For many around the world, Dubai is the city of progress, prosperity and luxury. Behind the scene, the city entails dirty conducts that promote crime and potentially boosts terrorism.
Dubai is a worldwide financial hub, a retailer’s utopia, and a haven for the world’s wealthy people. In Dubai, the great majority of commercial, economic, and property investment transactions have nothing to do with any illicit activities. However, a continual supply of illegal money underlies Dubai’s success. Those would be the results of corruption and criminal activity.
The Emirati growing real estate industry has benefited from the affluence. Banking system, money lenders, and corporate leaders benefited as well. Furthermore, the illicit capital has transformed Dubai into a significant gold trade center. Meanwhile, both Emirati officials and the global institutions keep looking the other way when it comes to egregious conduct. Dubai is an internationally appealing location for filthy money due to regulatory gaps and inadequate investigative procedures.
The Emirati commercial capital is only one among several criminal financing hotspots around the globe. Nonetheless, tackling the city’s problematic position poses particularly complicated and sensitive problems for law enforcement experts and politicians.
The vast breadth and complexity of illegal cashflows is the most significant of these concerns. It is made considerably more difficult to resolve by global facilitation systems that finish in or travel through the city. These thorny ties cross paths with a slew of other local and operational policy issues. Foreign efforts to determine if oligarchs and terrorists are purchasing real state or laundering money through Dubai frequently face rebuffs.
It is exceptionally hard for investigations to get evidence and elicit assistance from Emirati officials. The multinational FATF singled out Dubai a report two years ago on country for its small figure of money laundering investigations and verdicts.
Dubai; City of Cards
FATF followed the 2020 report a month ago by putting the country into the grey list. The designation occurred after the county made no effective steps in clarifying the financial transactions and money-laundering allegations.
The emirate’s tensely private institutions and unavailability of procedures to hold leaders responsible are also of big concerns. In UK, the US, and many other western states, corrupt oligarchs and terrorist groups are also actively working. In those states, however, these groups are subject to more monitoring from the press, and social groups than in Dubai.
Public elections, a free media, a vibrant civil movement, and the freedom to nonviolent demonstration are all forbidden in UAE. Emirati rulers are free to oppose changes that threaten their special benefits in the absence of local and global intervention.
The current situation resulted from a failure by foreign politicians and managers to step up their bid to encourage and push Emirati technocrats. Dubai will continue to be a problem to operations against corruption and terrorism throughout the world if no force is applied to make policy changes reforms concerning illicit money flows via the country.
Pointing the fingers to Dubai for its major role in enabling illegal money flows clashes with alternative comprehensive strategic agendas that the West care about. The UK, the US and other major powers relied on the Emirates as a secure and loyal regional partner. The UAE has had a particular relationship with the White House for a long time, no matter who sits in.
The clash of interests has led to policies that supported logistic and financial preparations for criminals, including terrorists, through Dubai. Inside suppression and outside silence has reinforced the rulers in the Arab country to proceed with their plans. Dubai is beautiful, only if you look from without.
