Phillip Thorpe

The man charged with creating a world-class regulatory environment for the DIFC - to match anything seen in London, New York or Frankfurt - is British born Phillip Thorpe. In April this year he was at his desk in Washington at the Institute for Financial Markets when he was offered the opportunity of a lifetime.

'It was a unique proposition. Here is a clean sheet of paper. Establish a regulatory structure for a new financial centre and make it for the highest global standard. I could not refuse,' he says.
This still meant some personal sacrifice.

For after four years of commuting between a job in London and Washington where his wife was working, Mr. Thorpe had only recently been reunited with his wife. The new post in Dubai now extends that commute to 15 hours, rather longer than the 10 minutes it takes him to get to his office on the 49th floor of Emirates Towers in the morning.

'The international financial community appears to have grasped the concept of the DIFC with great enthusiasm,' he says. 'That might seem a bit odd in a global financial recession and with a possible imminent Middle East war.

'But this sort of international company looks beyond present problems and sees a lot of opportunities for this region to expand its financial community at a time when things do not look very good elsewhere.'

There is no doubt that the DIFC is really going to make its mark. In terms of physical presence this $2 billion office project will provide an unbeatable infrastructure, reminiscent of though less densely packed than London's Canary Wharf or New York's Battery Park. Mr. Thorpe's job is to build a regulatory framework to match.

'We are able to cherry pick and acquire the best regulatory practice available from around the world. For example, we have gone for financial services legislation modelled on the UK and the EU's data protection legislation.

'This is exactly what the large global financial services companies want to see. They take the business risk and we, as far as possible, eliminate the regulatory risk.

'And this is the target group for the DIFC, the top 100-200 global financial institutions. This is a completely different target from Bahrain's, and the DIFC is in many ways complementary to Bahrain.'

It will be Mr. Thorpe's role to formally grant DIFC licenses to these institutions, although there is an appeals process. In practice he says most of them will already be subject to stringent 'home regulation' that will automatically qualify them for the DIFC.

'Its very encouraging that we have already had applications from big institutions even before publishing our regulatory framework, which we hope to do in the next few weeks' he says. 'A federal decree on the DIFC is imminent'.

Mr. Thorpe says success in 2003 for him will mean seeing the first clutch of high quality financial institutions licensed in the DIFC. For the time being such institutions will have to find themselves offices elsewhere in Dubai while the physical infrastructure of the DIFC is completed.

But by September when the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will take place in Dubai, the DIFC will be up and running.