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The prominent Qatari businessman Khalid Al-Rabban died from a heart attack on 22 March at his villa in Al-Khor. His funeral was held at the state mosque the following day, and senior dignitaries including the Father Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani and Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani attended the family’s majlis to pay condolences. Born in 1942, Al-Rabban was educated in Beirut and took over his family’s Rabban Contracting & Trading in 1970. The Rabban Group includes interests in contracting, cement, general sponsorship and trading and is one of the largest suppliers of mineral water in Qatar through Rayyan Water.

As Saudi Arabia turns its attention increasingly to citizens fighting in Syria and other conflicts abroad, Kuwaiti newspapers have reported that Jazaa Al-Shemmari, the brother of MP Sultan Al-Shemmari, was killed while fighting for the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat Al-Nusra. According to the Kuwait Times, Jazaa Al-Shemmari had left for Syria eight days before being killed in a battle in Yabroud on 21 March. The Syrian government said it recaptured Yabroud, a strategic town close to the border with Lebanon, on 16 March; according to a report in the Financial Times, rebels had been weakened by a powerplay between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, each of whom was backing rival groups.

Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has taken the first step towards a long-awaited cabinet shuffle, installing new interior and oil ministers. On 7 March, a presidential decree appointed Major General Abdo Hussein Al-Tareb as interior minister, replacing Abdel-Qader Qahtan. At the Ministry of Oil and Minerals, the new minister is Khaled Mahfouz Bahah, who fills the post vacated by the January resignation of Ahmed Abdullah Dares. Bahah was recalled from Canada, where he had been ambassador since 2008. He is a former oil minister (2006-08) of Hadhrami origin; holding a Masters of Commerce from the University of Pune in India, he has private sector experience and is known for pushing Yemenisation of the oil industry.

The Shura council has urged the National Anti-Corruption Commission (Nazaha) to make public photographs and names of officials found guilty of corruption, and to conduct swift trials, Saudi media have reported. “The Shura agreed that Nazaha must revise its regulations to include defamation as a form of punishment for individuals involved in graft,” assistant president of the council Fahaad Al-Hamad was quoted as saying by Arab News. “The Shura also urged the commission to co-ordinate with government departments to speed up investigation into graft cases and trial for people involved in such cases.”

Muscat’s Court of First Instance delivered more verdicts on 2 March in the string of corruption cases going through the Oman courts. The former managing director of Galfar Engineering & Contracting, Mohammed Ali, who had already been sentenced in January to three years in jail in a separate case, was sentenced to 15 years in prison and a fine of OR1.7m ($4.4m), after being found guilty in five cases. Another official at Galfar, the deputy of the oil sector – unnamed in press reports – was also given 15 years in prison and a fine of OR534,000, for being Mohammed Ali’s accomplice.

Qatar has a new ambassador in the United States. Mohamed Jaham Al-Kuwari, who presented his credentials at the White House on 11 March, has just spent ten years as ambassador to France, where he was appointed in 2003. Born in Qatar on 20 May 1958, he has a degree in political science from the University of Portland, an independently governed Catholic university in Oregon, and an MA in international relations from the University of Madrid. He joined the foreign ministry in 1981 as third secretary, and has held numerous posts since, including deputy head of cabinet (1993-95), director of European and American Affairs (1995-97, 2001-02) and chief of the information department of the co-operation council of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His foreign postings include a previous spell in Washington (1981-86), Madrid (1986-90) and Tehran (1991-92). Du

An Ankara-based engineering, procurement and construction contractor, which in 2013 filed a dispute against Oman under a bilateral investment treaty and is seeking some $182m in damages, has said it will wait another few weeks to hear from Muscat before moving the case to an international arbitration court in Europe. The March 2013 dispute, Attila Dogan Construction and Installation Co v The Sultanate of Oman, centres on the poor treatment Attila Dogan says it received after winning a $743.5m contract in October 2010 from Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) for work relating to PDO’s Block 6. “We have had no overtures from Oman since August 2013,” Akin Alcitepe, from Attila Dogan’s law firm, the Washington DC-based Bailey Law Group PC, told GSN. “They don’t seem keen to talk. It would be sensible if Oman would settle and clear it up.”

