President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan recently approved the adoption of a unified national healthcare and health insurance system for all Emirati citizens across all seven emirates.

In most boardrooms, the conversation still circles around growth, investment, and performance. The problem is that confidence in those answers has quietly eroded – not because the data has got worse, but because the way growth is created has changed faster than the way it is interpreted inside organisations.

When US and Israeli forces struck Iran on 28 February this year, the ripple effects across the Gulf were swift. And for business leaders who had been tracking Saudi Arabia as a market entry destination, the instinct was to wait.

Think about the last time a patient complained about waiting. Not for a bed or for a scan result, but for something administrative such as a prior authorisation, a referral, or a follow-up appointment that fell through the cracks. These aren’t clinical failures – they’re coordination breakdowns. And for the most part, they’re entirely preventable.

There is a contentious but meaningful quote that goes something like “Never waste a good crisis”. The words have been attributed to Churchill, Machiavelli, and, most recently, Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, during the 2008 financial crisis.

There’s a pattern that tends to repeat itself in global finance, and it’s one that experienced investors know well: when the world gets nervous, certain destinations don’t just hold their ground, they grow more compelling. The Gulf region, and the UAE in particular, is one of those places.

There’s a decent chance that the last app you opened, the last software your company renewed, or the last AI tool your team demoed is, at least in part, backed by capital from the Gulf. You probably didn’t notice. That’s partly by design, and partly because the story has not yet been told clearly enough.

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth. In 2025, nearly 246,000 tech workers lost their jobs as companies restructured around artificial intelligence and cost efficiency. By early 2026, the pace had accelerated – tech sector job losses in the first six weeks of the year were already tracking to surpass 270,000 by the end of the

In the years following Brexit, a growing number of British nationals based in Dubai have taken a strategic step to restore their European mobility: applying for Irish citizenship by descent. At Knightsbridge Group, working alongside our specialist Irish legal partners, we have seen a significant increase in successful applications from UK citizens with Irish parents or grandparents -

For decades, the UAE’s tax proposition was simple: zero corporate tax, a free zone ecosystem that made structuring relatively frictionless, and a regulatory environment that kept pace with business. It was, by most measures, a compelling offer. In January 2025, however, the UAE introduced a Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax (DMTT). This was the local implementation