by Lee, M
Except for Donna, the other women all had children, so the conversation revolved around that. Everyone was friendly, but any time the conversation strayed from kids it was rather stilted. It was all very polite, rather than relaxed. None of us really knew the others and I was very aware that I was sitting next to Marcus’s boss’s wife. No alcohol was consumed, and it turned out we were going to have dinner (lucky I only had something light when I ate at 7 p.m., just in case!). It took a very long time. I would later realise that it was very common in the Middle East to have dinner at 9 or 10 o’clock, but I was suppressing yawns by 11 p.m., and we didn’t get out of there until well after midnight.
MARCUS
While Julie was out with the other wives, the husbands and I were at the first of what was intended to be an annual celebration: Nakheel Day. It was supposed to be strictly staff only, not even partners, but I had been invited as part of the process of wooing me to take the job.
It was held at a large conference centre attached to one of Dubai’s many luxury hotels. As I walked in I saw Justin Crooks, who I had met earlier that day at the office. Justin was one of the people Matt Joyce had brought in. He had worked with Matt in Australia and had just flown in that day to take up a position at Dubai Waterfront as one of the (much-needed) Development Directors.
We accepted one of the offered non-alcoholic drinks and moved through to take our seats. This was new CEO Chris O’Donnell’s first big outing and he was obviously keen to make a no-expenses-spared statement. I had to smile to myself, remembering that the functions I’d attended at Investa while he was running it had been just a couple of steps above BYO, more often than not featuring stubbies of VB from the staff kitchen. Chris would later boast that the night had cost millions of dollars.
The MC for the event was Nakheel’s Director of Marketing and Sales, Manal Shaheen. To great whooping and cheering from the audience she welcomed the guests, making a special point to thank Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the chairman of Nakheel’s parent company, Dubai World, for attending. ‘It’s a privilege you could spare some of your time to join us, Your Excellency,’ she said with great deference. Then she introduced Chris, who gave a speech about all the huge projects Nakheel was undertaking and what an exciting time this was for the company and for Dubai.
He was followed by the singer Ronan Keating, who performed a song that had been specially commissioned for the occasion. As he literally sang the praises of the company and the emirate, the large screen behind him showed him wandering pensively through the desert, large black Arabian horse in tow, interspersed with images of Palm Jumeirah, The World development and, of course, the Burj Al Arab hotel. The room went wild. Zouheir Sabra, Dubai Waterfront’s Chief Financial Officer, turned to me and said, ‘Who wouldn’t want to work for this company!’
It was a level of hype that I had previously only associated with American events and I took it all with an Australian grain of salt. It was after 1 a.m. before things started wrapping up and I could take my leave. Julie got back to the hotel about the same time. I showed her the company-branded iPod we’d all been given as souvenirs of the night, and we headed to bed, exhausted.
The next day I received the proposed employment contract, which was for an initial three years, to align with Dubai’s residency period (though in effect the contract would be continuing if both parties chose not to end it). My Estate Manager consulting contract finished at the end of July, after which I would go back to Sydney for two weeks to help Julie pack up. With Dudley staying with one of our friends, Julie and I would then come back to Dubai together. We would sort out accommodation, then Julie would fly back to Sydney, pick up Dudley and they would come and join me.
People who came a year or two later to work for Nakheel and other companies would be given lots of useful help — folders full of contacts and information and relocation agents assigned to sort everything out for them. But in 2006 we were pretty much pioneers, left to rely completely on our own resources to navigate this unfamiliar land. There was a joke among those of us in that initial group that the plane had landed and tipped on its side, throwing us all out to fend for ourselves, before heading off to get the next load.
JULIE
Before I flew out Marcus and I started a detailed plan for the move. It was how we did most big things. It began as a small handwritten version of what’s called a Gantt chart, then we put it all into an Excel spreadsheet. There were entries for both Sydney and Dubai for all the elements that had to be dealt with: house, furniture, banking, employers, Dudley, etc.
When I got back to Australia we continued to work our way through it, via emails and Skype. Marcus dealt with the Dubai side and I sorted out the Sydney end. In a methodical, organised manner we sorted out item after item. When Marcus came back to Sydney all we had to do was box up our remaining things so they could be shipped out and get ourselves on the plane.
Chapter 4
A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM
MARCUS
If we’d known how hard it would be just to get the basics for living in Dubai in place I would have said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to Matt Joyce when he offered me the job.
It turned out that Julie and I needed all kinds of identification documents, licences and permits. Each one took countless hours and involved navigating an extraordinary amount of bureaucracy. I’m sure people moving to Australia experience a version of these frustrations, but at least there are multi-lingual websites that detail the requirements and the process. None of that information existed for expats in Dubai. Instead you stumbled your way through the strangest mix of rigidly adhered to processes and procedures which I’m convinced had been made up on the spot. Little wonder that a book called Dubai: Red Tape sold like hotcakes.
