“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.

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