Diamond exchange
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Dubai making strong strides toward major center status: Dubai is the logical location for the Arab world's first diamond bourse because it serves as a gateway to enormous markets on two continents. As a port of entry for the Persian Gulf states, Iran, the Indian subcontinent and Africa, Dubai has long been an important regional center for gold sales in India and the Far East.

Israel Diamonds,  June, 2004  
 

 

The glittering market potential of the Middle East has mesmerized the diamond industry for many years. Now this crucial region has an official presence in the trade, with the March 29 opening of the Dubai Diamond Exchange (DDE).

The new bourse will be based in the Almas Tower (from the Arabic word for diamond), which is now under construction on a 300 hectare (740 acre) property owned by the Dubai Metals and Commodities Centre (DMCC) on Dubai's Sheikh Zayed Road. The custom-built facility, which is expected to open next year, will serve as a base for large numbers of local and ...

 Dubai Diamond Exchange

 
From right to left: Ahmed bin Sulayem, Chief Operating Officer, DMCC; Tawfique Abdullah, Chairman of DDE; Chris Swolf, Director, HRD and Jan Buffaerts, Trade Commissioner, Belgian Trade Center.

The Dubai Diamond Exchange (DDE) has announced a co-operative initiative with the world-renowned HRD Institute of Gemmology to conduct comprehensive practical and theoretical diamond training courses at the Exchange.

From right to left: Ahmed bin Sulayem, Chief Operating Officer, DMCC; Tawfique Abdullah, Chairman of DDE; Chris Swolf, Director, HRD and Jan Buffaerts, Trade Commissioner, Belgian Trade Center.

 
This is the first time that diamond traders and gemmology students in Dubai have the opportunity to learn about various aspects of diamonds sorting and grading from such a globally recognised institute. The HRD Institute of Gemmology is the educational department of HRD, a leading non-profit diamond-grading laboratory, based in Antwerp, Belgium.

The first course, 'Diamond Grading and Identification', which was held from April 10 to 21, 2005, was attended by leading representatives from the diamond and jewellery trade including RosyBlue, Shalev and Tulip Diamonds, in addition to start-up businesses, members of the exchange and the general public.

Addressing a press conference to announce the tie-up today (Monday, April 25, 2005), Tawfique Abdullah, Chairman of DDE, said, 'This partnership with the world-renowned HRD Institute of Gemmology is in line with DDE's vision of bringing international standards in diamond grading and other key aspects of diamond trade to the Middle East region. We are now the sole provider of HRD courses in the UAE and are confident that diamond and jewellery professionals across the region will welcome the opportunity to learn from the experts in the diamond trade, right here in Dubai.'

The Dubai chapter of the HRD Institute of Gemmology course covers topics such as the '4Cs - carat, colour, clarity and cut', 'External and internal characteristics of diamonds', 'Measuring inclusions' and 'Diamond Treating Identification'. The trainees are also given practical workshops in grading and sorting diamonds. On passing, students receive certificates from the HRD Institute of Gemmology in Antwerp.

Noora Jamsheer, Chief Executive Officer, Dubai Diamond Exchange added, 'Offering internationally recognised training is integral to raising standards and enabling local jewellery traders to compete at an international level. We will continue to work with HRD to offer a wide variety of courses on topics ranging from rough diamonds to polished diamonds.'

'HRD has been committed to serving the international diamond industry for several decades. The DDE has been the driving force in promoting the diamond industry in the Middle East, and we are excited to work with them to further raise standards in the region. Together, we hope to provide the required skills and training to beginners as well as professional diamond graders and traders. We will be running a variety of courses consistent with the International Diamond Council rules for grading of polished diamonds,' said Chris Swolf, Directo

Gold Exchange

– Building a new home for the world’s commodity trade

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For as long as anyone can remember, the city of Dubai has relied on commodities trading for its staple income. The early days as a fortified fishing port soon gave way to a flourishing pearling industry. As, Dubai began to exploit its geographical position between Europe and Asia, this was replaced by an economy built on the re-exportation of goods. The emirate has been blessed with some oil wealth, but at its heart has always been a home for entrepreneurial merchants and companies wishing to base themselves in a cosmopolitan and globally connected community.


