For much of the past decade Abu Dhabi Emiratis have looked somewhat askance at their neighbors in Dubai who embarked on a mission to build the world’s tallest buildings, the greenest golf courses and the largest shopping malls.
“I know more than a few Emiratis who see what’s happening in Dubai and think of the hadith in the Qur’an about the end of days,” an Emirati businessman told The Media Line and asked not to be identified to protect his Dubai construction contracts. “The hadith says, ‘There will be no Judgment until very tall buildings are constructed.’ ”
Notwithstanding dark predictions of Dubai’s doom, the Emirati’s sentiment illustrates the gulf between the two emirates’ approach to economic diversity.
It’s easy to bash Dubai, which saw hundreds construction projects ground to a halt during the global recession that began in late 2008. Abu Dhabi contributed to a $20 billion bailout package to Dubai. An estimated $4.1 billion of that bailout went to save the government-owned Dubai World.
Abu Dhabi is far healthier, but it also gave loans totaling $10 billion to rescue its own troubled Aldar Properties, which developed such prestige projects as the Yas Marina Circuit for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and Ferrari World. The bailout stung so badly that Abu Dhabi’s investment arm, Mubadala, is considering abandoning real estate investments.
But given its wealth, Abu Dhabi is in a better position to be magnanimous. The United Arab Emirates has the world’s fifth largest oil reserves. Abu Dhabi controls 95% of those reserves, holding about 92.2 billion barrels. Dubai has only 4 billion barrels in reserve, which are mostly from offshore oil fields and likely to be exhausted by 2030.
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