GAMLA, Golan Heights // Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Sunday that Israel would never relinquish the Golan Heights, in a signal to Russia and the United States that the strategic plateau should be excluded from any deal on Syria’s future.
“The Golan Heights will remain in Israel’s hands forever,” Mr Netanyahu told his cabinet, which met for the first time on the Golan since the area was captured from Syria in a 1967 war and annexed in 1981, in a move that has not won international recognition.
Mr Netanyahu, who made a similar statement during an election campaign in 2009, said he had spoken by telephone with US secretary of state John Kerry on Saturday and told him that Israel’s security must not be compromised by any peace agreement to end Syria’s five-year-old civil war.
That would mean that “at the end of the day Iranian, Hezbollah and ISIS forces would be expelled from Syrian territory”, Mr Netanyahu said.
Iran, one of Israel’s main foes, as well as Tehran’s Lebanese proxy, Hizbollah, have supported Syrian president Bashar Al Assad in the conflict against rebel forces and ISIL militants.
Echoing a previous call from the Jewish Home party, a key ultranationalist partner in his governing coalition, Mr Netanyahu urged the international community “to recognise finally that the Golan will remain permanently under Israeli sovereignty”.
Officially, the Golan was chosen as the venue for the cabinet session as a way to mark the anniversary of Mr Netanyahu’s election victory a year ago.
But the timing was seen by some political commentators as linked to talks Mr Netanyahu is due to hold with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday on Syria, where Moscow’s military and diplomatic interventions are crucial.
Though Russia is committed to keeping Syria intact under Mr Al Assad, it has not publicly broached the future of the Golan.
“Whatever happens beyond the border, the [Golan] line is not going to change,” Mr Netanyahu said about his conversation with Mr Kerry.
Having sent in Russian forces last year to turn the tide against a rebellion raging since 2011, Mr Putin wants to preserve Mr Al Assad’s central rule as part of national reconciliation efforts. While formally neutral on the civil war next door, Israel has predicted Syria’s sectarian partition is inevitable.
* Reuters
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Yahya Al Ghassani's bio
Date of birth: April 18, 1998
Playing position: Winger
Clubs: 2015-2017 – Al Ahli Dubai; March-June 2018 – Paris FC; August – Al Wahda
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1. Australia 52; 2. New Zealand 44; 3. South Africa 36; 4. Sri Lanka 35; 5. UAE 27; 6. India 27; 7. England 26; 8. Singapore 8; 9. Malaysia 3
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Started: January 2018
Founder(s): Pishu Ganglani and Ricky Husaini
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Born: near Sialkot, Pakistan, 1981
Profession: Driver
Family: wife, son (11), daughter (8)
Favourite drink: chai karak
Favourite place in Dubai: The neighbourhood of Khawaneej. “When I see the old houses over there, near the date palms, I can be reminded of my old times. If I don’t go down I cannot recall my old times.”
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Distributed denial-of-service: Floods systems, servers or networks with information, effectively blocking them.
Man-in-the-middle attack: Intercepts two-way communication to obtain information, spy on participants or alter the outcome.
Malware: Installs itself in a network when a user clicks on a compromised link or email attachment.
Phishing: Aims to secure personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.
Ransomware: Encrypts user data, denying access and demands a payment to decrypt it.
Spyware: Collects information without the user's knowledge, which is then passed on to bad actors.
Trojans: Create a backdoor into systems, which becomes a point of entry for an attack.
Viruses: Infect applications in a system and replicate themselves as they go, just like their biological counterparts.
Worms: Send copies of themselves to other users or contacts. They don't attack the system, but they overload it.
Zero-day exploit: Exploits a vulnerability in software before a fix is found.
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Tightening the screw on rogue recruiters
The UAE overhauled the procedure to recruit housemaids and domestic workers with a law in 2017 to protect low-income labour from being exploited.
Only recruitment companies authorised by the government are permitted as part of Tadbeer, a network of labour ministry-regulated centres.
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The contract stating the wages, work entailed and accommodation must be sent to the employee in their home country before they depart for the UAE.
The contract will be signed by the employer and employee when the domestic worker arrives in the UAE.
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But agents not authorised by the government sidestep the law by illegally getting women into the country on visit visas.
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Friday, November 1 – Oman v UAE
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Brief scores:
England: 290 & 346
Sri Lanka: 336 & 243
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”