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What does the UAE own in the UK? Football clubs, London landmarks and billion-pound assets Submitted by Daniel Tester on Mon, 10/19/2026 - 14:44 Abu Dhabi and Dubai's vast investments are facing scrutiny amid allegations against Manchester City Football Club and pressure on PM Andy Burnham UAE investments in the UK include, from left, DP World, owner of P&O Ferries; parts of Berkeley Square in Mayfair, London; and Manchester City Football Club (all AFP). On The UAE is one of the world’s richest countries, with its seven monarchies owning sovereign wealth funds worth in excess of $2 trillion.  Fuelled by revenues from oil as well as finance, tourism and the gold trade, it has invested billions internationally, holding vast stakes in everything from banks to airports and restaurant chains across North America, Europe and beyond.   But this partnership is facing unprecedented scrutiny in the UK, where the UAE has committed to invest almost $30bn for the period 2021-2026 through the UAE–UK Sovereign Investment Partnership. In September, Manchester City Football Club, owned by Emirati royal and vice-president Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nayhan, was found to have breached 114 Premier League financial rules by disguising more than £830m ($1.1bn) in illicit funding. The club denies the claims. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is at the heart of the storm, having served as Manchester mayor from 2017 until June, during which time Emirati cash transformed both Manchester City football club and the wider city.  Doing business with the UAE has only become more controversial given its role in Sudan’s civil war, where it is accused of supporting the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group whose mass killings UN investigators say bear the “hallmarks of genocide”. The UAE denies the allegations.  But Burnham is also keen to balance public uproar against the UAE with the steady flow of Gulf investment, which both defenders of the football club and the government say has boosted economic growth.  If nothing else, the rows have exposed just how many UK institutions Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the wealthiest emirates and biggest investors, have a stake in. Sport Manchester City was bought by Abu Dhabi United Group, a private equity firm owned by the Emirati royal Mansour bin Zayed, in 2008 for £200m.  At the time, Manchester City was not an elite club, usually finishing mid-table and getting relegated in 2001.  But since the sale, the club has dominated top-flight English football, winning eight Premier League titles, plus the Uefa Champions League. Khaldoon al-Mubarak, an adviser to Abu Dhabi’s royal family and CEO of its Mubadala sovereign wealth fund, is the club’s chairman, while the club’s stadium is named the Etihad Arena, after Abu Dhabi’s government-owned airline.  Emirates sponsors both Arsenal (left) and the FA Cup (both AFP); the UAE-owned Godolphin stable has produced winners, including Sakhee, here ridden by Frankie Dettori in 2001 (Reuters) The UAE also has stakes elsewhere in the Premier League. In 2004, the airline Emirates, owned by the government of Dubai, purchased naming rights to Arsenal’s home ground, now called the Emirates Stadium, and the club’s shirt sponsorship for £100m. The deal was renewed in August until 2033 for an undisclosed fee. The airline has also sponsored the FA Cup since 2015, and Lancashire Cricket Club since 2013.  Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings has a minority stake in McLaren Racing, which owns McLaren’s Formula One team, based in Woking, southern England and was the winner of back-to-back Teams’ Championships in 2025. Bahrain’s Mumtalakat fund owns the rest of the stake, as well as parent company McLaren Group.  CYVN separately bought McLaren’s car manufacturing business, McLaren Automotive, outright in 2025 for an undisclosed fee.  Dubai’s royal family owns Godolphin, the world’s largest horseracing team that operates the biggest stable in the UK outside Newmarket in Suffolk, eastern England. Through Godolphin and other horses, Dubai royals have won the British Flat Racing Champion Owner title 31 times since 1985, including this year. Property Besides owning Manchester City football club, the UAE also owns lucrative property developments across the city. Among the largest is Manchester Life, a glitzy, mixed-use regeneration project in Manchester’s Ancoats area launched in 2014 in a deal between Manchester City Council and the Abu Dhabi United Group reportedly worth £1bn.  Abu Dhabi also invested an undisclosed figure in Manchester’s Co-Op Live arena, through its 81 percent share of the City Football Group, which in turn owns 47.5 percent of the UK's largest indoor venue. Berkeley Square in Mayfair is among the London properties owned by the UAE (AFP) It emerged in October that Manchester City Council gave Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group the right of first refusal on some of these projects in what critics have dubbed a “sweetheart deal” that sidelined rival developers. In London, the Emirati royal family amassed a property empire under Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, ruler of the UAE from 2004 until his death in 2022. Valued in 2020 at over £5bn, this includes luxury properties in some of London’s most expensive areas, including Mayfair and Knightsbridge, much of which was acquired via opaque companies registered in tax havens.  