Dubai, which is restructuring debt at its state-owned holding companies, may sell shares in some of its large businesses, the chairman of the Dubai Supreme Fiscal Committee said.
“We are working on opening up the capital of leading companies to our public,” Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum told a conference in Dubai yesterday.
The emirate may now need to “regroup, review and reconsider some of our investments and re- challenge our competitive edge,” he said.
The committee is the top body responsible for Dubai’s fiscal policy.
Dubai and its state-controlled companies are struggling to service debt that Barclays Capital estimated in September at about US$112 billion. The second-largest sheikhdom in the United Arab Emirates accumulated the loans during years of rapid growth in its property industry and other businesses.
The emirate stunned global markets a year ago when its -corporate flagship Dubai World sought to freeze payments on US$24.9 billion in loans. All of Dubai World’s creditors have agreed since then to a restructuring plan, a person with knowledge of the plans said last month.
The impact of last year’s debt scare was “compounded by the local real estate process and the significant drop in price of the assets acquired by Dubai-based entities in the boom years,” Sheikh Ahmed said.
Dubai allowed foreigners to buy property in some parts of the emirate in 2002, a decision that triggered a building boom and a quadrupling of home prices until mid-2008.
The credit crisis, which drove away speculators and squeezed mortgage lending, caused home prices to plunge by more than half.
A share sale by Emirates, the world’s biggest airline by international traffic, “may be a reality one day, not now,” Mohammad Ibrahim al-Shaibani, the director-general of the Dubai ruler’s court, said at the conference.
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