“SEXY? Is it sexy?” asks Sheikha Lubna.
Sex is the last subject you would expect to discuss with a Middle Eastern
finance minister, especially when she is dressed top-to-toe in a black
abaya, her head covered with a cream scarf. But Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi
likes flouting convention. She’s been doing it all her life.
She is the first Arab woman to run a major government agency in the
fast-growing United Arab Emirates (UAE), the first woman to join the cabinet
of the UAE and the first woman to become the economy minister of a hugely
oil-rich state. She has just become the first finance minister anywhere to
launch her own perfume line.
One day recently she swapped her office in Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, for
the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in downtown Dubai, where she posed
with a £200 turquoise bottle of Mukhalat Sheikha Lubna, described as
“floral, energetic and powerful”.
The idea of Britain’s chancellor, Alistair Darling, marketing “My Darling” is
enough to put you off your breakfast but, for Lubna, it’s all in a day’s
work. The fragrance launch is, it turns out, part of a campaign to persuade
more Arab women to set up their own retail businesses.
“I must seem the oddest character,” Lubna conceded as she drove away from the
launch, pursued by paparazzi, on her way to meet a delegation from the US
Chamber of Commerce at the five-star Madinat Jumeirah hotel. Odd is not the
word. Contrary is.
The 49-year-old is the poster woman for a fast-growing state where poster
girls are banned. She is an Arab trying to sell the American dream in the
world’s most antiAmerican region. She has spent a lifetime beating
notoriously conservative Middle Eastern men at their own game, but insists
she “despises” feminism.
She is a brilliant computer scientist but, although she flies around the world
first class, has a soft spot for the seaside town of Westgate-on-Sea in Kent.
Few in the West have heard of Lubna but she is about to become very popular.
She is drafting a radical law that will open the UAE economy to greater
foreign ownership, ending decades of restrictions that have ensured local
corporate dominance. Foreign investors can, at present, own only 49% of a
firm outside designated “free zones”. The new law will unleash a fresh wave
of foreign investment, mainly British and American.
Attracting overseas investment is the key part of Lubna’s strategy to
diversify the UAE economy away from oil and create a Middle East centre for
financial services, property, tourism, light manufacturing and service
industries.
Foreign investment in the UAE reached £6 billion last year – one-third of all
overseas investment in the Middle East – and is expected to hit £7 billion
by the end of this year.
“This is a small country,” she said as she sipped her Perrier (which in Dubai
costs more than petrol). “We could have been very complacent and structured
this place like a small social-welfare state but, by attracting foreign
investment and foreign workers, we are expanding and creating a much bigger
base that makes us richer per capita than some other countries in the region
that have more oil. What we have achieved here is phenomenal.”
Looking out from the terrace of the Madinat Jumeirah at the half-built
skyscrapers that punctuate the desert, it’s hard not to be impressed by
Dubai’s “al-bling” economic boom. How did Lubna get here? And could she be
heading to the very top?
Like most of the rulers of the UAE, she had a head start. She was one of seven
children born to the third royal family of the UAE, which ruled two of the
seven emirates, Sharjah and Ras Al-Khaimah.
At that time, most local youngsters learnt Arabic and mathematics and studied
the Koran, but Lubna got lucky. Her father, Sheikh Khalid bin Sultan Al
Qasimi, ran Sharjah airport, where the RAF had a base. He struck up a
friendship with an airman called John Taylor. Al Qasimi agreed to teach
Taylor Arabic and, in return, Taylor taught Al Qasimi English.
When Taylor retired he set up an exchange programme for young Emiratis to
travel to Britain to learn English, and Lubna, fresh out of secondary
school, was one of his first students, enrolling at a language school in
Westgate-on-Sea.
“I still remember the name of my landlord – ‘Uncle Tony’,” she recalls fondly.
She swapped Kent for the Sussex coast to do her A-levels in Brighton, but
dropped out and moved to America to study computer science and systems
engineering at California State University. “I always loved science and
technology, so I decided to become a geek,” she said.
On graduation, she turned down job offers in America and headed home. Her
family expected her to work for the government, but she joined an
Indian-owned software-development firm, Datamation. “I was the only Arab and
the only woman and they said I would never cut it . . . story of my life.”
Dubai was beginning to emerge as one of the world’s leading ports, and she got
her big break in 1993 when she joined the management team of Dubai Ports
Authority.
Most of the men dismissed her, but she quickly established her credentials by
coming up with a computerised manifest system that reduced the time it took
to handle cargo containers from one hour to 10 minutes.
The innovation earned her the UAE’s Distinguished Employee Award in 2000 – the
first woman to bag the honour – and prompted Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al
Maktoum, then chairman of Dubai Ports and Customs, to give her a £2.5m grant
to set up a new company, Tejari.com, to develop government and
business-to-business e-commerce. The firm is now the biggest e-commerce
outfit in the Middle East.
In November 2004, she was at a Tejari roadshow in Tunisia when her mobile
phone rang. It was Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, son of the then president of
the UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, asking her to become the first
woman to serve in the UAE cabinet, handling the newly merged economy and
planning portfolio. “I told him: ‘I’ll have to ask my mother.’ He nearly
flipped, I swear to God. I told him I was flattered but my family had a say.”
She now spends most of her time travelling the Middle East, Europe, North
America and the Far East drumming up fresh investment in the UAE and
identifying investment opportunities for Dubai-based firms.
Daeman Harris, who leads the US Chamber of Commerce in the Middle East,
describes her as “a superstar in the States”. She needs to be. After the
fiasco over Dubai Ports World’s acquisition of P&O – the Dubai
firm was forced to sell off P&O’s American ports after an outcry about
an Arab firm “taking over America’s borders” – there is still suspicion
about the UAE in the West.
In spite of the P&O controversy and hostility to America in the Middle
East, Lubna said the UAE was the perfect environment for the American dream
to take root, creating a unique, East-meets-West economic, social and
religious model.
“We in the UAE are merchants. From the oldest time, people dived for pearls
and travelled to Africa and India to sell timber, spices, perfumes and
textiles. In recent years our trading has become accented by looking at
America. We’ve swapped pearls for services, technology, property.”
She may describe the growth of the UAE – and particularly Dubai – as
phenomenal, but her proudest achievement is to lift the economic veil from
Arab women and encourage them to go into business.
“I am a change agent, a facilitator, a bridge,” she said. “Women are following
my example.”
How far could she go? Becoming the first Arab woman to lead a Middle Eastern
state flush with petrodollars and overseas investment would be a fitting
climax to a career during which she has achieved much – and sacrificed much.
“The biggest regret in my life is that I did not have a family of my own.”
Lubna is single and lives with her mother.
“I was engaged once, a long time back, but it did not work. You think you can
plan your life. I always thought: ‘I’m going to do this job, build my career
and the marriage will come along in time.’ But it never did. The right
person never came along.”
At a youthful-looking 49, surely there’s still time, especially as she now has
her own perfume line? Lubna giggles.
“Quite right. You know it’s a very feminine fragrance and I’m not a feminist.
I like being a lady. I don’t like this business of women marching. A woman
should be beautiful, eloquent, smart and hard-working but, above all,
feminine.”
And, with that, she heads off into the soupy Arabian evening to carry on her
one-woman, economic and social revolution.