A court sentenced the chief executive of state-owned Oman Oil Company (OOC), Ahmed Al-Wahaibi, to 23 years in jail on 27 February for accepting bribes, abuse of office and money laundering. It was the most severe punishment meted out in a series of corruption trials that began in 2013. The Court of First Instance in Muscat also convicted Adel Al-Raisi, a former ministerial aide in the economy ministry, of organising a bribe made by a senior official at South Korea-based LGI to Al-Wahaibi, and sentenced him to 10 years in jail, according to the Reuters news agency.

Many analysts have questioned whether Moqtada Al-Sadr’s retirement from politics, announced in February will be permanent. The reshuffling of MPs within the Ahrar bloc in late February/early March suggests that his removal from the party front line will last at least until the upcoming general election. But his evident involvement in the reshuffle – which saw Bahaa Al-Araji replaced with Mushrik Naji as the head of the Ahrar bloc in parliament – as well as his recent speech urging Ahrar MPs to fully participate in the polls, demonstrate that his behind-the-scenes leadership remains strong.

A court in Los Angeles has ruled in favour of King Abdullah Bin Abdelaziz’s son, deputy foreign minister Abdelaziz Bin Abdullah, who is seeking to build a residential estate in the hills above Benedict Canyon. Legal battles linked to the development have been going on for some time; in a blog posting on 3 March, Prince Abdelaziz’s lawyer Benjamin Reznik, of Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell, said a three-judge panel in the Court of Appeal had unanimously affirmed a lower court judgment in favour of the prince’s Tower Lane Properties, and against the City of Los Angeles and Bruce and Martha Karsh, who own a neighbouring property and have been leading efforts to stop the prince from building.

Iran may have topped its group in qualifying for the fast-approaching 2014 Fifa World Cup but, at home, football remains fraught with allegations of match fixing, favouritism and bribery. In many ways, football in Iran is a microcosm of the republic’s complex political system, with athletes and sports clubs implicated in a web of corruption incubated by the closed nature of society. And, as is the case in broader society, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is often to be found at the heart of it.

Muscat’s criminal court has sentenced 23 people, including former government officials, to between one and three years for their part in a scandal involving the misappropriation of land in Duqm. According to Omani press reports, on 16 February, a former undersecretary at the housing ministry and the former secretary-general at the Supreme Committee for Town Planning were each given three-year terms for abuse of office. Omani newspapers said those also accused included the governor of Duqm and his assistant and various others employed by the government. All of those convicted were fined OR100 ($260), and offered OR1,000 bail, and all are expected to appeal.

The UK-based law firm Addleshaw Goddard is to represent Saudi property developer Dar Al-Arkan and Bahrain’s Bank Alkhair (previously known as Unicorn Investment Bank) in a $1bn conspiracy case against several defendants: the bank’s former chief executive, the US-born Majid Bader Al-Refai, global risk consulting firm Kroll Associates, Bahrain-based chartered accountant Alex Richardson and business consultancy FTI Consulting. The case will reportedly start in London’s Commercial Court in the autumn. Dar Al-Arkan and Bank Alkhair are both chaired by Saudi businessman Yousef Al-Shelash.

Kuwait’s five-month-old cabinet has already fallen apart, as political tensions prompted a major reshuffle (GSN 953/8). On 23 December – just hours after the constitutional court rejected petitions to nullify July’s parliamentary polls – the entire government submitted its resignation to Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Al-Mubarak, following media reports of an imminent reshuffle. On 6 January, Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah issued two emiri decrees, one accepting the resignation of seven of those ministers – including oil minister Mustafa Al-Shamali and finance minister Sheikh Salem Abdulaziz Al-Sabah – and the other making seven new appointments and reshuffling the remaining portfolios.

The UAE has sentenced Waleed Al-Shehhi to two years in prison and a fine of Dh500,000 ($136,000) for his tweets about the UAE 94 trial (GSN 958/7, 948/6). Al-Shehhi was arrested on 11 May in Ajman, and charged under the new cybercrimes law, which prohibits the use of information technology for activities that could endanger national security or defame the government (GSN 936/4). He was convicted on 18 November. Al-Shehhi, an employee at the Emirates Authority for Standardisation and Metrology, had posted comments on Twitter about the mass trial of Islamists, coverage of which was heavily censored (GSN 950/7, 949/7).