Goodbye to all that...

Halliburton - which has been paid $13 billion by the U.S. government for their work in Iraq alone - are demonstrating their allegiance to the country by moving their operations from Houston to Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates.  David Lesar, the CEO, is packing up  the HQ and taking his marbles to the fastest growing business center in the Middle East.  Although it looks at this end like a slinking off, make no mistake - Dubai's hot.  As a symbol of their towering heights in the corporate pantheon, Dubai is currently building the world's tallest skyscraper.  (Contrary to the UAE stereotype, Dubai doesn't make most of it's money from oil. It's biggest bucks come from industry specific "free zones" that service international corporations and a booming tourist trade - Dubai's "Emirates Airline" booked 24 million mostly international passengers in 2005.)

  Dubai has no corporate or personal income tax. Last year Halli's Honcho, Lesar,  was compensated nearly $30 million, so the dubious distinction of residing in Dubai will pay off. Neither does Dubai have congressional investigating committees sniffing into Halliburton's business. Another thing you won't find in Dubai is any Israelis. It's not entirely clear whether non-Israeli Jews can travel to Dubai - few try and reports vary as to whether there's a total exclusion. But anyone or anything Israeli is banned - including any internet  traffic linked to ".il".  Halliburton will, no doubt, survive without. Clearly they respect Dubai's claimed distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.  Or something...

If this is the last we see of Halliburton, it's not what I would consider a loss.  Too bad they couldn't have trucked off to Dubai when Dick Cheny was Halliburton's Top Gun.  I can't think of a better berth for his bunker.

Comments

[gary7]

No disrespect, but I'm not sure who is giving you facts about Dubai. There are Israelis there, although they enter on foreign passports. On a recent long layover at Dubai intl. airport I surfed Israeli websites with no problem. Jews can and do travel to Dubai all the time. Some even live there. Kosher food can be bought in any supermarket. No kosher meat, but plenty of other processed foods with Kosher symbols.

At present, officially Dubai has no relations with Israel. Unofficially there are many. I have told many people in Dubai that I am Jewish. No one bats an eyelash.

[Reg]

My information was that you couldn't travel to Dubai on an Israeli passport. Which is true. If Israelis travel there on other passports, that's kind of beside the point. So, no, there's not an ongoing pogrom and obviously the restrictions on Israelis are enforced with enough loopholes to be conducive to not making Dubai seem Draconian in it's sanctions on Israeli travel. And I wouldn't trust the Dubai International Airport's wifi as indicative of whether local internet connections are filtered or not. I'll check into this some more. I had, as I noted, thought that simply being Jewish wasn't a deal-breaker if you traveled to Dubai, but I had heard differing reports. You seem to verify that most of this is rumor.

[Reg]

This is from the country study on UAE from OpenNet Intiative, dated 2005. Maybe things have changed:

The UAE uses the SmartFilter filtering software to block nearly all pornography, gambling, religious conversion, and illegal drugs sites tested. The state also blocks access to all sites in the Israeli top-level domain. ONI's testing of the UAE filtering regime also found blocking of sites on the Bahai faith, Middle East-oriented gay and lesbian issues, and English-language (though not Arabic-language) dating sites.