Thanks to the popularity of the Gold Souk area in the Deira district, Dubai has become known internationally as the ‘City of Gold’. An astonishing 20 per cent of the global gold trade passes through the city, making it a business worth an estimated $4 billion annually. Some of that is certainly wholesale and paper trading, but a growing proportion of the trade is attributable to domestic retail sales that are made either in the Gold Souk itself or in one of Dubai’s numerous air-conditioned shopping malls.
Quite a Place to Buy Jewelry
Ahmed Bin Sulayem,
DMCC’s Chief Operations Officer

According to government statistics, 95 per cent of visitors to Dubai buy jewelry during their stay. Given that the number of visitors arriving in the city is expected to double to 10 million by 2010, there is small wonder that companies involved in the diamonds and precious metals business are so bullish about Dubai’s prospects.
 

Recognising the opportunity to harness the power of existing commodities businesses while attracting new ones to the emirate, the government founded the Dubai Metals & Commodities Centre (DMCC) in 2002. The premise of the DMCC is to provide companies engaging in commodities trading and support services with a free zone environment featuring 100 per cent business ownership, a guaranteed 50-year tax holiday, a one-stop shop for regulation and licensing, and a custom designed infrastructure. Three target segments have been identified – gold and precious metals, diamonds and coloured stones, and other commodities. The center’s objective is to create a dedicated market place for these goods. This will broaden the range of activities undertaken in the local market while simultaneously increasing the value and volume of commodities traded in and around the Middle East region.
 

According to David Rutledge, acting chief executive and executive director of commodities for the DMCC, the centre has already registered more than 425 companies across the three core segments. These companies not only hail from the Middle East but from Asia and Europe, and all are attracted by the combination of regional demand and Dubai’s position at the crossroads between continents.
“Dubai’s attractions really vary by commodity,” he explains. “The city is already a major bullion centre, along with New York, London, Zurich and Tokyo, and for gold part of the demand is for local jewelry while another is for the nearby market of India – the world’s largest consumer of gold. Similarly, for diamonds we enjoy proximity to the source nations in Africa and Russia and are in a natural position to intermediate in the flow from producer to fabricator to consumer.”
 

Almas Tower

“Then there are other commodity products such as energy, tea, spices and steel. Energy is an obvious commodity for Gulf markets, but steel might seem odd, as it isn’t sourced here. All you need to do is look at the skyline in Dubai to see how much local construction demand there is for steel, though. Beyond Dubai, we also expect demand for the reconstruction of Iraq over the coming years and for major development work in countries like Iran.”
 

A Commodity Campus to Be Built
DMCC licensees are already trading from temporary premises in Dubai, but the center’s 300-hectare campus won’t be completed until late 2006. Located near to the Emirates Golf Club on the arterial Sheikh Zayed Freeway linking Dubai to Abu Dhabi, the campus will provide an array of mixed-use towers in which DMCC-registered businesses can undertake commodity trading and manufacturing. Designed for jewelry manufacturers, and containing 500 factory units, workshops and residential facilities, the three 12-story towers of the Jewellery and Gemplex opened their doors in January. Mid-January also saw freehold units in the flagship Almas Tower and Au Towers go on sale.
 

Rising 65 stories above an island, the spiral-design glass Almas Tower (“Almas” means “diamond” in Arabic) is expected to become the new home for Dubai’s diamond trading community, and is being built to include such industry-oriented features as natural lighting, vaulting facilities and reinforced flooring, strong enough to support heavy safes. Similarly, the 37 stories of the Au Tower will be customised to meet the needs of the gold industry.
 