Abu Dhabi also picked up country estates in the Scottish Highlands and Surrey, and owns London’s Excel exhibition centre, the city’s largest conference hall. Much of this property has since been divided up among Khalifa’s heirs, although which Emirati royal owns what isn’t always clear.  Since then, the UAE’s property spree has continued. In 2023, a real estate firm owned by Abu Dhabi’s government bought London Square, the developer behind London’s controversial Nine Elms regeneration project, for $291m. It announced earlier this month plans to build a further 9,000 homes at the site. Ports, shipping and infrastructure DP World, the Dubai government’s ports and logistics giant, owns London Gateway and Southampton, the UK’s second and third largest shipping terminals by container volume. The London site was approved for a £1bn expansion by the government in 2024.  Part of the UK’s freeports scheme, the ports are special economic zones in which DP World and other businesses pay less tax and face weaker regulation than they would elsewhere in the UK.  DP World also owns P&O, the UK’s long-established shipping company, sold off from public ownership in 2006 for £3.6bn. It separately bought P&O Ferries in 2019 for £322m. DP World, owned by Dubai, bought UK ferry operator P&O Ferries in 2019 (AFP) In 2022, DP World faced heavy criticism, including from the UK government, for sacking 800 of P&O Ferries’ British staff and replacing them with foreign agency workers paid less than the UK minimum wage.  But DP World consolidated its logistics empire further in August when it purchased six grocery distribution centres serving Asda, Sainsbury’s and the Co-op from the US conglomerate GXO Logistics.  The UAE has also targeted tech. Abu Dhabi's Mubadala invested an undisclosed sum into Yondr in 2024, one of the operators of a data centre campus in Slough on the outskirts of London. And Masdar, the UAE’s state-owned renewable energy company, has stakes in the UK’s wind farms, including the London Array off the coast of Kent and Dogger Bank South in the North Sea. Mubadala meanwhile holds a minority stake in CityFibre, the UK’s third largest network provider, as of 2021.   In 2011 Abu Dhabi bought a 9.9 percent stake in Thames Water, although the UAE wrote off the investment as worthless in its 2024 accounts, amid the utility firm’s financial toils. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund also owns nearly eight percent of London Gatwick, the UK’s second busiest airport, having sold down its stake from 15 percent in 2018. It has coveted owning part of Heathrow. Abu Dhabi was also approached as a potential investor into the Sizewell C nuclear power plant in 2023, before the shares were instead sold to the French state-owned energy firm EDF and a Canadian pension fund, among other investors. In July, Etisalat, a telecoms firm majority-owned by the UAE government, sold its £4.4bn stake in Vodafone, the British telecoms multinational, after its ownership was called a “national security risk” by the UK government and it was forced to establish a special committee overseeing sensitive work.  Finance and research In 2024, Abu Dhabi gained a one-third stake in Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s largest retail investment house, in a £5.4bn takeover alongside American and European private equity firms. Later that year, Mubadala bought an undisclosed stake in the British digital bank Revolut as part of a $500m secondary share sale. The Barclays HQ in Canary Wharf: the UAE invested in the bank after the financial crash of 2008 (AFP) Sheikh Mansour attracted controversy in 2008 when he and investors from Qatar bought a 16 percent share in Barclays during the global financial crisis. Worth an estimated £4bn, the deal helped the bank avoid a government bailout imposed on some of its rivals, to which conditions were attached. The Financial Conduct Authority in 2024 fined Barclays £40m for misleading its shareholders about payments of over £300m to Qatari investors involved in the deal. Abu Dhabi sold all of its stakes by 2013. The UK is also courting Emirati investment for a “growth corridor” located between Oxford and Cambridge that the government has dubbed "the UK’s Silicon Valley”. But the UAE is now reportedly threatening to pull out of the plans amid fallout over its guilty verdict in the Manchester City case. Hospitality and retail The UAE has stakes on British high streets, much of which it acquired in 2024 when Mubadala bought a 68 percent share of equity owned by Fortress Investment Group, a US firm with over $55bn of assets under management. Customers wait outside The Ivy restaurant in the city centre of Manchester in October 2020 (AFP) In the UK, Fortress owns Punch Pubs, which operates 1,400 pubs and bars across the country, the cinema chain Curzon, the budget shop Poundstretcher, and the wine retailer Majestic.  In April, Sheikh Tahnoon's International Holding Company paid £1.4bn for the restaurant empire of hospitality mogul Richard Caring, which includes the Ivy chain and the elite member’s club Annabel’s in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square, where the UAE also owns other properties.  Media Abu Dhabi launched a bid to buy the Telegraph newspaper and Spectator magazine in 2023 alongside the US private equity firm Redbird Capital Partners.   The deal, which was headed by Sheikh Mansour, sparked massive scrutiny over censorship concerns, and ultimately fell through after the UK government introduced new laws barring leaders of foreign governments from owning media companies. The Telegraph was instead sold to the German media giant Axel Springer in June, while the Spectator was bought by GB News co-owner Paul Marshall in September 2024.   But Abu Dhabi has gained a stake in media elsewhere via its takeover of Fortress, which led a lender consortium that bought Vice Media Group in 2023 after the broadcaster and magazine filed for bankruptcy.  Vice had months earlier signed a lucrative partnership with the MBC Group, a media company backed by the UAE’s sometime rival, Saudi Arabia.  Inside UAE Explainers Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0

