With H.E. Mohammad Ali Rashed Lootah, President and CEO of Dubai Chambers: A Working Conversation on Pakistan and UAE Trade
Not a Ceremony. A Working Meeting.
There is a familiar version of a meeting between a business council and a chamber of commerce: a photograph, a handshake, a paragraph of pleasantries. The meeting the Pakistan Business Council Dubai held with H.E. Mohammad Ali Rashed Lootah, President and CEO of Dubai Chambers, was not that version. Led by the Council’s Chairman, Mr. Shabbir Merchant, the delegation brought together PBC members from across the sectors the Pakistani business community operates in here, and the agenda was the one that actually matters: the challenges, the opportunities, and the practical avenues for strengthening trade and investment between Pakistan and the UAE. I was in the room, and it was time well spent.
What Members Actually Brought to the Table
The format was open and interactive, which in my experience is the only format that produces anything. Members spoke from experience: what it has taken to set up and run their businesses in Dubai, where the operational friction sits, and what they would need in order to expand. Nobody was reading from a card. The questions were the ones a business owner asks when he has a real decision in front of him, put directly to the one office in the city best placed to answer them.
A Council That Arrives With Something to Offer
PBC Dubai’s leadership also set out what the Council has been building on its own account: trade promotion, business networking, digitalisation, the PBC mobile application, member engagement, and a running calendar of seminars and webinars. I mention this deliberately. A council that only asks for support has little to offer a partner. A council that arrives with its own infrastructure is a partner.
What H.E. Lootah Put on the Record
H.E. Lootah reaffirmed Dubai Chambers’ continued support for the Pakistani business community and, more than that, actively encouraged greater Pakistani investment in Dubai. He also pointed to the Chamber’s international network as a platform for businesses here that want to expand into global markets. That point deserves more attention than it usually gets. A Pakistani-owned company in Dubai is not only operating in one of the most open markets in the world; through Dubai Chambers it has a route into markets well beyond the Gulf. That is a door many businesses do not realise is already open to them.
Why I Keep Turning Up to Rooms Like This
I have written before that diplomacy and commerce move together or not at all. The same is true of a business community and the institutions around it. Pakistan and the UAE already share deep ties of trade, family and capital. What turns those ties into measurable investment is a working relationship between the people who run businesses and the people who set the conditions they operate in. That relationship is not built through statements. It is built in rooms like this one, through direct conversation, over time.
Where It Goes From Here
The meeting closed with a shared commitment to strengthening business connectivity, trade, investment and the long-term economic relationship between Pakistan and the UAE. Commitments like that are only as good as the follow-through, and I intend to be part of the follow-through. My thanks to H.E. Lootah and Dubai Chambers for the open dialogue and the continued support, and to Mr. Shabbir Merchant and the PBC Dubai team for bringing the right people into the right room.
