Global Citizen 22

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TANK MC T W O -TO N E S K E L E TO N 9 61 9 M C

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TO BREAK THE RULES, YOU MUST FIRST MASTER THEM. THE ROYAL OAK CONCEPT SERIES CONTINUES TO PUSH THE BOUNDARIES OF AUDEMARS PIGUET SAVOIR-FAIRE. THIS CONCEPT GMT TOURBILLON, WITH DUAL TIME FUNCTION, FEATURES WHITE CERAMIC BEZEL, CROWN, PUSHER AND BRIDGE. NINE TIMES HARDER THAN STEEL, CERAMIC IS EXCEPTIONALLY DIFFICULT TO WORK, YET HERE IT IS FINELY BRUSHED AND POLISHED AS IF IT WERE PRECIOUS METAL. THE COMPLEX FORM OF THE CASE IS MILLED FROM A SOLID BLOCK OF TITANIUM. THE INDIVIDUAL FACETS ARE THEN MICRO SAND BLASTED TO ACHIEVE THE DISTINCTIVE MATT GRAINING. AUDACIOUS STYLING, PEERLESS CRAFTSMANSHIP.

ROYAL OAK CONCEPT GMT TOURBILLON IN TITANIUM, WHITE CERAMIC BEZEL.

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CONTENTS Business 18 First word

34 Business

58 PhotoJournalism

20 Investment Destination

Philanthropy

60 Real Estate

CEOs on Business Ownership in UAE Chinese Rebirth

22 Business

Peeta Planet

38 Voss Foundation

Just Falafel Founder

42 Adopt-a-Camp

24 REal Estate

46 Syrian Supper Club

Virtual Auction

26 Philanthropy

Global Poverty Project

30 Cover

Jon Hamm on Life After Don Draper

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Andrew Parsons exhibition in London Hamilton Grand

Global Citizenship 64 Kittitian Hill 67 Russia Bans Dual Citizenship

Special Report-Privacy 50 London’s Panic Rooms 54 Right to be Forgotten

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lifestyle 68

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68 Gizmos & Gadgets

78 Hotels

90 Travel

70 Auto

82 Dining

94 Fashion

74 Yacht

86 Little Black Book

96 Horology

76 Art

88 Design

Cutting Edge Technology

Mercedes S65 AMG

A Speedboat Fit for a Tycoon

Faig Ahmed

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Historical Gems

Take Out Treats

Jeremy Hackett’s Paris

Georgia

Discreet Tailoring

Tourbillion Masterpieces

Gilded Stage

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Insta

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Editor’s LETTER GLOBAL CITIZEN editor Natasha Tourish - nt@global-citizen.com Business Editor Tahira Yaqoob - ty@global-citizen.com Lifestyle Editor Nausheen Noor - nn@global-citizen.com ART DIRECTOR Omid Khadem - ok@global-citizen.com Finance Manager Muhammad Tauseef - mtauseef@reachmedia.ae CONTRIBUTORS Heba Hashem, Simon de Burton, Daniel Bates, Shane Phillips, Anthea Ayache, Nawied Jabarkhyl, Madeleine Lee, Natalie Sauras Printed by Masar Printing and Publishing

hen Global Citizen first launched nearly four years ago, one of the questions we were most frequently asked as we met PRs and advertisers and travelled to meet contributors in London and the US with our fresh new title, was the meaning behind the term Global Citizen.

Fast forward to today and in the space of one week this calendar month, there are two separate events showcasing the role of Global Citizens and how valuable their contribution is in this often chaotic, unfairly divided society.

The Global Citizen Festival in New York’s Central Park and the Global Citizen Forum in Toronto - we are media partners for the latter - not to mention the hashtag #globalcitizen trending on Twitter, all throw the spotlight on individuals who are willing to be responsible for those less fortunate and give back. We cannot claim credit for organising these events but it is a privilege to be part of a movement that promotes positive change through philanthropy, social business or activism of any kind.

We are doing our bit this issue - as we always do - by turning the spotlight on individuals who spearhead change. Our New York correspondent Daniel Bates meets Hugh Evans, the founder of the Global Citizen Festival and the Global Poverty Project (p26) and Kara Gerson, executive director of the Voss Foundation (p38).

And let’s not forget this month’s cover star Jon Hamm, who has become one of the most recognisable faces on television for nearly a decade playing Mad Men’s Don Draper. Despite a less-than-ideal upbringing, Hamm managed to turn his rough start in life around.