Even though the DMCC anticipated significant demand and doubled the original size of the Almas Tower, all units sold out in less than 24 hours. Properties in the Au Tower were in similarly high demand, taking only 48 hours to sell out. The last high-rise tower, Elaf Tower, has yet to go on the market, but units will only be available for leasehold.
 

A Unique System of Negotiable Receipts
As they wait to take possession of their premises, the DMCC’s licensees are coming to grips with new systems and facilities that the centre has put in place to guarantee efficient and transparent trading operations. The first of these initiatives was the Dubai Commodities Receipt (DCR) mechanism, essentially a series of negotiable electronic warehouse receipts issued both to facilitate the financing of goods and to combat fraud.
 

Launched in September 2004, DCRs are issued once goods are deposited in a DMCC-approved warehouse and are stored in a web-based management system. The existence of a DCR proves the existence of the goods, and so a trader can then use the DCR either to conduct trades with other registered members of the system or as collateral to obtain finance from member banks. Early financial services members of the DCR mechanism include Citigroup and the UK’s HSBC and Standard Chartered banks.
 

“The DCR is similar to an electronic warehouse receipt systems at the New York Board of Trade and the London Metals Exchange,” explains David Rutledge. “The difference really is that their systems are designed to facilitate trading as the delivery end of a commodity derivatives trading platform while ours is also a financing mechanism. That makes the DCR a unique concept, and one that is flexible enough to be used by member banks anywhere in the world.”
 

The DMCC is also preparing to launch a Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange (DGCX) in the second half of this year. Announcing a technical partnership with Multi-Commodity Exchange of India and Financial Technologies India Ltd in early November, the DMCC’s executive director for gold and precious metals, Colin Griffith, said the exchange would use a state-of-the-art electronic trading platform.
 

“The first contract to be listed will be gold, but that will quickly be followed by other contracts,” he said. “As the exchange develops and gains in prominence we expect a significant amount of trade in silver, steel, freight, cotton and energy contracts, so that we can achieve a balanced portfolio with futures and options contracts available for all listed commodities.”
 

As an added benefit for companies trading contracts on the DGCX, insiders say that the exchange is likely to be regulated by the DFSA, the independent financial services regulator that has been set up at the new Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). This arrangement is yet to be confirmed, but the DMCC has already opened the exchange for membership applications. Approved companies can either join as market members who may only trade in a specified commodity on their own behalf, or as general members who may trade in any category of goods both for themselves and for clients.

Prostitution racket in Dubai an affront to Islam's holiest places

By M A Shaikh

Several years after the collapse of communism, thousands of prostitutes are still flocking to Dubai, the trade centre of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), from the countries of the former Soviet Union. And although prostitution is illegal in the emirate, this appalling trade in human flesh is a high-profile activity in a region which hosts Islam's two holiest places - Makkah and Madinah. Even the self-appointed custodians of the shrines approve of the racket, travelling to Dubai to indulge themselves.

Many of the 'night butterflies', as prostitutes are called in Russian, are young Muslim women - some former students - who came looking for work but have ended in a trap of sin, poverty, exploitation, hopelessness and fear.

Indeed, those who try to escape their ordeal often only manage to get killed by pimps and others who have an interest in seeing them secure in their cages. They are in dire need of rescue - not condemnation - and rehabilitation to prepare them for a life fit for Muslim women.

There are now several thousand prostitutes in Dubai. Apart from a few African women, they come from Russia, the Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Chechenya, Kyrgyzstan and other republics of the so-called Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). This may be a trickle compared to the hundreds of thousands of young women that flooded into Western Europe when the Soviet Union collapsed, but it is already causing great embarrassment in a sparsely-populated Muslim country, whose authorities are ignoring it for reasons of their own.

The women arrive on weekly flights from the CIS on pre-arranged visas by agents who then confiscate their passports, set them to 'work' and force them to buy back their travelling documents in addition to paying for the arranged visas and the awful accommodation they are given. As soon as the visas expire the women are on the run and become entirely dependent on their pimps. Each day a prostitute stays on without a visa is equivalent to a fine of ú16.