Are we not allowed to say a genocide began on 7 October, too? Submitted by Barry Malone on Wed, 10/21/2026 - 21:19 Western media commemorate the Israelis killed three years ago, while largely ignoring the genocide that began the same day A girl looks at the temporary tents of displaced Palestinians, alongside destroyed buildings, in Gaza City on 7 October 2026 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP) Off Just after 4pm local time on 7 October 2023, Al Jazeera’s Youmna El Sayed stood on a rooftop to update her audience on the latest from Gaza City, which was already under bombardment following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel early that same morning.  Live on air, as she was about to answer a question from a news anchor, we heard the sound of a missile scream down from the sky before thumping into a tower block with a horrible boom, the orange flash of an explosion appearing over her shoulder. Sayed cried out in shock and ducked from view, but as so many brave Palestinian journalists would do over the next three years, she tried to continue reporting. “We have just witnessed live what an Israeli air raid looks like on a populated area of Gaza City,” said the anchor, Cyril Vanier. “What we believe is a residential building.” That initial strike on Palestine Tower, which indeed was a mixed-use residential and office building, was what the Israelis call a “roof knock” - a warning that a building is about to be destroyed, giving people an absurdly short time to escape.  (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Minutes later, the rockets intended to obliterate the tower arrived, and about 80 apartments - homes that would have had family photos on the walls, toys on the floor and dishes in the sink - were instantly reduced to a painful memory. Vanier’s words were a portent of what was to come, because what we witnessed in that viral moment has since been repeated daily.  Israel’s campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people had begun. The genocide started on 7 October.   'Wicked city' In fact, it started just hours after Hamas and other groups launched their dawn attack. By 8:24am, the Times of Israel reported that Israeli strikes were under way.  The Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya was struck a short while after, killing two people, including a member of staff. This set in motion what would become a pattern of attacking medical facilities, doctors, patients and employees: over the next three years, more than 1,700 healthcare workers were killed, many in targeted attacks. Journalist Mohammad al-Salhi was shot dead by Israeli forces in al-Bureij on 7 October, and ambulances were hit outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and in Jabalia, where two paramedics lost their lives and several others were wounded. The industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinian children also began on 7 October. Just after 8pm, with the attack on Gaza ongoing for 12 hours, the Israelis hit a three-storey building in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, where three generations of the al-Dos family lived. Fifteen family members, including seven children, were killed. Adam al-Dos, 18 months old, was the youngest. The entries on Gaza were so fleeting and by-the-numbers that all they did was underline the disparity. They reeked of afterthought  Children were also killed in other strikes that day. By 9pm, a provisional death toll of 232 Palestinians was reported.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other politicians were not shy about making their intentions immediately clear, with intent a key component of legally determining that a genocide has been committed.  “We will take mighty vengeance for this black day,” Netanyahu said in a televised address. “We will take revenge for all the young people who lost their lives … We will turn Gaza into a deserted island.”  Gaza was “a wicked city”, he added. Yoav Gallant, then the defence minister, vowed to “change reality on the ground in Gaza for the next 50 years”, while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reportedly told a cabinet meeting that Israel must “be cruel now and not think too much about the hostages”. An army general made the sinister promise that Hamas had “opened the gates of hell on the Gaza Strip”.  All of these statements, and more, were made on 7 October. It is clear that the genocide began that morning. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Hierarchy of suffering Why, then, did much of the western media this month mark the anniversary with wall-to-wall reporting of Israeli commemorations - and only the paltriest of mentions for Palestinians? Why did the BBC run a live blog with pages of stories humanising Israelis killed three years ago, while Palestinians continue to be massacred? Why did the Guardian? To be clear, it’s not the fact that there was coverage. It’s the immense scale and prominence of it: a scale that amounted to tens of thousands of words and hours of television, yet found little room for Gaza. This highlights the hierarchy of suffering that western media has applied to the events of the last three years. It’s more than a hierarchy of suffering: it’s a hierarchy of peoples.  