He has used the fruits of his labour to set up a scholarship in his high school in his late mother’s name for students who cannot afford school fees. What’s next for Hamm? It involves a remote island… (p30)

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www.global-citizen.com www.issuu.com/global-citizen www.facebook.com/GlobalCitizenMag MEDIA REPRESENTATIVE Fierce International Dubai Internet City Business Central Tower A | Office 2803 T: +971 4 421 5455 | F: +971 4 421 0208 tarek@fierce-international.com

REACH MEDIA FZ LLC publisher Armand Peponnet Advertising sales@reachmedia.ae SUBSCRIPTION subscription@reachmedia.ae Dubai Media City, Building 8, Ground Floor, Office 87, PO Box 502068, Dubai, UAE T: +971 4 385 5485 Email: info@reachmedia.ae Copyright 2014 Reach Media. All rights reserved.

Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the permission of Reach Media. Where opinion is expressed it is that of the author and does not necessarily reflect the editorial views of the publisher or Global Citizen.

All information in Global Citizen is checked and verified to the best of the publisher’s ability, however the publisher cannot be held responsible for any mistake or omission enclosed in the publication.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Simon de Burton

Daniel Bates

Shane Phillips

is a UK-based journalist and author who covers a variety of subjects ranging from high-end cars and motorcycles to luxury watches and international auctions. He is a contributing editor to the Financial Times How To Spend It magazine.

is a British freelance journalist based in New York. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Daily Express in the UK and has covered major stories in his decade as a reporter, from the BP oil spill to the Boston Marathon bombing.

is a leading executive search consultant in the region and managing director of Shane Phillips Consultants, a local boutique search firm. Shane hosts his own show on Dubai Eye every Thursday evening called Eye On Careers.

Heba Hashem

Anthea Ayache

Nawied Jabarkhyl

is a freelance journalist based between Abu Dhabi and Cairo. She reports regularly on the solar and nuclear power sectors for CSP Today and Nuclear Energy Insider. She has a BA in communications and media studies from Middlesex University.

is a Dubai-based freelance journalist with a focus on social injustice and humanitarian affairs. She spent 10 years as a broadcast journalist in Lebanon, the UK and the UAE before turning to print. She is a regular contributor to UAE publications including Gulf News and Philanthropy Age.

is a newsreader and reporter for Radio 1 in the UK and a presenter for Gulf News television in the UAE. With parents originating from Afghanistan, he was raised in England and has a BA in politics from York University. Jabarkhyl previously worked for BBC London.

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©2014 TUMI, INC.

Designed in America for Global Citizens like D a v e A l t a r esc u • Digit al Music Inno vat o r Learn more at www.TUMI.com/GlobalCitizens

A B U D H A B I M A L L . + 9 7 1 2 6 73 8 5 74 . T H E GAL L E R I A . + 9 71 2 4 1 2 4 1 1 5 TH E D U B A I M A L L . + 9 7 1 4 3 3 9 8 5 3 6 . M I R D I F C I T Y C E NT E R . + 9 71 4 2 3 6 3 4 0 8 A L S O AVA I L AB L E AT GAL E R I E S L AFAY E T T E

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the Big Picture

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Image courtesy of Lurie Belegurschi

Photographer Lurie Belegurschi captured this amazing aerial shot from a helicopter of Iceland’s largest volcano spewing out lava. The Bardarbunga has awakened since mid-August and has erupted more lava than any other volcano on the planet in the last 10,000 years.

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Globetrotter September

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October 2014

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27 s ep

Wealth Think 2014, Marina Square, Singapore

Monaco Yacht Show 2014, France

Wealth Think 2014 will bring together leaders in the global wealth and asset management communities. CEO of Wealth-X, Mykolas Rambus, will be speaking on winning strategies: holdouts – what music companies and sports teams can teach the private wealth industry.

The Monaco Yacht Show is considered the most prestigious pleasure boat show in the world with the exhibition of 500 major companies in the luxury yachting industry and a flotilla of 100 super and megayachts.

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The Global Citizen Festival, Central Park, New York, USA

Global Citizen Forum 2014, Four Seasons, Toronto, Canada

Paris Motor Show, Pavillon Porte de Versailles, France

Coinciding each year with the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, the Global Citizen Festival will once again be a free-ticketed event, with the aim of helping to achieve a world without extreme poverty by 2030. Jay-Z will headline this year’s concert with performances from No Doubt and Carrie Underwood in the line up. www.globalcitizen.org

The Global Citizen Forum is a platform for exchange between all relevant stakeholders in an effort to build awareness, educate and promote global citizenship as a way of life. Armand Arton, CEO of Arton Capital, will speak at the event about the importance of global citizenship, supported by four prime ministers from Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada and St Kitts & Nevis.