You couldn’t call up to find out what you needed to bring before you presented yourself at the relevant office to get a driver’s licence, register an electricity connection, get internet access or get a licence to purchase alcohol. Instead you had to go there and queue for hours just to ask a clerk what was needed to make the application. You’d ask, ‘Is this everything I need?’ and the answer would be, ‘Yes, Insha’Allah’.
Insha’Allah literally translates as ‘God willing’. In Dubai, as throughout the Arabic-speaking world, it is routinely added to the end of sentences. For devout Muslims it’s a statement of faith. For the less devout it is in one sense a verbal habit or a kind of fatalistic shrug that seems to allow the speaker to step away from taking responsibility. I was living in a foreign country; it wasn’t my place to impose my values and I tried not to be judgemental. That was a battle I lost — my experiences have, without doubt, made me bitter. But even in those early days I found the general lack of accountability and consistency infuriating.
This was clear in all of the transactions where, fronting up to the relevant department with the documents you’d been assured were necessary, you then learned that your application couldn’t be processed because there was something extra you needed to provide. There was no apology, no sense that customers had expectations that should be met. Instead you got a blank look, a shrug and the news that the extra piece of information would be all that was required, ‘Insha’Allah’. After a day like this, Julie and I would look at each other and try to find the humour in what we called these ‘Dubai moments’. (The other common expression among the expat community was a wry ‘You’ve been Dubai’ed’.)
The timing made these processes even more frustrating; I wanted all the bureaucratic hurdles to be done with so I could just focus on my job. But even trying to find a place to live was a full-time task. With the property boom in full swing, people were pouring into Dubai from Britain, Russia and other parts of the Middle East. Properties were snapped up, sight unseen, within an hour of being listed. Finding a rental property in Sydney was no picnic either but here the dodgy and downright illegal activity added another obstacle.
As there was no licence for real-estate agents or brokers, anyone could call themselves an agent
and claim to be representing a particular property. Bizarrely, many of the properties that were genuinely for lease were left unlocked. So someone calling themselves a real-estate agent could just stroll in with a client and then stroll off with a large cheque, generally with no recourse for the duped would-be renter. All rental properties required twelve months’ payment upfront plus 5 per cent commission. Prices were sky-high — a perfectly ordinary villa, which was really a fancy name for a house, would cost upwards of AUD1000 a week, so people who were duped could and did lose vast amounts of money.
We had been warned about these scams but we almost got trapped. After repeatedly asking whether the ‘agent’ who had shown us round a particular villa was genuinely entitled to represent it we handed over a cheque. Moments later the agent confessed that it was really a ‘sublet’ arrangement. I asked for the cheque back. The ‘agent’ tried to bluff it out, but when he learned I worked for Nakheel, everything changed. Nakheel was a private company, but it had close ties to the government, which alarmed the scammer, who promptly handed back our money.
To our relief Julie got a call from a broker at the last minute saying he had what we were looking for — reasonably sized, nothing too fancy — but it would need to be renovated before we could move in. We agreed to meet him there the next day. The place was an unbelievable mess; the previous tenants had pulled down non-structural internal walls and erected others, the kitchen walls were blackened by naked flames and there was a crater in the backyard where they had brought in a truck-mounted crane to pull out a fully grown tree to take with them when they left.
We were stunned, both at the damage done and the thought of how long it would take to repair. Unfazed, the agent assured us this was common behaviour from tenants. The villa’s owner worked as a manager for a local property developer so, using company resources (on the sly, we learned), he would have it all fixed within days. This seemed implausible but two days after Julie flew out to pick up Dudley, the broker called to say the work was complete. Desperate by now, I raced over to his office and wrote a cheque for the balance without visiting the villa itself to check the work. Amazingly, it had all been done, as promised.
In Sydney we’d paid AUD500 a week in rent. Here we paid the equivalent of AUD1200 a week, which meant a AUD65,500 upfront payment, including the commission. Between airfares, the cost of shipping our furniture and personal effects and transporting Dudley, a deposit for a new car, plus local charges for various permits and licences, we paid around another AUD30,000 to make the move. While I would be earning very good money it would take a while to accumulate enough to cover all this, so in the meantime we used a combination of credit cards, bank line of credit and the cash we had on hand, rediscovering the financial juggling skills we had honed while trying to pay for textbooks all those years before.
JULIE
At the end of our fortnight in the hotel I flew back to Sydney as planned, finished the last of the packing and, after saying goodbye to family, set off with Dudley on 12 September 2006 for our adventure. The first month or so of my time in Dubai was swallowed up by navigating the bureaucratic minefield Marcus described. My intention was to take time off work, study for my CPA qualifications, learn to cook and relax, but that didn’t last long. I tried, really I did, but I just couldn’t get the hang of all that idleness.
There were a few women among the executives who had been brought into the emirate to work in the upper echelons of big companies but the vast majority of them were men. Their wives and children generally also came to Dubai for the duration and few of these expat wives worked. The disparaging nickname for them was Jumeirah Janes. They lived lavish lives, with sprawling villas in upmarket compounds and lots of live-in household staff, including maids and nannies.
