New debt law will help UAE financial markets - The National

New debt law will help UAE financial markets  - The National:

The new Public Debt Law enabling the UAE to issue sovereign bonds will help to deepen the capital markets in the second-biggest Arabian Gulf economy, enabling the country to tap a wider pool of financing options and creating a government yield curve to bolster secondary debt market in the UAE.

“The debt law represents a further fillip to the UAE’s plans to deepen the breadth of the financial and debt capital markets,” said Ehsan Khoman, the head of Middle East and North Africa research and strategy at the Japanese MUFG Bank. “The bonds [issued under the new law] will act as a central mechanism in the creation of a government yield curve in the secondary debt market.”

The UAE on Saturday issued the law permitting the Federal Government to sell sovereign debt for the first time, a move that will boost banking liquidity and enable individual emirates - which currently issue debt at the state level - to benefit from higher issuer ratings than they could achieve on their own, said Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai and Minister of Finance, in a statement from the Ministry of Finance.