Ahmed bin Sulayem: ‘If Dubai is singled out, I’ll call hypocrisy’

I’ve broken bread with Ahmed bin Sulayem many times in the near two decades I’ve known him. But when we sat down in the Uptown Social restaurant at the new hub of the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, it was the first time he had agreed to a full on-the-record interview. I was a little apprehensive, I must admit. 

I know he speaks his mind and is not afraid to call out people who he thinks have been unfair to him, the DMCC, Dubai and the UAE more generally. Would he be outrageous? Offended by my line of questioning? Would the interview be publishable?

My fears were unfounded.

On his home turf at the DMCC, regularly interrupted by well-wishers and executives spotting the opportunity for a little face-time with the boss, Bin Sulayem is relaxed, voluble and measured. Over a 90-minute lunch, I had to turn off the recorder only once.

Early on, he makes a distinction that will frame much of what followed.

“If it’s valid criticism, I will acknowledge it and say ‘thank you’,” he says. “If it’s something where they have singled out Dubai for some issue that affects every trade hub, I will call ‘hypocrisy’.”

That set the tone for our informal, civilised interrogation: a robust defence of the DMCC’s track record as one of the UAE’s most successful free zones; an explanation of how its governance and compliance culture has evolved; an unapologetic account of the role he plays in global diamond watchdog the Kimberley Process; and candid reflections on doing business with politically sensitive markets including Venezuela, Russia and Israel.

The restaurant at the base of Uptown Tower looks out over a skyline that has thickened dramatically during Bin Sulayem’s two decades at the DMCC. The menu is contemporary Dubai fusion – chicken mushroom soup, salad, arrabbiata pasta – a reminder that power lunches in the city no longer require excess.

The setting suits him, because this is his institutional home.

Imre Solt/Wikimedia/Creative Commons

Dubai Media Office

Bin Sulayem has led the DMCC since 2006, overseeing its expansion from a startup commodities zone into a district of more than 26,000 companies spanning trading, logistics, trade finance, digital assets and wealth management. Few executives in Dubai have exercised such long and consistent influence over a single institution.

He reminds me that it sprang from the same seed capital that birthed DP World and the port and customs free zone, in which his father Sultan plays a huge role. The two men continue to share insights and guidance.

“DP World has expertise in providing trade finance for goods in transit. DMCC has expertise in providing trade finance for goods at rest,” he says.

The DMCC’s longevity brings authority, but it has also brought scrutiny. Its rise coincided with a period when Dubai was growing at breakneck speed, attracting global traders and capital faster than some observers were comfortable with.

The system was stress-tested in the Dubai debt crisis of 2009, but DMCC emerged from that apparently all the stronger and attractive to global entrepreneurs. 

Critics said a lot of that attraction was because Dubai’s commodities trade was opaque, lightly regulated and overly accommodating to complex global flows of goods and money.

DMCC and regulation

Bin Sulayem does not deny that DMCC’s early years attracted scepticism. What he resists is the suggestion that the organisation has failed to evolve. He argues that it has consciously shifted from a phase defined by rapid growth to one centred on institutional depth, governance and compliance.

He shows me an internal DMCC document, The Gilded Nexus, charting the evolution of the centre through its different phases – foundation, resilience, the “Wild West” years, maturity and now hyper-compliance.

Is this a tacit admission of past reputational challenges?

“What I’m saying is that we want a future where businesses don’t need to pick between innovation and regulation. It all goes hand in hand,” he says. As evidence, he cites the removal of the UAE from blacklists by international financial authorities.

Banks, he insists, now view DMCC companies as ultra-reliable counterparties – not because standards have been lowered, but because they have been raised. Compliance has moved from a defensive necessity to a competitive advantage.

One of the DMCC’s specialities is the coffee trade and Bin Sulayem has become an expert in the subject. He arranges for a special serving to our table of a Ugandan coffee he has recently discovered. Intended as an accompaniment to food rather than a post-prandial drink, it is deliciously smooth and refreshing. 

Conflict diamonds and flawed sanctions

No part of Bin Sulayem’s career has attracted more scrutiny than his work in the diamond sector, particularly through the Kimberley Process (KP), the international certification scheme designed to prevent conflict diamonds entering the legitimate supply chain.

Under his chairmanship, the programme has been criticised by non-governmental organisations and some Western governments for being too narrow, too slow and too deferential to producer countries with poor human-rights records. Bin Sulayem’s defence is consistent and unapologetic.

“The KP has a mandate,” he says. “It was created to deal with conflict diamonds. It was not created to solve every problem in the world.”

He argues that attempts to stretch that mandate without consensus risk undermining the trust that allows the system to function – particularly among African producer countries for whom diamond revenues remain economically vital.

Undermine that trust, Bin Sulayem warns, and the result is not reform but disengagement.

Noushad Thekkayil/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect

Throughout our conversation, he returns to what he sees as a selective morality in parts of the West: intense scrutiny of commodities such as diamonds and gold, coupled with far less attention to the global arms trade that sustains many of the conflicts in question.

“You can’t talk about conflict and ignore the weapons,” he says, clearly frustrated.

