Where am I?

OK - having got rid of the reason for being (watch out for the Rorschach inkblots - I feel they can't be far away!) I'll set the scene for where I am, and what I'm doing. Right now, I'm back in my hotel, trying to cool down, having been working in an office space where the air conditioning isn't yet commissioned, most of the external walls are glass, and the outside temperature is well over 40 Deg C. If ever I wanted to know what a joint of beef or a chicken felt like in the oven, I'd say I've a pretty good idea now. (Not that I really did want to know what they felt like - that's carrying existentialism way too far for me.)

Anyway, the hotel in which I sit is in Dubai. I'm sure you all know where that is, but for the avoidance of doubt, it's in the Persian Gulf, round about here:



Dubai is broken up into a number of areas, some of which are Free Zones - relevant to what I'm dong, so I'll get back to that later - and others are just municipal areas, just as you'd find anywhere else. This map shows a fair breakdown of the areas:




Within Dubai, which is one of the Emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, I'm in an area called Jumeirah Lakes Towers. This is just inland of the Dubai Marina shown on the map above. In addition to Dubai building new islands - the Palms, the World, etc - they also create lakes and waterways inland. Some of these are low rise; JLT, as you might guess, is an area of tower blocks, surrounding a number of lakes.



The Almas Tower - the round location shown between the 2 lakes to the left - is where the office that I'm working on is located; the hotel is - on this image - immediately below the Almas Tower and to the left of the road.

As I noted earlier, Dubai has a number of Free Zones. If you set up in business in Dubai, broadly you can do so in one of 2 ways. If you set up "on shore", you can trade more or less anywhere in Dubai, doing anything (subject to your trade license.) However, your business must be 51% Emirati owned. If you set up in a free zone, the business can be 100% foreign owned. There are pros and cons to either approach, and the reasons for selecting how to set up a company here are far more complex than I want to trouble you with in this post. The reason for getting in to the issue of Free Zones, is in general you must set up in the Free Zone that relates to your business type. Hence if you're in finance, you must set up in the Dubai International Finance Centre, if in Internet, then in the Dubai Internet City, and so on.

The commodities market, although a governing body was created (the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, or DMCC), didn't actually have a physical location, so if you were in that market, you could set up anywhere, and operate under the DMCC regime. However,after a few years like this, the DMCC now has a home, and any businesses that operate under this authority have a time limited period within which they must move to the new Free Zone. Just in case you haven't spotted where this is going, the location of the DMCC is Jumeirah Lakes Towers, and the DMCC organisation itself is in the Almas Tower.

The DMCC fills 3 floors of this building; the remaining 60 floors or so are beginning to fill up with commodities organisations. The reason, then, that I'm here is to help commission the new office of a firm for which I do work in the UK, but actually has it's head office in Florida.

That should round this post out nicely - the next will probably be a series of rants about the joys of doing business here - but in the meantime, you might find the following links interesting - for the DMCC, and the hotel in which I'm staying. See you on the other side ...

http://www.dmcc.ae/
http://www.bonningtontower.com/