Why Gaza's genocide ranks among the gravest horrors of human history Read More » The BBC’s blog was headlined “Israeli families mourn 7 October victims as memorials held around world”. Its lead image was a girl placing a candle at a fountain in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, where photos of victims of the attack on Israel sat alongside photos of Israeli soldiers killed while committing genocide in Gaza. The pages featured dozens of images of Israeli commemorations; of people weeping, embracing and bowing their heads in remembrance, as they should, because they deserve to heal and to remember their loved ones like anyone else. The point, though, is that with the genocide ongoing, there were only a handful of Palestinians briefly featured, all of them currently living through hell - and not a single blog post was reserved for the Palestinians killed by Israel on 7 October 2023 itself. The entries on Gaza were so fleeting and by-the-numbers that all they did was underline the disparity. They reeked of afterthought, or of an attempt to see off criticism. There was no space for the seven Dos children, who were wiped from mainstream media memory as 7 October victims because they were Palestinian. Taboo subject The Guardian’s live blog, headlined “World leaders pay tribute to victims as Israel marks three years since 7 October attack by Hamas - as it happened”, was more of the same. Palestinians were featured, but as footnotes drowned out by Israel’s mourning.  In the US, NBC’s live updates, which focused on how Israel was marking the anniversary with memorials “at homes, roadsides, kibbutzim and a music festival site”, gave more room than others to Palestinians - but in doing so, exposed another dichotomy.  It communicated, or at least implied, to the reader that the Israelis killed three years ago were more important than the Palestinians it rightly pointed out were still being killed. Even on the anniversary itself, at least five Palestinians were killed, including a 17-year-old boy and a rescue worker responding to a previous strike. The fact is, talking about the Palestinians killed on 7 October is a taboo - one fiercely policed by pro-Israel lobbying groups and the western media and political classes. The opening line of a BBC report on an anniversary march in London to demand an end to the genocide said that organisers were “ignoring a request by the Metropolitan Police” for it to be called off. Police, it continued, were worried that the march, organised by the University of London coalition, would distress Jewish students and staff.  It then quoted the Union of Jewish Students as saying that the protest was “provocative, deliberate and must be condemned”. The BBC only briefly - without naming or, it appears, interviewing anyone - mentioned that protest organisers said they wanted to denounce genocide and fight for a free Palestine. Over on the Guardian, a statement from the Board of Deputies of British Jews was published in full, calling the protesters, some of whom were Jewish, a “small and extremist minority of British society”. The UK’s defence secretary, Wes Streeting, was featured labelling the march “shameful”. Not a single marcher was quoted.  Media manipulation The strength of the taboo was also demonstrated by the hysterical reactions from the pro-Israel lobby, along with right-wing and centrist politicians, to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement on the day, to which the media hungrily responded. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); News stories in the US were not framed around what Mamdani actually said. Instead, they centred on the absurd response to it. It’s worth noting that his statement began not with Gaza, but with a condemnation of the Hamas-led attacks, which he called “horrific war crimes” that were “profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers”. But that wasn’t enough. Mamdani’s transgression, it seems, was that he went on to condemn the genocide, pointing out how many people were killed and underscoring the fact that despite the “so-called ceasefire”, the slaughter continues. Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people began on 7 October 2023. It continues. And Palestinian lives are as important as Israeli lives The New York Times, CNN and Politico all centred their stories around the three paragraphs in which the mayor focused on Palestinians.  Mamdani “draws anger”, the New York Times headline said. For CNN, he drew “ire”. And in the telling of Politico’s headline, he was subject to “bipartisan backlash”. Those three stories, from some of the most esteemed outlets in the US, collectively provide a pitch-perfect example of media manipulation in action at the highest levels. Here are the facts: Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people began on 7 October 2023. It continues. And Palestinian lives are as important as Israeli lives. That’s the simple truth, whether the western media wants to tell it or not.  The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0

A shark known as ‘Bukangi’ has eluded authorities and returned to a canal in Busan, South Korea, after being guided toward the open sea. The incident has drawn significant attention online.

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Ten days after former Congolese President Joseph Kabila launched a new political-military movement, Belgium has condemned the decision as “deplorable, incomprehensible and unacceptable.”

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