Third of staff axed at Omniyat

Developer Omniyat Properties confirmed on Monday it has axed nearly a third of its workforce to ride out the real estate downturn.

A total of 69 jobs, including 32 staff on probation along with others in sales and marketing, have been lost - reducing the overall headcount to 145 from 214 as the group looks to cut costs and tightly manage cash flows during the property slump.

In addition, Omniyat CEO Peter Walichnowski and Alex Andarakis, head of sales and marketing, are to take at least a 30 percent pay cut each this year.

Mehdi Amjad, executive chairman of Omniyat Properties said: "We had to look at our cost and organisational structure and how we could make it effective. That meant we had to lay off 69 of our colleagues."

Amjad stressed its core project and asset management teams had remained intact.

It comes just weeks after fellow Dubai-based developer Damac said it was cutting 200 jobs and on the same day that Emaar also announced it was considering redundancies.

And as the credit crunch bites developers are across the region are suspending future projects yet to hit the market.

Omniyat has delayed six future projects worth around 8 billion dirhams, such as a hotel project at the Dubai Waterfront.

The project, which will bring the Miami South Beach hotel concept to the Middle East in partnership with a publicly listed hotel group, was supposed to launched this month but is being delayed until the first quarter of next year.

Omniyat is the developer behind projects including the cube-shaped The Opus which was launched in May and is under construction in the Business Bay district of Dubai, near the Burj Dubai.

It also announced in October that it had broken ground on Gemini, a 500 million dirham freehold office tower in Dubai's Business Bay, comprising 20-storeys and 260,237 square feet of office space.

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