Mr Brightside

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Salaam Al Shaksy says that Dubai Bank has a balance sheet between $5bn and $6bn.

Damian Reilly meets Salaam Al Shaksy, CEO of Dubai Bank, to discuss the region's economic outlook.

Dubai Bank CEO Salaam Al Shaksy's first floor office looks out directly over the Sheikh Zayed motorway. Waiting to meet him, in an anteroom, visitors gaze at it through the window, watching cars hurtling who knows where.

This road, how famous it is in the emirate. People talk about it constantly. And now they say it is emptying. They say this road is a barometer for the health of the nation and now it is trying to tell them something.

Certainly, the Sheikh Zayed motorway has long been a metaphor for commercial life in the emirate. Take the velocity at which people move on it: recklessly fast to maddeningly slow. No one has any friends on this road; here it is every man for himself.

The laws of the motorway, the regulation of it, is laissez faire, to put it mildly; here you can overtake in any lane, and so drivers with an instinct for survival must be constantly swivelling their heads, watchful for ambush from any direction, never allowing complacency to set in.

In fact, as it is in the commercial world, the fast lane is the probably the safest place to be: here the owners of expensive, technologically advanced vehicles must only worry about the lesser contraptions they are passing, throwbacks to bygone eras. But go too fast, illegally fast, as it's tempting to do, and the fines are massive.

But today the talk in Dubai about this road isn't about how fast it is, nor about how unendurable the once, twice daily traffic jams are. The talk is about how few cars there are on it. Rightly or wrongly, the residents of Dubai think that Dubai is emptying and the traffic on the Sheikh Zayed motorway reflects it.

It is precisely at this point in your correspondent's ruminations that Al Shaksy's secretary puts her head around the door to say that the man himself is ready to be interviewed. It's good timing. For those concerned about the health of emirate, who better to ask for analysis than the CEO of the bank that bears its very name?

In his office, pleasantries dispensed with, CEO Middle East now hunkers down on the sofa next to the chair in which Al Shaksy sits in his dishdash, readies a dictaphone and gets straight to the point. What is going on in Dubai? What is happening to the city whose rise and rise over the last decade has captured the world's imagination? Is the fat lady really warming up, as some say she is?

Al Shaksy pauses to think, smiles, and then says this: "I think we have gone through some challenging times because of the global financial crisis. I don't think any country is totally immune to what is happening on a global scale. I think that Dubai has had its share of the impact. It's because of being such an open economy and having investors from all over the world, be it in real estate or stock markets.

And also Dubai is a big player, investing outside in various entities. Obviously there has been an impact. However, I think so far Dubai has been resilient and it has shown that it has been able to handle the crisis so far. I think things have slowed down a little bit because of what is happening."

A little bit? What about the property market in the emirate, which people are now comparing to Singapore's in the early 1990s, when 80 percent of property values there were wiped off quicker than you can say negative equity. Surely this is not a little slowdown? Surely this is what the financial fraternity refers to as ‘going off a cliff'? And then there's the local stock market...

Al Shaksy smiles again. He has a friendly face. He says: "Well, it is relative. In our world of finance everything is benchmarked. But you have asked the right question, relative to what? If you look at the global slowdown and you look at our slowdown, I don't think we are out of touch with reality. So it is not a Dubai phenomenon, it is worldwide phenomenon that has trickled down."

There are those who say that Dubai is overly reliant on the rest of the world, that it is the poster child of globalisation during the good times, but in the bad times, as we are discovering, more akin to the canary miners used to take down the pit. The problem is, these people say, that Dubai doesn't really make anything, it has nothing to sell, and so when times are tough and international trade is drying up, the emirate is left with little on which to fall back. It doesn't export very much.

"But Dubai re-exports," Al Shaksy says, showing me the whites of his eyes, seemingly incredulous that there are people out there for whom this argument might hold water.

"If you export you rely on other countries, too. Everyone relies on other countries. And probably countries that don't rely on other countries so much won't be affected as much. But the countries which do are more international, more economically developed, more advanced, and more dynamic. But the beauty of Dubai is that it has the ability to adapt. I have seen Dubai reinvent itself over the years."

Optimism for the emirate

Over the course of the 40 or so minutes CEO Middle East spends in the company of Al Shaksy it becomes increasingly apparent that he is an ardent fan of Dubai and truly believes the emirate has what it takes to take on the world. He is constantly optimistic and emphasises that the emirate's rulers will learn from the current global malaise, all the better to emerge from it stronger and wiser. He will not, however, be easily drawn into specifics. Al Shaksy is not a man who indulges in speculation.

Asked about the real estate market in Dubai, and when it is likely to recover, if indeed it is, Al Shaksy folds his arms and says: "I certainly have no clue. I am not much of a real estate expert."

CEO Middle East tells him he must be being disingenuous, that everyone else in the emirate has a view on the property market, from locals to bellboys. How can he not have an opinion?

"Everyone else is entitled to have a view on the market, and I am entitled not to have a view. I will tell you very frankly, I refuse to be forced into predicting what is going to happen, because I tell you, what we are experiencing today on a global scale is a first. When it happened in the 1930s the world wasn't so globalised. Today all countries are somewhat interrelated. It is systemic."

Pushed further, Al Shaksy will admit that he is "optimistic" that Dubai will recover, citing the emirate's infrastructure as the factor that will make sure it remains the most attractive destination in the Middle East in which to do business.

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