When the emir of the United Arab Emirates wanted to build a world-class port, he built it. When he wanted to turn Dubai into a Middle Eastern Las Vegas, he went all out, with the world’s tallest skyscraper, the world’s largest aquarium, an indoor ski slope, and a property development build on land shaped into a map of the world.
Now he wants Dubai to become a financial center, rivaling New York, London, and Tokyo. From In Quest to Build A Financial Center, Hurdles for Dubai:
In the latest phase of its development, Dubai sought to lure global financial firms to its soil. And if they wanted international legal and regulatory standards, Dubai was determined it would provide them — at least inside one section of downtown. After some wrangling with the U.A.E.’s central authorities, Dubai won permission to exempt its financial center from nearly all of the federation’s commercial laws.The U.A.E.’s central bank, under international pressure to improve its oversight, set some limits. It retained jurisdiction over investigations of possible terrorism financing and money laundering. But it let Dubai set up an entirely separate, Western-based commercial system for its financial district that would do business in dollars, and in English.
This included independent regulators and judges imported from the West. Dubai scored its first coup in 2002 when it lured Ian Hay Davison, a former chief executive of Lloyds of London, and Phillip Thorpe, a former senior British financial regulator, to set up and oversee the regulatory side of the proposed financial center.