Created in 1898, the Paris Motor Show is the biggest motor show in the world. The bi-annual event attracts more than one million visitors and provides the only significant international audience for French car manufacturers to show off their unique style.

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the first word Perspectives from the top

Creating Harmony Does the UAE have the right incentive structures to align management and ownership of a business - or does it have too tight a grip on its equity stake to make this a reality?

By Shane Phillips

John Martin St Valery

founding partner, Links Group “Historically UAE businesses have not been built on a culture of transparency so there has often been a disconnect between management and owners. This is starting to change with the government putting in place corporate governance frameworks for listed companies as well as SMEs. However, the latter remains a voluntary code, so it is really up to individual companies to recognise the importance of these structures, particularly if they want to scale up.”

Shabana Karim

owner and managing director, House Of Enspa “Entrepreneurs exhibit a passion to create and grow a business, displaying a stubbornness to succeed against all odds, whereas the interests of most senior management are sometimes not aligned as they do not have an equity stake and will not naturally think and behave as a business owner.

That said, a profit share model is considered best practice in certain industries and regions. It is important to consider the practicalities and implementation of a profit sharing model as this helps grow and develop a successful organisation with a sense of ownership at all levels.”

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The first word

Fadi Malas

former chief executive, Just Falafel “I feel the UAE has the most supportive structure to set up new businesses.

There are many options available to the would-be entrepreneur with the different trade free zones and that is why we have seen the proliferation of so many start-ups. While owners have generally invested heavily both emotionally and financially in their business, like all good relationships, trust is key. Over time you learn to delegate control and trust your management team to make decisions, which enables your business to thrive.”

Hazel Jackson

CEO, biz-group “As UAE business owners, I believe we still have a lot to learn. We are often afraid of losing control, building an entitlement culture and establishing complex reward structures that make businesses difficult to sell and exit. Many businesses also struggle to tap into the full intelligence of their teams, which is something you can do without linking to compensation through concepts like multipliers. If you can get this balance right, you will achieve alignment behind the companies priorities and build long-term strategic plans.”

Sergio Lopez

managing director, Tom and Serg cafe “The law in the UAE is created to protect those with higher risks when it comes to owning a business. Management and ownership can of course be harmonised, depending on the type of partnership agreed and a comparable level of risk being undertaken by each of the parties involved. Could the incentive structure be revised to encourage more external investors and operators to open new businesses here? Yes - but at the same time, that could easily contribute to a growing number of failed operations in a country as young and fast-developing as the UAE.”

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Investment Destination

The sleeping giant stirs again Chinese firms are doing brisk business once again after financial crisis blip

By Heba Hashem

Dubai’s Dragon Mart is just one symbol of strong UAE/Chinese trade relations

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agreed last year to impose duties on Chinese plates and other table and kitchenware.

Manufacturing haven Some global players have taken a different approach and are making the best of this wide-reaching market and its low labour costs.

Tata motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover, Switzerlandbased pharmaceutical company Siegfried Holdings and even Dubai-based Danube Building Materials are among the many companies that have set up manufacturing facilities in the world’s most populous country.

“Evidence suggests China’s largely favourable demographic dynamic and export orientation makes the country an attractive place for investment for large-scale production activities,” read a recent Dubai Chamber of Commerce circular on Chinese investment.

The latest UAE player to expand into China is chemical and plastic solutions provider Borouge, a joint venture between the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and the Austria-based Borealis.

According to Borouge, China is on its way to become the world’s largest polyolefins market, which explains why they are setting up a logistics hub there, as well as investing in a new 50,000-tonnes-per-year manufacturing plant in Guangzhou.

“There RE a variety of industries in China that can provide profitable opportunities for UAE investors, including trade, tourism, oil-related activities, financial services and logistics,” says Hani Hamil, secretary general from Dubai Economic Council.

Relations are key The Chinese market, however, may not be the easiest one to access, as bureaucracy and differences in business ethics – as well as the language – represent obstacles.

“A key challenge for foreign investors is government relations,” says Shehryar Ashfaque, deputy manager at Gulf Chinese Trading Corporation, the company that established the 100,000sq m China Mall in Ajman in 2010.

“Guanxi, or ‘relations’ in English, is the typical culture in China. Having harmonious relations with the Chinese

Images courtesy of Corbis / ArabianEye.com

ew places in the world today can claim to be untouched by the spread of Chinese commercialism.

