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On 18 March, Maldives President Abdullah Yameed Abdul Gayoom flew into Riyadh, where he was received at the airport by King Salman Bin Abdelaziz. King Salman has excellent relations with Gayoom, and spent considerable time in the Maldives at the end of his 2014 Asia tour – at the time, there was some controversy over the size of the then crown prince’s retinue and the associated displacement of tourists. King Salman hosted a banquet for Gayoom, and the two men held official talks, also attended by Crown Prince Miqrin, defence minister Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), deputy foreign minister Abdelaziz Bin Abdullah and Riyadh governor Faisal Bin Bandar.

A Saudi prince accused of failing to pay Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) a $3.5m medical bill for the treatment of an Egyptian child has denied he owes the sum. In his 12 June answer to an April 2019 complaint filed by the hospital, Prince Abdelilah Bin Abdelaziz Bin Abdulrahman Al-Faisal Al-Saud admitted to agreeing to sponsor the patient’s care at BCH, but with a one-time donation of $750,000.

A 29 March reshuffle at Abu Dhabi’s Supreme Petroleum Council (SPC) has further reinforced the dominance of Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan (MBZ) and his Bani Fatima brothers. Among those to join the SPC are Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber – who has been reshuffling executives himself following his recent appointment to head Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (see below) – Mubadala Development Corporation (MDC) chief executive Khaldoon Al-Mubarak and MBZ’s son Sheikh Diyab.

Prime minister and interior minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Bin Khalifa Al-Thani travelled to the UAE in late November for meetings with the senior leadership there. During the trip he met Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, UAE deputy prime minister and interior minister Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, prime minister and Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum and Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Al-Maktoum. Qatar and the UAE have not always had the easiest of relationships but there have been a number of high-level meetings of late.

The king of Bahrain’s son, Prince Nasser Bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, is not immune from prosecution, and may face investigation and potentially trial in Britain over allegations that he tortured a number of political prisoners in Bahrain in April 2011, a British court has ruled. After a two-year court case, details of which only emerged in May, High Court judges Lord Justice Laws and Mr Justice Cranston quashed a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that the prince was immune from arrest and prosecution, at a divisional court hearing in London on 7 October.

Abu Dhabi Crown Prince and UAE Armed Forces deputy supreme commander Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan (MBZ) took part in the Astana International Financial Centre’s official inauguration on 5 July, in the company of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Also in the MBZ delegation was deputy prime minister and minister of presidential affairs Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan and minister of state for foreign affairs Anwar Gargash. A day earlier MBZ held talks with Nazarbayev in Astana, where they witnessed the signing of agreements on the transfer of prisoners and cultural co-operation.

The Bahraini government has clarified a court ruling on 28 October that seemed to suspend opposition group Al-Wefaq for three months. As GSN reported at the time, a statement from the justice ministry seemed to suggest the ruling would not be enforced if Al-Wefaq fulfilled its legal obligations (something Al-Wefaq says it has already done).The government has since confirmed that the suspension would not take place “if the society puts things right at its general conference”, a spokeswoman at the Bahrain embassy in London told GSN.

Body-worn camera (BWC) specialist Edesix has opened an office in Dubai as the focus of a regional market drive. The UK-based firm already supplies VideoBadges to the Abu Dhabi police force. Managing director Richie McBride said Edesix “see[s] the Middle East as a fast-growing market”. The office will explore regional markets, “support our growing channel within the UAE” and promote integrated video management systems.

Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani travelled to Belgium on 4 March at the start of a two-leg trip to Europe which will also take in a state visit to Bulgaria. A number of co-operation agreements and memoranda of understanding are due to be signed over the course of the trip.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said it had killed two members of a ‘terrorist group’ and wounded four others, in a clash in the Marivan general district of Kurdistan province on 19 May. It was the latest in a long line of security incidents along Iran’s western border. The latest operation, carried out by the IRGC’s Hamzeh Seyed Al-Shohada Base in partnership with local intelligence agencies, followed an incident on 5 May, when three IRGC soldiers including Colonel Shakiba Salimi were killed by what official sources labelled “counter-revolutionary terrorists” in Divandere.

Saudi Arabia has launched its first advertising campaign against the abuse of women, with a striking poster of a women, in niqab, with one bruised eye. The damaged eye, peeping through the black fabric that covers all of her body and most of her face, is paired with the slogan: “What is hidden is greater – together, fighting violence against women”. A more idiomatic translation might be “the tip of the iceberg”; an English version of the poster read: “Some things can’t be covered, fighting women’s abuse together”.

The federal government has reached an agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to resume oil exports from Kirkuk via pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Exports will run initially at 50,000-100,000 b/d, but could in time rise to more than 200,000 b/d. Exports had been halted since October 2017 when Baghdad took control of the Kirkuk area, following the Kurdish independence referendum.

The involvement of Saudi businessman Khalid Ali Bugshan in a major French political corruption case is not expected to affect the wider family businesses. Bugshan is a scion of the Hadramauti family whose parent company is the long-established Abdullah Said Bugshan Group (ASB), and which remains prominent both among the Jeddah business community and in Yemen.The case stems from an investigation into allegations that Nicolas Sarkozy received money from the late Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi to finance his 2007 election campaign, and is politically explosive in France at a time when Sarkozy has returned to head the centre-right party UMP (Union pour un Movement Populaire), which emerged on top in 29 March local elections.

It must have been very frustrating for the Qataris to see the International Labour Organisation (ILO) distance itself from Qatar’s newly released report, Workers’ Welfare Standards (WWS), a 50-page document intended to demonstrate to the world that Qatar planned to treat its migrant workers better in the run-up to the 2022 World Cup (see page 4). Releasing the report (rather bizarrely subtitled A lasting legacy of human and social development) on 11 February, the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy (SC) noted that it had engaged the ILO “to look at the entire process from recruitment to living and working conditions upon arrival”

Plantation Holdings filed its case against Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) at the High Court in London on 5 August 2013 and submitted an amended claim in February 2014. Despite this, DIB failed to declare the existence of the claim in its prospectus for a $1bn sukuk which it published in January 2015. HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank were the structuring banks and joint lead managers of the Islamic bond, which was supported by six UAE-based banks including DIB itself. The prospectus was approved by the Dubai Financial Services Authority and also published on the Irish Stock Exchange.