The remittance man: find him today in the Gulf

Dubai is a weird place. The words “where every prospect pleases and only man is vile” would apply to it perfectly, if only the prospects were more pleasing.

The first problem is that Dubai’s on the wrong end of a long slope. That means that dust constantly blows over the city from the desert behind it. The air’s never pleasant to breathe, and there’s a constant haze spoiling the view, such as it is.

The view is mostly man-made. And the theme is simple: build it big. So Dubai is all huge expanses of concrete upwards, and wide stretches of tarmac horizontally. Colossal buildings linked by fast roads with little or nothing done for pedestrians. And constantly humming through it all is a hymn to money. I’ve never seen such a collection of yachts in the harbour, so large, so luxurious, so completely immobile.

Dubai: where few prospects please
but the scent of money's everywhere

It’s the money that decides the human mix too. A mix which doesn’t mix: humanity in Dubai is rigidly divided by class, which in there means race.

At the top of the hierarchy the tiny number of Dubai citizens, none of whom I ever saw: presumably they move only from air-conditioned mansion to air-conditioned shop by air-conditioned, tinted-window car.

Next are what we casually refer to as Westerners: Americans, Europeans, Japanese.

Behind them come the underprivileged. First the citizens of former Soviet Republics: Russians, Kasakhs, and others from the region. They’re the waiters, the receptionists and the chambermaids. Or, so I’m told “chambermaids.”

And finally the huge army of Pakistanis, Nepalese and other South Asians, who form the queues each morning at the building sites, working for a pittance, in dangerous conditions, with minimal rights.

Migrant workers in Dubai
Exploited, endangered, enjoying few rights

This is reminiscent of nothing so much as the period of European colonialism. But with one difference: European colonialists were at the top of the tree, behaving with ugly arrogance. In Dubai they’re one level down and have to be a bit more careful, behaving with ugly obsequiousness.

A colourful figure from that colonial time has been reincarnated today, in a rather reduced version: the remittance man. This was the Black Sheep sent away, usually after some scandal at home, to a distant colony where his small remittance would allow his family and friends to ignore him.

You get quite a lot of that kind of character out in Dubai these days. Disreputable, slightly fly-blown, always looking for the scheme that’s going to make them rich. And some of them, suprisingly, manage.

I met one of them out there. Sam (that wasn’t his name and, as far as I know, it still isn’t) had been Chief Executive of a company he’d founded with a group of colleagues. They’d had an innovative idea in software development, and got a system out to market fast, giving them several years of impressive success. Sadly, however, when small companies find a clever notion, the big boys won’t be far behind. They have the resources to put huge teams onto them, and eventually turn out something more powerful, more effective and easier to support. Suddenly, the small company’s playing catch up.

What it needs is another smart idea, to get some edge over the big players again. But good ideas aren’t that common or simple to come up with. And Sam’s company didn’t.

His reaction was quite a common one: under pressure, he would disappear. He’d turn off his mobile and clear off somewhere that nobody could find him. Leaving his colleagues in disarray.

Eventually, they got tired of him and pushed him out of the Chief Executive position. But they didn’t sack him – indeed they left him with a massive salary and, of course, his shares.

Things continued to get worse, and he kept on disappearing. But, freed of even the responsibilities he ignored as Chief Exec, he’d disappear a lot further. He started heading off regularly to the Gulf. There he could enjoy the pink gin existence, with few questions asked, of the remittance man. All he had to do was attend a few meetings out there and report home about how good the prospects were.

That left him convinced that he was an important contributor to his company. I once had the privilege of working with another former Chief Executive like him: he once assured me “I feel I’m working at all times, whenever I’m thinking about the company.”

“So,” I asked him, “as long as you think about the company, you’re working even if you’re lying in the bath?”

Sadly, he explained to me that this was exactly how he saw things.

The beauty for Sam was that he could be out in the Gulf whenever things got tough at home. Eventually, his colleagues sold the company and even got a reasonable deal for it. Inevitably, in time, the new owners decided it was time for a new broom. Many of the old guard, the people who’d built the company and its products, were sacked.

But not Sam. He’d persuaded the owners that the Gulf was the place. The new Eldorado, the land adventurers from Europe sought to bring gold home. The Gulf was the place that could provide gold today, for a company that knew how to play its cards. Sam had persuaded the new owners that he was the man to play the cards. And he was out of the country when the axe fell on his colleagues.

How much gold has he brought home? I saw Sam out there six years ago. At that stage, after two years in the region, he had nothing but glittering promises. To my knowledge, today, after eight years, he’s still produced nothing.

Except for a good salary for himself. On top of the seven-figure sum he had for his shares.

It’s wonderful to see the old traditions being maintained. Fortune favours the guy who knows how to be out of the way at the right time, bluff the people in power, and sell snake oil at a high price.

Leaves you with a lovely warm feeling, doesn’t it?

Dubai: just the place for the rich

‘Visitors complain that there’s no historic old town,’ I’m told one of his advisers complained to the Sultan of Dubai, during a conversation about how to stimulate tourism.

‘That’s OK,’ replied the Sultan. ‘We’ll build one.’

Dubai: haven of the synthetic.

Note the dust haze in the background

What prompted me to think of Dubai again was a friend’s photo from his hotel window there. It showed a glittering panorama of nighttime lights, conjuring up the liveliness that gives the place its charm. 

For those who find it charming.

The story about the old town may be a myth. Many myths, though, contain a core of truth, and Dubai is the expression of everything that is artificial, synthesised, planned.

But like most state planning (one thinks of the Soviet Union), it’s not always well-planned. The city has a super-highway running through its centre. That’s like plunging a dagger through the heart of a community. It’s what makes Birmingham a sad place, despite the liveliness of the area around Broad Street and the Canal: try to walk almost anywhere and you have to get to the other side of a major road, and that means boxed-in underpasses, dank, sinister and usually smelling of urine.