Whether through the proliferation of goods in stores and the emergence of neighbourhood Chinatowns or China-themed malls, Chinese brands have long been a familiarity in the global commercial landscape.

In 2013, for the first time ever, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing nation, generating $2.9 trillion in output annually versus $2.43 trillion from the US. In the same year, the country overtook the EU as the top export market for Singapore and replaced the UK as the world’s fifth largest arms exporter.

But China’s mass production and cheap costs are considered to be a threat by many local manufacturers worldwide. While India plans to impose anti-dumping duties on solar panels imported from China, the US has already done so. EU countries also

Digital

The 100,000sq m China Mall in Ajman

government will pave the way for the long-term development of foreign investments and increase the possibility of high returns,” he says.

To this end, public relations are crucial. “Since the culture is so different, it would be better to research the market, including the cultural aspects, and to hire a local,” Ashfaque adds.

The Dubai Economic Council has accomplished a great deal in narrowing this gap, sending delegations to China on a regular basis as well as hosting high-profile Chinese delegations.

The government entity has also secured partnerships with numerous Chinese economic decision makers, including the China Council for Promotion of International Trade and the China Economic and Social Council, as well as financial institutions like China Exim Bank, People’s Bank of China and China Development Bank, the world’s largest development bank.

“DEC believes these partnerships and alliances with Chinese institutions will serve the trading and investment relations between the UAE and China,” says Hamil.

Despite the perceived barriers, foreign investments continue to pour into China. Figures by the country’s Ministry of Commerce show between January and May this year, the number of newly approved foreign-invested enterprises was up by 1.6 per cent on the same period last year.

Synergies between the UAE and China One of the strongest synergies between the UAE and China lies in the oil sector. While the Chinese economy depends on the UAE as a trade hub for Chinese products – with nearly 70 per cent of exports re-exported to GCC countries, Africa and Europe – the UAE is a major source of oil for China.

“China is the second largest oil consumer in the world and the UAE ranks seventh globally in oil production. We have seen the Chinese recently bidding for oil concessions in Abu Dhabi,” says Alan Rodgers, partner at UAE-based law firm Hadef Partners.

Ties between the UAE and China in the construction sector have also considerably strengthened. Within the last two years, Chinese firms have won construction contracts worth more than $4.8 billion in the UAE, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

This has led to more Chinese companies setting up in the UAE. When Aabar and China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) signed a $2 billion deal to develop 30 property projects in Abu Dhabi, it prompted CSCEC to set up offices in the UAE. In fact, Dubai Economic Council estimates more than 2,000 Chinese companies are operating in the UAE, “mostly in the construction sector”.

When it comes to bilateral trade, volumes increased by an impressive 14 per cent year-on-year in 2013, reaching around $46.2 billion. The UAE is now China’s second largest trading partner in the Middle East.

Retail clusters like Dubai’s Dragon Mart and Ajman’s China Mall are living proof of the success of Chinese products.

“Furniture, lighting solutions and apparel are the highest in demand by UAE companies,” says Ashfaque.

With such remarkable success domestically and overseas, it’s hard to imagine that nearly 40 per cent of China’s businesses had either crashed or were on the verge of bankruptcy during the peak of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Clearly, the Chinese economy has more than recovered.

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RECIPE FOR SUCCESS Just Falafel’s success has taken even its founders by surprise with an accelerated pace of growth that led them to the brink of an IPO before pulling back. GC talks to founder Mohamad Bitar about where the company’s future lies

By Tahira Yaqoob

t is known as a poor man’s meal, a simple snack made of fava beans, chickpeas and spices and sold on the street for a few pennies.

But the humble falafel is proving a recipe for runaway success for one UAE company, which has taken the modest dish and turned it into a global brand sold around the world.

Just Falafel is one of just a select few firms in the UAE which have successfully created an international brand and spread their wings across the globe.

It has sold more than 700 franchises in 18 countries, including the United States, the UK, Canada, Egypt and Oman, and is already operational in 13.

But its success has come at a price, with the company’s cofounder, Mohamad Bitar, now frantically playing catch-up with the franchises he has sold.

“If you had asked me five or six years ago if I thought I would be here, I would have said no,” he says.

“I could sell much more with the requests we get every day but I do not think we want to grow faster than we already are.”

It must be every entrepreneur’s dream to expand exponentially beyond all expectations but, Bitar warns, there is a catch.

