Comment: Dubai needs law reform

Image by geordieb1 via Flickr

The car parks around Dubai’s larger office complexes tell a story of plummeting activity far graver than the regular summer lull.

In contrast, business is booming at Dubai’s courts. Even the valet parking tends to fill up and buses are needed to shuttle people from a nearby park. As the tide of the city-state’s property boom has receded with the global financial crisis, a rising swell of litigation has followed.

But it is hard these days to decide which cases are legitimate and which are driven by denuded investors manipulating the legal process to wriggle out of commercial bets on the wrong side of the 50 per cent collapse in real estate prices.