Was Dubai A Disaster Waiting To Happen?

Posted by admin on Nov 30th, 2009 and filed under News, Photo Gallery, Travel Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Dubai has existed for many years as an important strategic post between the east and western worlds with its earliest ever mention thought to be in the “Book of Geography” dated 1095. More recently Dubai has flourished at an exceedingly fast rate.
2001 saw construction begin on the now world famous Palm Islands by Nakheel Properties, a UAE development company who hired Belgian and Dutch contractors to start dredging and reclaiming land to create the Palm Jumeirah, Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira. The 2,000 villas and townhouses on the Palm Islands sold out within a month when they went on sale in 2002. The one million pound properties were snapped up by footballers and film stars alike with David Beckham, Michael Owen, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie buying some of the much sought after beach side properties.
Thousands of people flocked to Dubai during these affluent times, many enticed by the tax free lifestyle. Property prices soared and by the end of 2007, rents skyrocketed as Dubai became hooked on its own success in seeming to have achieved the unachievable. But was this envied emirates bubble about to burst?
There was unrest among the natives, workers were becoming restless at their conditions and pay, constructing tower blocks in the mid day heat, without proper breaks and working for paltry wages that sometimes weren’t getting paid for months was causing unrest. They couldn’t leave as would most certainly lose the money they were owed and they simply could not afford this. Workers began to protest and the government was forced to intervene.
Nakheel Properties operate under the umbrella of Dubai World, who manage various businesses on behalf of the Dubai government and are responsible for a lot of the construction work that has gone on in Dubai over the last several years. They are currently working on The World and Universe Islands and have announced plans for the Nakheel Tower, which when built will be the world’s tallest skyscraper standing at over two thirds of a mile high, and at the centre of a vast development complex called the Nakheel Harbour and Tower. However all this has now come to a grinding halt.
Dubai’s government has tried to deny that they had any financial problems, however top of the range sports cars have been abandoned at the airport with credit cards still inside as people flea from the threat of imprisonment if they go bankrupt.
The Dubai government and its associates have more than $80 billion worth of debt and have already twice asked Abu Dhabi for funds to help bail them out. The Federal Government has already approved $15 billion in bonds, but the emirate is going to need much more if it is to avoid total financial meltdown. Has the greed of trying to build faster, bigger and better than anywhere else in the world, a dream that was seemingly coming true, turned into a very expensive nightmare? A nightmare which could leave this stretch of the Persian Gulf coastline looking like a very costly construction site?