Press.
Sheik Qasim Ibrahim Nur, director of security at Somalia's Interior and National Security Ministry, said evidence points to Somali expatriates in Kenya and the United Arab Emirates, but declined to give further details.
The al-Qaeda factor
For Salafi jihadis, Dubai may be worse than Sodom and Gomorrah put together. An al-Qaeda attack in Dubai would instantly turn the overbuilding capitalist frenzy into ashes. So why does it not happen? First and foremost because al-Qaeda and assorted Salafi jihadi funds still transit through Dubai.
Money-laundering in the financial mecca of the Persian Gulf has been virtually uncontrollable. The US government's case against Zacarias Moussaoui documented how money to finance the attacks of September 11, 2001, was laundered through the UAE.
During the mid- to late 1990s, the air path from the UAE to Kandahar was crammed with private jets taking Arab notables on falcon-hunting trips in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Frequent fliers included UAE and Saudi rulers - the UAE and Saudi Arabia, along with Pakistan, were the only countries that recognized and maintained normal relations with the Taliban regime. Return flights laundered Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.
A famous Dubai joke has a real-estate agent telling a client to "buy a house in Jumeirah Beach. It's the safest place to be. Half the bin Laden clan lives there."
The government's respect for human rights remained problematic. The following human rights problems exist or were reported:
- no citizens' right to change the government and no popularly elected representatives of any kind
? flogging as judicially sanctioned punishment
? arbitrary detention
? incommunicado detention permitted by law
? questionable independence of the judiciary
? restrictions on civil liberties--freedom of speech and of the press, and assembly
? restrictions on right of association, particularly for human rights groups
? restrictions on religious freedom
? domestic abuse of women, sometimes enabled by police
? trafficking in women and children
? legal and societal discrimination against women and noncitizens
? corruption and lack of government transparency
? abuse of foreign domestic servants
? restrictions on and abuses of workers' rights.
'We've made a pact with the devil to be here'
Before I arrive in Dubai, I meet 'Clare' on an expat website who insists I visit her at her home in the Meadows, a housing development in the city's suburbs - 'to give you an idea of how so many people get misled into thinking they are in Milton Keynes'.
'Oh yes, it looks good, doesn't it? But we've all made a pact with the devil to be here. You get the tax-free salary, but in return you have to give up all your rights. There's no accountability, no transparency, no rule of law. There's no legislative body. Very few employment rights. It looks like a modern country, but it takes more than a few skyscrapers to create one of those. Scratch the surface and it's a different story.
"Once you get rich on the back of the poor," she says, "it's not easy to let go of that lifestyle. They are devaluing human beings," she says.
Employers normally hold their employees' passports. Because the law does not prohibit this practice, servants do not have the recourse of leaving their employment and returning to their home country or finding another job.
For a migrant worker, changing jobs within the UAE is a cumbersome, bureaucratic process and requires the consent of the original employer. To begin with, labor regulations require a worker to have completed two years of service with his current employer before being entitle to switch employers. He may seek only the same kind of job, and there must be no UAE national available for the job. Most significantly, in order to move to a new employer, a worker must obtain a “letter of no objection” from his current employer and request the Ministry of Labor to reregister his visa and work permit in the name of the new employer. The fact that employers usually hold on to workers’ passports makes it even more difficult for the worker to switch jobs. Nataranjan explained, “We want our employer to give us a ‘letter of no objection,’ so we can look for another employer and get a decent wage. But he says, ‘Either work for $5 a day or I’ll revoke your visa and you have to go back to India.’”
All of these men are part of a huge scam that is helping the construction boom in the Gulf. Like hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, they each paid more than ￡1,000 to employment agents in India and Pakistan. They were promised double the wages they are actually getting, plus plane tickets to visit their families once a year, but none of the men in the room had actually read their contract. Only two of them knew how to read.
"They lied to us," a worker with a long beard says. "They told us lies to bring us here. Some of us sold their land; others took big loans to come and work here."
Once they arrive in the United Arab Emirates, migrant workers are treated little better than cattle, with no access to healthcare and many other basic rights. The company that sponsors them holds on to their passports - and often a month or two of their wages to make sure that they keep working. And for this some will earn just 400 dirhams (￡62) a month.
A group of construction engineers told me, with no apparent shame, that if a worker becomes too ill to work he will be sent home after a few days. "They are the cheapest commodity here. Steel, concrete, everything is up, but workers are the same."
Some domestic and agricultural workers were subject to de facto compulsory labor. Employers routinely held employees' passports, severely restricting their freedom of movement. There were increasing incidents of employees being prevented from changing positions because their contracts stipulated that they were banned from working for a "competitor" for six months after their original employment ended; the only way to overcome the six-month ban was to seek a letter of "no objection" from the original employer. However, some employers, as retribution, refused to sign such letters
Domestic workers were routinely subject to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.
Workers' jobs were not protected if they removed themselves from what they considered unsafe working conditions..
There are no independent human rights groups. Government restrictions on freedom of the press and public association make it difficult for such groups to investigate and publicly criticize the Government's human rights restrictions. A human rights section exists within Dubai Emirate's police force to monitor allegations of human rights abuses.
The government did not allow international human rights NGOs to be based in the country but allowed representatives to visit on a limited basis. There were no transparent standards governing visitation from international NGO representatives.
A Time magazine cover story on BCCI. The Bank of England shuts down Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the largest Islamic bank in the world. Based in Pakistan, this bank financed numerous militant organizations and laundered money generated by illicit drug trafficking and other illegal activities, including arms trafficking. Bin Laden and many other militants had accounts there. “BCCI did dirty work
for every major terrorist service in the world.” Beginning in February 1991, the mainstream media began reporting on BCCI’s criminal activities as more and more whistleblowers came forward.
Most of the bank’s top officials will escape prosecution, and remnants of the bank will continue operating in some countries under new names. A French intelligence report in 2001 will suggest the that Osama bin Laden will later build his financial network on the ruins of the BCCI network, oftentimes using former BCCI officials
A majority of the bank is owned by Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, President of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the UAE similarly indicates that it will not extradite any of the 18 top BCCI managers living there. The UAE is also sitting on most of BCCI’s financial records. [Time, 8/3/1992] BCCI branches in the UAE are not shut down either, but are simply renamed to become the National Union Bank. [BBC, 8/5/1991]