All visitors to Dubai, except British citizens, are required to be sponsored by a local sponsor. It is this system of sponsorship, manipulated ruthlessly which partly makes possible the arrival, and stay, of so many women that are in effect illegal immigrants. Despite their legally precarious position, the prostitutes are becoming bolder and bolder - thronging Dubai's beaches, night-clubs and hotel bars, and openly walking the streets. The majority of their clients are Arabs but the western expatriates are also coveted patrons.

They have in fact become so bold, that even seasoned expatriates are shocked by their aggressiveness. According to one of the very rare foreign reports on the topic, a Swiss engineer who has worked in most of the Gulf States, including Oman and Bahrain, finds their behaviour unprecedented.

A recent article in the London-based Sunday Times quoted him as saying: 'I have never seen such in-your-face prostitution as this. I had literally just stepped into the lift of my hotel when a Russian girl tried to invite herself into my hotel room.'

Yet, the authorities turn a blind eye to this outrage, largely because the business community, both Arab and expatriate, prefers things this way. Dubai, like Bahrain, 'has prospered as a centre for fun-starved Saudis,' as the Sunday Times report puts it.

Dubai owes most of its prosperity to its status as the region's tax-free centre. No longer able to rely on its oil reserves, it defers to the business community which, like secular Gulf Arabs, wants to preserve a Shari'ah-free zone in the region. The six remaining members of the UAE, and their western protectors, share Dubai's antipathy to an Islamic way of life and back its decision to tolerate the prostitution racket.

This explains the extraordinary denial by the emirate's police that the racket exists or that there are large numbers of foreign women who are illegal immigrants as a result of the expiry of their visas or confiscation of their passports by the pimps. It also explains why the local media are under orders from the authorities not to comment on the issue.

Only one thing worries the Gulf potentates and the west about the racket: it is an aspect of the growing drug-smuggling and money-laundering activities of the pimps which is controlled by the Russian mafia. Western officials are concerned that the drugs will end up in their countries and that the money-laundering will cover illegal operations there.

It is not surprising that the joint operations carried out by western and Gulf officials in recent months have concentrated on the drug-smuggling and money-laundering aspects - ignoring the prostitution issue altogether. In July, a joint police investigation smashed a ú25 million drug ring. It was only after arrests were made as a result that Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the UAE president, was moved to hold a crisis meeting with the other six rulers. Even then, no announcement was made and no action taken. Shaikh Zayed simply urged the sponsors to be more vigilant.

The prostitutes - and the child camel jockeys smuggled into UAE out of the Indian subcontinent - are apparently the only illegal 'foreign workers' immune from expulsion. Hundreds of children, some as young as five, are forced to ride on camels in desert races on which huge sums are gambled. Their terrified screams make the camels run faster. And like prostitution, the employment of young jockeys is illegal in the UAE (since 1993) but the authorities also turn a blind eye. Again, like the prostitutes, many of the child jockeys are Muslim children who are being ruthlessly exploited and are in dire need of rescue.

Unlike the prostitutes and the child jockeys, foreign workers in the UAE, including those on legal stay, are routinely rounded up and expelled. Between 1991 and 1996 more than 145,000 workers, mostly Muslim, were sent home (see Crescent International report of December 16-31, 1996). More recently, Saudi Arabia expelled nearly 400,000 workers from the kingdom, accusing of them being there 'illegally.' The majority had simply changed employers - a right denied foreign workers in the kingdom.

The Saudis and Kuwaitis who are engaged in rounding up Muslim workers, approve of the presence of the young prostitutes and jockeys for their own diversion.

 

Donald Trump: the ultimate Dubai endorsement?

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News that Donald Trump is to enter the Dubai real estate market with a landmark hotel project in the centre of The Palm, Jumeirah marks a new step in the creation of Arabia's international city. For Dubai is now the epicenter of the oil boom in the Middle East.