“You can’t talk about a region that has conflict and highlight the role of gold and diamonds fuelling conflict, completely forgetting that there’s someone supplying the arms.”

For Bin Sulayem, the KP’s achievement lies not in perfection but in participation. It keeps producers, traders and governments inside a framework that can at least be monitored, pressured and improved. Remove that framework, he argues, and trade does not disappear – it simply becomes less visible.

Those arguments sharpened after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when diamonds became a symbolic target for Western sanctions. Calls to block Russian stones from global markets gained traction, particularly in Europe.

Bin Sulayem approaches the issue with characteristic realism. Diamonds, he argues, are emotionally potent but economically marginal in the context of modern warfare.

“Even in the best scenario for the diamond industry, it couldn’t fund more than a few days of Russia’s war,” he says.

He is particularly sceptical of the G7’s attempt to create a centralised channel through which Russian diamonds can be filtered. This idea is closely associated with Antwerp and he sees it as an attack on Dubai’s rising influence in precious stones and metals. 

“Trade routes adapt,” he says. “They always do.”

In a decentralised global market, he suggests, centralisation is always unlikely to succeed. The risk, in his view, is that poorly designed sanctions reduce transparency rather than eliminate trade – a result that may satisfy political instincts but undermines oversight.

This is not, he insists, a defence of Russia. It is a critique of a sanctions policy built on symbolism rather than pragmatism.

Some of Bin Sulayem’s views on engagement versus isolation are informed by direct experience. A decade ago, I accompanied him on a trip to Venezuela, at a time when the country was already deeply isolated from much of the Western financial system.

We reminisce about that trip to a country that was clearly suffering, but whose people were doing their best to get through. A visit to a Caracas McDonald’s in the company of armed police protectors was one highlight, we recall.

But the trip was really about engagement, which for Bin Sulayem does not imply endorsement. It is a means of retaining visibility and influence in environments where withdrawal often produces unintended consequences.

“You don’t change systems by pretending they don’t exist,” he says, returning to a theme he has articulated many times before.

He points out that – before the detention of the Venezuelan president – the country was working within the KP process, though its future is uncertain on many counts.

He highlights the fact that since UAE involvement in the KP in 2015, the penetration of conflict diamonds on global markets has been reduced to “less than 0.5 percent” and takes particular pride in the establishment of a permanent KP secretariat under his watch.

Dubai: reality vs media narrative

That same logic, he suggests, applies to other politically sensitive markets. Dubai’s role in global trade places it at the intersection of competing interests and narratives. Avoiding those intersections altogether is, in his view, both unrealistic and damaging.

He follows international media coverage of Dubai closely, sometimes with visible irritation. During lunch, he scrolls through articles, correspondence and official documents, illustrating what he sees as a persistent lag between reality and media narrative.

He draws a clear line between scrutiny he considers legitimate and criticism he believes is selectively applied.

“If someone shows me something that’s wrong, I’ll fix it,” he says. “But if Dubai is blamed for something that exists everywhere else, I will push back.”

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Bin Sulayem is acutely aware of how reputations are constructed – and distorted – in a digital environment. His office monitors media content in real time.

“Usually the positive and neutral is way bigger than the negative. But the negative is more important,” he says.

Our conversation turns to FinX, the DMCC’s newly formalised financial centre, which has prompted questions in a region already home to ambitious financial hubs such as the DIFC and ADGM.

Bin Sulayem is clear about what FinX is not. It is not intended to replicate courts, regulators or the quasi-sovereign architecture of other financial centres. Instead, it formalises an existing network of trade finance, clearing, settlement and real-world asset financing that has long operated within the DMCC.

“I’m just making official what we already have,” he says.

The move, he argues, reflects confidence in the UAE’s broader institutional maturity. Regulatory co-ordination has improved markedly over the past decade, he says, pointing to streamlining at the Central Bank and growing alignment with bodies such as the digital assets regulator Vara. FinX is designed to plug into that architecture rather than compete with it.

Lunch finished, we withdraw to a side table for some (non-alcoholic) mulled wine – which was pretty good. Bin Sulayem loosens up.

He has some time before his next meeting, he says, with the governor of the central bank of Palestine – “just to explore synergies” – which leads us onto the question of Israel.

Jewish business people have been longstanding customers of the DMCC, even before the Abraham Accords regularised trade with Israel. But does he feel any pressure to reduce those contacts after the events of October 7, 2023 and the Gaza conflict that followed?

“We always follow the official position of the UAE, which is to aim for peace and to protect the rights of the Palestinians. At the same time, the UAE is keeping the dialogue open because there is more engagement that way,” he says.

After that, we move seamlessly to President Trump, whom Bin Sulayem seems to like (“he’s a survivor”), and the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani (“I like that energy”).

We briefly touch on football, but there is nothing for either of us – fans of Tottenham (me) and Manchester United (him) – to get too excited about there.

And so it is time to pay the bill. The “Lunch with Frank Kane” protocol is that I pick up the tab, but he is having none of it, certainly not in Uptown Social.

“I’m not inviting you into my kitchen and asking you to pay,” he says, shocked.

It is the closest I get to provoking outrage the whole lunchtime.