Dubai and Abu Dhabi: the new centre of gravity

Growth in figures

No financial centre has gained more ground in the last decade than Dubai. In the GFCI of March 2026 it ranked seventh, four places higher than six months earlier and ahead of every European centre except London. Abu Dhabi rose from twenty-eighth to twenty-first place.¹ The Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), the free zone with its own civil and commercial law, its own courts and its own regulator, the Dubai Financial Services Authority, reported for 2025 a total of 8,844 active registered companies, an increase of 28 per cent, and a workforce of 50,200. Among these were 1,052 regulated financial services firms, more than 500 wealth and asset management entities and 102 hedge funds. The number of family-related entities rose by 61 per cent to 1,289, that of family foundations by 66 per cent to 1,115.² The figures show that the DIFC has become a place where wealthy families establish holding, foundation and family office structures, and no longer only a regional base for international banks.

The migration estimates point in the same direction. Henley & Partners expected a net inflow of 9,800 millionaires to the United Arab Emirates in 2025, the highest of any country and more than three times the figure for Switzerland. The report attributed this to the country's residence programmes, the so-called golden visas, and to the absence of personal income tax.³ The Boston Consulting Group reported that crossborder financial wealth booked in the United Arab Emirates grew by 11.1 per cent in 2025, faster than in Switzerland or Hong Kong.⁴ Whatever the precision of these estimates, Dubai has become a destination for wealth from South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and Europe, including Italy.

Tax, residence and the legal environment

Dubai's offer to the wealthy individual rests on four elements. The United Arab Emirates levy no personal income tax and no inheritance tax. A federal corporate income tax of 9 per cent has applied since financial years beginning on or after 1 June 2023, with a zero rate for qualifying income of free zone entities, and a domestic minimum top-up tax for large multinational groups has applied since 2025.⁵ Longterm residence visas of five or ten years are available to investors, entrepreneurs and persons with significant assets. The DIFC and the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) offer a legal environment based on the common law, with courts staffed largely by judges from common law jurisdictions, which international families and their advisers find familiar.⁶ DIFC foundations and ADGM foundations have become the preferred vehicles for regional family wealth.

The United Arab Emirates spent two years under increased monitoring by the FATF. They were grey-listed on 4 March 2022 and removed on 23 February 2024, after the FATF found that their authorities had shown greater willingness to investigate and prosecute money laundering and had improved their supervisory framework.⁷ The European Commission removed the United Arab Emirates from its list of high-risk third countries by Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/1184, in force since 5 August 2025.⁸ The sequence is the mirror image of Monaco's: in the same regulation in which the European Union added Monaco to its list, it removed the Emirates. For European banks and advisers, enhanced due diligence on clients and transactions connected with the Emirates is no longer required by law, although many institutions continue to treat the jurisdiction as a higher-risk one in their internal policies.

Notes

1. GFCI 39 (above), Table 1. ↩
2. Dubai Media Office, "Dubai International Financial Centre announces landmark annual results for 2025", 5 February 2026, https://www.mediaoffice.ae/en/news/2026/february/05-02/dubai-international-financial-centre-announces-landmark-annual-results-for-2025. ↩
3. Henley & Partners (above). ↩
4. Private Banker International (above). ↩
5. Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 on the Taxation of Corporations and Businesses and the later rules on a domestic minimum top-up tax from 2025. ↩
6. ADGM, "ADGM Courts", https://www.adgm.com/adgm-courts (direct application of English common law; judges drawn from the senior judiciary of leading common law jurisdictions); Wikipedia, "DIFC Courts", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIFC_Courts (English-language common law courts established under Dubai Law No. 12 of 2004, operating since 2006, with judges from England and Wales, Scotland, Australia, Malaysia and the UAE; consulted October 2026, used as a last resort). ↩
7. Norton Rose Fulbright, "UAE removed from the FATF grey list", February 2024, https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-in/knowledge/publications/eb06aa7c/uae-removed-from-the-fatf-grey-list. ↩
8. Stibbe (above). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.