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“It is so hard to keep up with building infrastructure to keep up with this growth,” he says.

“The most important thing for us is finding the right people who understand our culture. That is really the hardest part.”

The easy part, he adds, was coming up with the concept.

Lebanese-born Bitar, 39, grew up in Beirut, but when he moved to Dubai in 2003, he noticed there were no outlets selling the street snack.

“Falafel is by far the oldest Mediterranean street food and no one had taken the time to properly look into commercialising it,” he says. “In Egypt, there are maybe half a million falafel shops but no one put it under one brand in a clean environment.

In Lebanon, there are specialist stores that do falafel really well.

“It is one of the oldest foods so I thought: ‘Why don’t we do to the falafel what McDonald’s did to burgers?’”

Ambitious aims indeed, but they are in keeping with Bitar’s grand-scale aspirations, many of which have already become a reality.

He came up with a recipe based on 70 per cent fava beans together with chickpeas and chia seeds, mixed with spices including cumin, coriander and fennel. In a sign of the

Business

company’s evolution, falafel are now made with chickpeas, come either baked or fried depending on preference, use sunflower oil and are packed in wraps with vegetables, the majority of which come from Greenheart organic farms.

But it is the company’s rapid expansion since it was founded in 2007 by Bitar and Reema Shetty, who went on to become his wife, that is remarkable and which has even inspired Facebook managers to use it as one of 45 case studies globally for business practice.

The first outlet was a tiny shop in Abu Dhabi’s Hamdan Street, joined a year later by another in the capital. By 2009, there were two more outlets in Dubai.

A year later, Bitar stood on the edge of a precipice. “We had a choice - either we open our own stores, which I needed a lot of capital for, or we start franchising,” he says. In the end it came down to economics.

In March 2011, the firm began franchising. For costs ranging from $150,000 to $700,000, depending on location, franchisees could buy the right to use the Just Falafel name and receive

curve for us as it was our first time in Europe.”

The company founder has now assembled a dream team of 30 staff at his headquarters in Dubai, whose credentials range from McDonald’s to Shake Shack.

It has also just waved goodbye to Fadi Malas, who has stepped down after four years as chief executive, although he remains a shareholder.

“I have the right people on board now,” says Bitar. “Originally when we had four or five falafel shops and wanted to grow, no one of that calibre would come and work for us. One of the essential things is choosing the right partner and building a proper infrastructure.”

Key to operations is a strong CSR component. Just Falafel has sponsored sports initiatives and nutrition programmes in schools. It aims to raise $1 million in three years by donating $500 to the UN World Food Programme for every franchise opened. And it has just undertaken to sponsor a promising UAE student with a background in fundraising for charity, 18-year-old Aqil Rashid, through his course at an Ivy League

“We are not ready [for an IPO].

I felt there was a bit of a cleanup we needed to do in terms of existing sites and franchises.”

Mohamad Bitar, managing director and founder of Just Falafel

training. London, New York and Sydney are the most expensive sites; India, where Just Falafel will open for the first time in November, is likely to be the cheapest.

Bitar originally hoped to have more than 1,500 franchises but with about half that number sold, he has decided to temporarily halt any further expansion to give managers a chance to catch their breath.

“This year and next, I would like to concentrate on existing markets and open the ones we have sold rather than going on selling more,” he says.

“We have expanded so fast in the past few years that I need to catch up.”

Some markets have proven more successful than others.

Bitar had to scrap plans to open in troubled Libya and while he aimed to open more than 200 outlets in Britain, his four London restaurants have failed to make an impact.

“They were not where I wanted to be,” he says. “We took what was available rather than what we should. It was a learning

university, a sum amounting to about $250,000.

Last year, Bitar stood on another precipice as the company contemplated listing as an IPO. In the end, after consultations with the likes of Ernst & Young, Arqaam Capital and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Just Falafel team took a decision to pull back.

“We are not ready for it,” says Bitar. “It was an amazing experience for us and we learned a lot. It was the first time we had a third eye to look at our business and tell us where our weaknesses are.

“It set us right in so many ways but I felt there was a bit of a clean-up we needed to do in terms of existing sites and franchises.”

Meanwhile, Just Falafel is planning an overhaul of the menu in its 18 UAE outlets, with a tweak to the original recipe, some new dishes and the introduction of meat for the first time with shawarmas. “We feel it is time for us to move to the next level and offer other street food as well,” he says.

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Business

eZayed’s founder Adham Saleh and business partner Rashad Moosa

Homes Under a Virtual Hammer The UAE’s first privately run property auction promises owners a quick sale - but can they deliver?