A typical day for them would start with school-aged children being dropped at a very expensive private school (there were no cheap government alternatives for expat children) and younger ones left at home with one or more nannies. The lady of the house would then be free to go out for a coffee or lunch with the girls, do some mall shopping and fit in a ‘mani-pedi’ or a beauty spa appointment before going home. Three or four times a year they would fly to Europe for skiing or more shopping. Summer holidays in July and August were almost always spent away from the stinking heat of Dubai.
Women who couldn’t have dreamed of living like this back in their home countries did so in Dubai, where luxury lifestyles were something to flaunt: the more conspicuous your consumption the better. It was all fuelled by the very large tax-free expat executive salaries their husbands received and the pittance they had to pay staff.
I couldn’t get comfortable with any of it. All the manual labour was done by expatriates, but not white-skinned westerners. These were Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Filipinos who left their own families behind and came to Dubai where they worked twelve or more hours a day for the equivalent of perhaps AUD200 a month. The majority of this got sent back to their families, leaving them with a tiny amount to survive on.
You never saw these people in the glossy brochures or glowing travel shows about Dubai, but when you lived there they were everywhere: they make up more than 70 per cent of the population. And that doesn’t even count the ones who travel hours each day to and from neighbouring emirate Sharjah where rents are cheaper — although they still often have to live six or more to a room.
If the members of this underclass worked as shop assistants they at least had the benefit of air-conditioning. The lowest of the low were the construction workers. During our time there one of the biggest property development companies was averaging a death a day on its building sites. In Chris O’Donnell’s early days at Nakheel I remember him talking about getting these workers into proper gear including safety boots. He must have made some progress because I later heard a story about one of the workers diligently fronting up in his work boots — with his toes wiggling free at the front where he had removed the steel cap for comfort. Over the years we were there, safety did become more important in Dubai, but horrific accidents still occurred.
The government didn’t show much appetite to fix what would have been a scandal elsewhere. Instead the locals just seemed to accept these avoidable deaths as a cost of doing business. In fact, most Emiratis openly treated these non-western expatriates as an inferior class with few rights. A lot of other westerners seemed to just accept the status quo, but as an egalitarian Australian, I found it very troubling.
So, no household help for us. And I didn’t have much interest in spending my days shopping. I like nice shoes, but I didn’t enjoy clothes shopping and I wasn’t interested in jewellery. Our goal was to save a deposit for a Sydney cottage and we stayed focused on that.
Like most other companies, Nakheel paid its employees’ salaries in dirhams. The dirham was pegged against the US dollar but there were continual whispers that this peg might be removed, which would mean the value of money held in dirhams could disappear overnight. Transferring this money to an Australian bank was expensive because the banks took out fees for two exchange transactions — first from dirhams to US dollars, then from US dollars to Australian dollars. Not to mention the Australian dollar’s fluctuations against US currency, which could really hurt. So it made sense to hold the money you made in US dollars. The solution for many Australians, British and other expats residing in Dubai, including us, was to open a US dollar account with a bank based in Jersey in the Channel Islands.
Even though Jersey is what’s called a British Crown dependency, it is self-governed. While it has strong banking regulations like the UK, it doesn’t tax interest paid on your savings. Having a Jersey bank account sounds like a big deal, as though you’d have to be a billionaire to make it worthwhile. But in reality it was very easy, mundane even. Lots of international banks like Citibank and Standard Chartered had branches in the UAE. The one we used was HSBC. This is the account into which our pay was banked in dirhams. The bank had a Jersey arm and, once we opened an acc
ount with it and linked the accounts, we could simply transfer the money that went into our UAE account into the Jersey account, where the money was held in US dollars.
Apart from not losing money in bank fees, the arrangement also gave us real peace of mind. There were always stories circulating about people in the UAE having their bank accounts frozen for bizarre reasons like changing jobs or being mistaken for another person. Perhaps it would eventually get sorted, but in the meantime they had no money to live on. We had also heard about rumour-driven runs on local banks. A nice, secure Jersey account was a much better option.
After just a couple of months I’d given up on the lady of leisure idea and started looking for a job. I had good, transferable skills, so it didn’t take long to get something and in January 2007 I joined the pay-TV company Showtime Arabia as Project Accountant.
Marcus had told me about the mess with financial systems — or the lack of them — at Nakheel, and Showtime Arabia had very similar problems. This was a company with a huge number of subscribers and transactions but the financial tracking systems it had would have been inadequate for a school canteen back home. It was an absolute debacle. It was majority-controlled by a company belonging to the Kuwaiti royal family and it needed to be accountable, but when I joined they couldn’t even do something as fundamental as get the bank statements to reconcile. I was hired to implement a completely new purchasing process with systems to match.
It was great to be doing something worthwhile and I was paid well, if nothing like what executives at Marcus’s level got. My salary was about the same as I would have been paid for a similar role in Sydney, but the bonus was it was tax-free. Within a few months, we fully paid off all our debts, including HECS, and we were making good progress on our Balmain house deposit.