United Arab Emirates: Thursday, October 06 - 2005 at 09:14

 

Nowhere in the Middle East will be more transformed by the oil boom of the early 21st century than Dubai. And the arrival of US billionaire and self-publicist Donald Trump is exactly the kind of international endorsement that this city now merits. Donald Trump once wrote a book called 'The Art of the Deal' so it is likely that he struck a pretty tough bargain in Dubai. But when New York's leading property developer moves into a city this has to be big news; Mr. Trump after all has made his fortune by being ahead of the game.

 


So what does he see in Dubai, apart from more self-publicity? But to be fair his Dubai deal will not be big news in the USA. Surely Mr. Trump is attracted by the high margins available to hotel owners in Dubai, and the chance to secure a prime piece of real estate in the world's fastest growing city.

For Dubai residents coping daily with long traffic queues and the nuisance of constant construction this may not seem such a wonderful thing. But Dubai has now earned its place on the world stage, and nothing succeeds like success.

It attracts successful people like Donald Trump who then attract others in their turn. Now at some point this seemingly endless development boom has to take a breather, if only to allow some of the concrete trucks to reach their construction sites on time.

 

Will the boom end?

But calling an end to the Dubai boom has become a bit of a joke among long term expatriates, some of whom have been waiting for 20 years for things to calm down.

For Dubai is becoming another Singapore or Hong Kong - an international city serving a much wider and less hospitable region. If you go back in time then Singapore and Hong Kong were once little more than coastal villages.

The same kind of energy, rampant capitalism and visionary leadership that transformed these cities is also evident in Dubai. That this coincides with a period when oil money is flowing freely in the Middle East explains why there is quite such an extraordinary rush of development in Dubai right now.

Mr. Trump is no fool. He knows real estate goes in cycles, and has suffered badly in previous slumps. Indeed, when he addressed the 'Leaders in Dubai' event recently Mr. Trump said he did not expect to be enjoying such fame and fortune in a few years' time.

But Donald Trump has survived the ups and downs of the real estate industry, and so will Dubai. That is perhaps ultimately why Mr. Trump is happy to invest in this city.


 

Dubai's Israel ban violates U.S. law

 
 
BY MICHAEL McAULIFF
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

 

WASHINGTON - The government of Dubai, whose company is taking over operations in six U.S. ports, enforces a boycott of Israel - a boycott that is illegal under U.S. law.

The law is enforced by the Commerce Department, which is one of the agencies that signed off on Dubai Ports World taking control of terminals in Manhattan, Newark and four other cities.

The issue was raised in congressional hearings yesterday by Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who quizzed DP World Chief Operating Officer Ted Bilkey on whether Dubai still backs the ban.

"I would imagine it would," answered the clearly uncomfortable exec, who also admitted the company is 100% owned by Dubai's ruling family.

According to Commerce figures provided by Nelson's office, U.S. ships docking in the United Arab Emirates were asked 238 times in 2003 and 2004 to certify they had no Israeli goods.

In fact, Israeli passport holders arriving by cruise ship to Dubai are not allowed to disembark.

The State Department could not immediately say last night how it would deal with a company doing business in the U.S. that backs a ban of Israeli products in apparent violation of U.S. law. A spokesman said the U.S. is negotiating a new trade deal to end the boycott.

"This is yet another problem that this deal raises," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). "The more you learn the more unanswered questions there are."

Among those questions raised yesterday were why the Coast Guard found DP World's purchase of P&O, the British company now running the ports, posed no risks after complaining "intelligence gaps" made a security assessment possible.

Schumer and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) also asked about worries other agencies may have had.

Sources told the Daily News yesterday the Customs Department also may have had questions.

In another hearing, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte for a full intelligence workup on the UAE before letting DP World do work here.

Negroponte insisted the deal was thoroughly vetted. "We did not see any red flags come up during the course of our inquiry," he said.

In London, the Eller & Co. stevedoring company of Miami challenged the deal in a court that must approve the $6.8 million purchase of the British company.

The court, usually seen as a rubber stamp for such deals, put off a decision until tomorrow.