Isn’t it odd that so many men only need a cover over a street to feel they can pee in it?

Birmingham: many charming sights
but in a sadly vandalised city

Dubai’s highway is several lanes wider than Birmingham’s. And the lack of planning meant there was no provision made for the elevated railway the Emirate decided to add later. So, when I was last there, I was amused to see that they frequently had to bring the ‘elevated’ track down to ground level to get it under bridges across the roadway. 

Indeed, at one point they were having to scoop out the ground to take the railway down below ground level.

Its attachment to high-speed roads means that Dubai has the same problem as Birmingham for walkers, but in spades. While we were out there to discuss a project, a colleague suggested that the two of us walk the few hundred metres between our hotel and another where we were to attend a working dinner. The idea was that we could talk over some of the issues ahead more easily than we could at a crowded table.

The walk took nearly forty minutes. Again and again, we were forced to backtrack, as we reached roads we couldn’t cross: no underpass, no traffic lights. Eventually, we found a way through, but it took us across a building site and we arrived with mud-caked shoes.

Dubai doesn’t do walking. The beaches are slightly unprepossessing, especially as Dubai is generally cloaked in a fine mist of dust blowing off the desert inland. But in any case it’s extremely difficult to reach the coast on foot, so the simple desire to go for a walk along the beach is beset by logistical obstacles so immense that they’re likely to be terminally off-putting to most normal people.

Dubai, though, appeals to the super-rich. They, after all, travel everywhere by vehicle: why would they want to walk from one hotel to another? As for beaches, they prefer ones that are privately owned, by them or their friends. And no mere physical beauty can make a place as attractive as a highly favourable tax regime, and from that point of view Dubai’s pretty much unbeatable.

In any case, that regime means that you’re saving so much money you can easily get away as often as you want to visit somewhere with better views – Switzerland, say, or the Caribbean, where fiscal advantages are marginally less attractive.

That’s presumably why the boats, or perhaps I should say small ships, in the marinas never seemed to move anywhere. They’re badges of wealth proudly displayed by absentee owners who feel little need to use them, and probably spend most of their time in more salubrious places.

To me, few places I’ve visited have seemed less salubrious than Dubai. Synthetic, soulless, a millionaires’ playground with none of the joy of the child’s variety. What marks it most is the reek of money; whether that’s a scent or a stench I leave it to you to decide, according to taste. 

Herself much quoted, Dorothy Parker liked the words of Maurice Baring: ‘If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it’. For me, Dubai is where the Lord has offered the same people their spiritual home.

Singer, Footballer, Prime Minister, Spy

Some household by the name of Cole has been dominating the British press recently. He, Ashley, makes far too much money kicking a football around; she, Cheryl, makes far too much money singing forgettable songs. It seems that their marriage has collapsed into a completely banal string of infidelities and recriminations of the kind that surround us all these days. I have no idea why this is supposed to interest me, or even why it’s news, since it seems to me the papers have been talking about it for months. That didn’t stop one of our tabloids devoting seven out of its first eight pages to the subject recently.

Meanwhile, the political pages are dominated by ‘Bullygate’, the latest manufactured scandal about Gordon Brown. Did he or didn’t he bully staff at Downing Street?

Perhaps one shouldn’t judge people one only knows through their public persona, but I can’t help feeling that Brown is not the kind of man I’d seek out for an evening at the pub: I think his mood swings and his brooding character would make him less than congenial company.

To be fair, there’s nothing to indicate that he’d be any more anxious to spend an evening with me.

Having said all that, I don’t expect the British electorate to select my drinking companions for me – apart from anything else, who knows what they might come up with? All I’d like voters to do is pick people who know how to rise to a challenge when things get rough.

They got pretty grim on Black Friday, 10 October 2008: stock markets were in free fall around the world and the international financial system was close to collapse. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, as we quaintly call our Minister of Finance, hauled civil servants and bankers into the Treasury – the Finance Ministry – over the weekend. While Brown and Darling jetted around Europe or the States making sure solutions were adopted internationally, the guys in London worked out the rescue package that stopped the whole house of cards falling over.

It strikes me that those are the qualities we should be looking for in leaders rather than conviviality over a pint or two. And, though I don’t want to belittle bullying as a source of misery in the workplace, I actually think that kind of decisiveness actually matters a little more.

So with the press dominated by stories about tedious footballers, their disconsolate wives and the personality of the Prime Minister, it’s been almost a relief to follow the Dubai Mossad hit story. It’s like seeing a Le Carré novel coming to life, with Israeli agents flying around in small groups to Frankfurt, Rome or Zurich, converging on Dubai, tracking their prey (no doubt making heavy use of ‘tradecraft’ and leaving their ‘signatures’ in various places), carrying out the hit and then scattering around the globe again.

It isn’t just any Le Carré novel – it’s The Little Drummer Girl.

In this country, the aspect of the case that’s created the most noise has been the fact that rather a lot of these guys used British passports. We’re most upset. And the Foreign Secretary told the Israeli ambassador so. You can imagine how the Israeli state was shaken to its foundations by so tough a sanction.

The real beauty of the British passport aspect is that it too is straight out of The Little Drummer Girl. At one point, Kurtz, the chief of the Israeli operation meets Commander Picton of the British Special Branch to enlist his assistance. Having agreed to help, Picton asks him to pass on a message to Kurtz’s boss, the legendary ‘Rook’:

‘He will please to stop using our bloody passports. If other people can manage without them, so can the Rook, damn him.’

Hey, Binyamin. Read the book. Follow the advice. Stop using our bloody passports.