Investment bankers are a rare breed. They operate in a world where deals are brokered well away from the glare of publicity, but their very survival depends on maintaining a public profile.

It is a difficult balancing act.

One of the tricks of the trade they use to pull it off is to release research notes to investors and the media designed to make them appear like oracles with a bottomless depth of industry knowledge.

This distribution of industry knowledge aims to give confidence to private individuals who trust the investment banks to invest their money wisely. The more knowledge a bank appears to have, the more people trust them with their hard-earned cash.

In the Middle East, there are a few investment banks that consistently provide valuable insight into the market. EFG Hermes is normally a reliable source of opinion, if not always hard facts. Barclays Capital also distributes wise words from time to time.

But these multinational operators have their clever techniques undermined by smaller, more local, players who understand the need to have their voices heard, but often have nothing of value to say.

I could point to any number of examples from across the GCC, so UAE-based Al Mal Capital is not alone in serving up industry gossip disguised as priceless research, but a report today usefully illustrates my point.

In a research note about the UAE mobile phone market, the bank asserts that growth in the number of phones in use will slow this year as the population shrinks.

In a not insubstantial report, Al Mal says that every person in the UAE had more than two mobile phones in 2008. But its analyst goes on to say that this figure might be misleading as it doesn’t take into account whether the phones are active or not.

In other words, the number is more than misleading, it is useless.

What else might be useless in the research note? Perhaps its “estimate” of 2008 population, which it records (or guesses) was 5.6 million (the last official census in 2006 revealed the population to be 4.6 million).

Or perhaps its guess that the UAE population will decline this year to 5.08 is also misleading. After all, the head of the Dubai Naturalisation & Residency Department, the government body responsible for issuing residence visas, says that more people have been arriving in the city than leaving.

DRND chief, Major General Mohammed Ahmed Al Marri, is specific about the figures: in January this year DRND issued 88,423 new residency and cancelled 54,684. Every other assertion about UAE population growth since this announcement has ignored the hard facts provided by the man in charge of visas.

In a way, GCC authorities have only themselves to blame. The institutions do not exist to provide reliable and trusted statistics, so investment bankers (and ratings agencies, and journalists, and the general public) happily make up their own numbers.

The bizarre thing is that when government officials do stand up to be counted, their word is ignored over the guesswork of investment bankers.

I live in an apartment block owned and managed by Emaar at The Greens.

We had lots of notices and posters displayed around the common areas of the building urging us to turn our lights out for Earth Hour last Saturday night – and for us all the ‘do our bit’ for the planet.

What a joke when then the next day as I was walking through The Greens in the POURING RAIN that all the sprinklers were on watering the grass!

Where’s the green thinking behind that? Or are we just supposed to make an effort for one hour every year and put a tick in the box?

It’s this disregard for any real commitment to improving the environment and promotional packaged claptrap that allows fair weather ‘greenies’ to really think they have made a difference by turning their lights out for one hour!

So, day one of the Arab League Summit in Doha, where the minds of the attending leaders are supposedly focused on putting aside squabbles, generally being nice to each other, and sorting out sizeable regional problems as the world looks on.

Here are Libya premier Muammar Qadafi’s opening comments, delivered astonishingly from the stage to Saudi’s King Abullah bin Abdulaziz: “I say to you now… that it’s proven that you are the one whose lies are behind him and his grave is ahead of him and you are the one who has been made by Britain and protected by America… I am a leader of nations and the chief of Arab rulers and the king of kings of Africa and the imam of the Muslims.”

The organisers turned the microphone off at this point. Qadafi then flounced out, having, as he must have known he would, stolen the show.

Isn’t this grandstanding today a little depressing and tired? 300 million people in the Arab world are surely hoping that the summit is an opportunity for real progress on the humanitarian crises of Iraq, Somalia and Palestine, not to mention education and health care reform in the region. These are the issues people care deeply about, not the ego of a 66 year old.

If leaders must fight with each other, can’t they do it the way the rest of us do it in 2009: in private and mainly over text message? This summit is too important to waste.

I’m not in the business of preaching, but I’m fed up with whining, moaning expatriates who think they can impress you with 10 minute soliloquies about how much they hate Dubai. Don’t come out here on your own volition, milk the tax-free lifestyle and then spend every minute of your spare time slagging off a place you chose to come to. I think part of the problem with most of the expats in Dubai is that they don’t get out enough.

On the surface, Dubai is very much shopping malls, glitzy hotels and rowdy Antipodean watering holes. If you’re lazy and unadventurous, that’s all you’ll get from it. But if you’re prepared to venture further afield, there are endless things to do,  which don’t involve spending huge amounts of money.

Try watching camel racing at the weekends, organising your own camping trip to the desert (not with a tour operator), go to Bur Dubai and munch in one of the many Indian owned eateries for less than AED20, or wander down Umm Sequim beach and watch fisherman making dhows. There’s always the fish market in Deira if you can stand the smell.

If you don’t like the outdoors, don’t enjoy travelling and seeing new things, then maybe you’re in the wrong place. You didn’t move to Dubai for the culture and nightlife did you? If you’re a Londoner (coming from a city with an arts and music scene to rival any in the world) I hope not.

What is it with kids in the UAE?

Aside from the fact that they seem to have lost the ability to walk and spend most of their time on those dreadful ‘heelies’ whizzing up and down the malls here – have parents here forgotten how to discipline them?

I have witnessed tantrum after tantrum in supermarkets while mums just totally ignore their kids ranting on – or just turn a blind eye while they run up and down the aisles getting in the way of other shoppers.

Yesterday I was in a changing room at a department store while a child continuously banged and kicked the wall from the other side…and the mum just apparently continued to try and clothes in a different fitting room.

In my apartment block there is a young mum with a child who goes swimming virtually every night – and I can pretty much set my watch by the time that I hear the child come screeching along the corridor to wait for the lift…it drives me mad!

Control your kids!