JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2001 I was invited to the Rubens Hotel in London's Buckingham Palace Road for breakfast. My hosts were Claude Smadja, a Swiss journalist and until recently secretary to the famous annual World Economic Forum in Davos, and Habib Mahloujhi, a young British-educated Dubai resident of Iranian extraction. Mahloujhi was then head of knowledge at the executive office of the Crown Prince of Dubai, HH Sheikh Mohammed.
They told me of the executive office's plan to establish a regional financial centre in Dubai. It was to be called the Dubai International Financial Centre – DIFC for short. They were looking for a chief regulator. Did I know of anyone suitable?
Having retired from the Bank of England two years earlier, I was free and willing to undertake an advisory but not an executive role in the project.
During the Christmas break I took soundings from former colleagues at...
