Landing in Dubai around the end of May 1975, with a plan to establish a branch for Intermarkets in the UAE, my first port of call was the office of Juma Al Majid. Based on his earlier Canada Dry and An-Nahar newspaper contacts with Intermarkets, Abou Khaled instantly confirmed a meeting with me, to which he invited our old friend and his legal advisor, Abdallah Humaid.
I briefed them about our plan and requested their guidance on the best and most practical way to open an advertising agency and if they felt that there was a need for such a business in the UAE. Abou Khaled, in a matter-of-fact tone, assured me that Dubai was fast developing to become a dynamic business center of international standards, thanks to the vision of its founder, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum.
Abdallah Humaid took over to explain how companies were established in the UAE, stressing the need of 51 per cent equity for a national partner who could be a real investor or a sponsor. At that moment, Abou Khaled interjected to confirm his interest in being an equity partner in the advertising agency we were planning to establish.
I managed to get our Lebanese partners’ approval on going into a 51/49 joint venture with Juma Al Majid to establish Intermarkets UAE, and we started the ball rolling. Our partner did not have any available office space in its many buildings at the time, but it still managed to free up an office it had rented and was holding in the Samir Al Mahmoud building on the creek for our new agency. We furnished it in a hurry by buying two metal desks, two chairs, a typewriter and four additional chairs for the guests from Juma Al Majid’s office equipment stores.
In 1975, Dubai was like a tranquil village that was slowly becoming crowded with Indians and Pakistanis and the street scenes were punctuated by very few nationals in their white dress. Local women were rarely seen on the streets and Urdu was the predominantly spoken language, followed by English. Arabic was spoken by very few.
One of my first personal challenges was family accommodation. My wife and son were still living comfortably with my in-laws – the Zakhours – in Abu Dhabi. But deep down in my wife’s heart, and more so in mine, we were extremely sensitive to the fact that we had grossly abused this unique and extremely sincere privilege.
Before leaving Bahrain for Dubai, Eddie Moutran introduced me to a close Rotary Club colleague by the name of Mishal Kanoo. The Kanoos being a prominent trading family in Bahrain and the UAE, Mishal kindly offered to help me find accommodation in Dubai, promising to let me know the next time he was visiting. Finally, Eddie called to let me know when and where to meet his friend. I was not very familiar with Dubai’s geography yet but with what I had briefly seen I was not very encouraged by the Bur Dubai meeting point suggested by Mishal. The Bahraini friend was waiting at the corner of Al Fahidi Street with a big smile on his face. Like the perfect salesman, he passionately presented the property as we walked towards it. It was an old traditional house which was occupied by Mishal’s uncle. The entrance door led into a courtyard, where the goats were kept. There was a pond in the middle with the living quarters in one structure, the toilet and bathroom in another, which meant that one had to step outside the living quarters to get to the hole-in-the-floor toilet and the adjacent rusty tub bathroom. The third structure housed the kitchen and the provision room, with the giant clay urns used for oil and rainwater. I thanked Mishal and instantly decided not to waste any more time looking. I was told that there were two new buildings that were about to be completed on the Deira side. The first, Sheikh Rashid building, was almost ready for delivery and the Indian real estate agent assured me that he would get us a two-bedroom apartment there.
At that point, I booked a room for my family at the Dubai Intercontinental Hotel, which was walking distance from the Samir Al Mahmoud building, and moved them down from Abu Dhabi. We felt that my wife Grace was very close to delivery, so we booked our flight to Beirut on 12 March 1976, and we alerted the InterContinental that we were checking out the next morning.
Good hotels in Dubai during the mid-Seventies were few and far between and there was a continuous race among visitors to secure a room. As we announced we were leaving, the hotel instantly sold our room to the next guest. Before going to sleep, Grace called her father to remind him – for the hundredth time – to be at the airport on time. My father-in-law told us to cancel our Lebanon travel plan, since the Lebanese Army’s Brigadier General Abdel Aziz Al Ahdab had attempted a coup against President Frangieh that very morning and the entire country was waiting to see what was going to happen next. The hotel was not able to extend our stay, which led to a big dose of personal panic, but our national partner’s office applied the necessary pressure and we moved to the Oasis Hotel in the same area.
The real estate agent sent me a message that the apartment he had reserved in my name at the Sheikh Rashid building has been snatched by another agent, and then he went silent, not responding to my repeated calls. Later, I found out that the mafia of real estate agents had gone into a war over the only new building in Dubai. Many potential tenants like me had lost their down payments to double-crossing fake agents who fled the country. Luckily, we had the Oasis Hotel, which we made into a home, and we stayed there.
In the meantime, at the agency we hired a secretary by the name of Dahlia Albuquerque and an office boy named Abdallah, both of whom were Indian nationals. Personally, I was very keen to familiarize myself with the advertising market around me. My search led to MADCO, an advertising agency recently established by Burhan Baidas, a fellow student at the English School for Boys, where I had carried out my elementary and secondary schooling. Burhan had also moved to AUB, from where the two of us had graduated. Burhan was encouraged to leave Beirut when the civil war erupted by his brother-in-law, Ahmad Al Jaouni, who was in the film business. Upon arrival in Dubai, he started MADCO in partnership with his brother-in-law and Mohammad Al Gaed, the Libyan partner of Jaouni.
I also learnt that Arab Advertising, founded by a Syrian named Hassan Haikal, had a presence in Dubai (led by Haikal personally), while its regional head office was based in Kuwait, where Souad Al Jaafari Haikal was in charge. The door seemed to be open for Intermarkets to establish a dynamic presence in the UAE.
My brother-in-law, Nabil Zakhour, was preparing to launch a scheme addressing UAE families with average and below average incomes that would help in the education of their children. This was the time that many national families were moving in from their traditional desert dwellings to the new cities built and offered by the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and when most fathers aspired to have their sons graduate from elementary schools and work as concierge or watchmen.
ADCO’s offer was a promise to take on the responsibility of educating and providing for young boys that were enrolled on the scheme by their fathers. By the time they had completed and passed the government’s secondary education diploma, and excelled, ADCO would offer them university education in Petroleum engineering and, when they had graduated, offer them a four-year employment contract, after which they could take their engineering degree and work on their own. If the son’s performance did not prove encouraging during his secondary schooling, he would be enrolled in a technical school (with the usual upkeep) until he graduated with an oil or petroleum related diploma. He would then also be given a four-year employment contract.
ADCO’s audio visual department had produced a 12-minute documentary film to explain its scholarship scheme in the Abu Dhabi spoken dialect. My brother-in-law tasked me with booking this documentary to run for one time on Abu Dhabi and Dubai TV stations. I explained that this was too long a film to run in a TV commercial break, but they insisted. My first booking with both TV stations was this record-breaking 12-minute spot that ran before the daily news at peak time.
After a week, Nabil called me to say that they had not received any response and asked me to repeat the booking – daily – for the entire week. No contacts, no enquiries, so we continued this strange campaign for the entire month, after which ADCO succeeded in having their first child enrolled. For our agency, issuing its first invoice was a very encouraging sign of the business potential in the UAE.