By Nawied Jabarkhyl

My two biggest regrets in life were not inventing Facebook and not being in Dubai for the last property boom,” Adham Saleh tells me as we meet in the lobby of the Oberoi Hotel in Dubai’s Business Bay - one of the by-products of the property boom he is referring to, which now forms a central part of Dubai’s latest resurgence in the world property market.

It was apparently those regrets which inspired Saleh’s latest business venture, the UAE’s first privately owned online property auction website Ezayed.com.

Born and raised in Dubai, Egyptian Adham Saleh went to

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university in 2004 in the UK, studying pharmacy in Manchester for four years before moving to London to do a masters in business administration at Regent’s Business School.

Although Saleh says he thrived in the UK, it wasn’t long into the term before the isolation of being thousands of miles away from his family and friends hit him. Instead of letting it get to him, Saleh decided to turn it into a business opportunity and started his own events company. He organised regular events in both Manchester and London for foreign students who were in a similar situation to him and found it difficult to socialise outside the classroom.

Business

In 2009, Saleh returned to Dubai and tried his hand in the pharmaceutical world for the likes of GlaxoSmithKline. But, compelled by the entrepreneurial drive of running his own businesses in England, he quickly left to pursue Ezayed.com.

With the help of two Emirati investors – one a silent partner and the other Rashad Al Moosa, joint managing director and board member of his family business, UAE healthcare giant Gulfdrug.

Ezayed claims to be the first RERA (Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Authority) certified company allowed to conduct private auctions. There will be four every year, each consisting of 25 properties, which will range in price from $136,000 to $1.36 million. Significantly, all of the properties on offer will be at a minimum of 10 per cent below market price so they

it attracts the right type of traffic.

That’s one reason why the website is steering clear of off-plan developments. It will only list completed property on its website and auctions, as Saleh believes the incentive of a good sale is enhanced when there is a tangible product on offer. There will also be no charges for buyers whatsoever, with all of Ezayed’s revenue generated from the seller and from advertising on the website. With a four per cent charge on sellers on the total sale price at auction, this might be a factor that could turn away potential homeowners.

But a bigger concern for Ezayed - which goes live this month, with the first auction planned for December - could be the fact Dubai’s property market appears to be slowing down. A

“Auctions have been used in the West to promote a healthy real-estate market for a long time now and I think the concept is still fairly new here.”

Ezayed’s homepage counts down the days to the live auction held in Dubai

will include distress sales and homeowners looking to sell their properties quickly. “Ezayed creates urgency,” says Saleh. Sellers no longer have to have their properties listed for between six and nine months. “We have given them a specific date and told them this is when your property will be sold.”

The auctions themselves will have a physical element in the UAE but they will also be streamed live around the world. That means a potential buyer in Hong Kong or Los Angeles can take part in real time. “Auctions have been used in the West to promote a healthy property market for a long time now and I think the concept is still fairly new here.”

There have been property auctions in the past in the UAE but none were entirely privately run. Previous ones were overseen by authorities like the Dubai Land Department. Saleh is conscious of the time it will take for consumers to get to grips with the idea but is confident it will be successful: “Essentially, it is about getting a good deal.”

There is an increasing trend among UAE and global retailers to move more towards online shopping, which is likely to work in Ezayed’s favour. But with the internet still heavily populated with too much UAE property, he will have a challenge ensuring

report out this week by property consultancy Phidar Advisory showed a four per cent drop in property prices in the emirate in July and August. “We predict that slowdown will continue into the next year,” says Jesse Downs, managing director of Phidar. “But this is a good thing. What we’re seeing is a natural correction of the market, driven partly by over-inflated prices last year - almost 30 per cent growth - and it is also a result of government initiatives to make lending harder, which has had an impact on mortgage amounts and volumes.”

Saleh is not too worried though. “It is definitely a valid concern, I think. But the market is growing at a slower rate and I think the measures taken by the UAE government late last year – namely, making borrowing from banks more difficult and increasing the transfer fee on properties from two per cent to four per cent are working.”

Is he worried the market could go too far in the wrong direction? “Definitely not. People often look at Dubai’s property market and refer to the crash in 2008. If you look at the growth rate then, it was ridiculous, it was in the hundreds. That’s not the fact now. In fact, it is decreasing. And I think that is a good sign another bubble will not happen.”

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The Prodigy of Philanthropy The founder of the Global Poverty Project attracts big-name celebrities but has been accused of “hashtag activism”

By Daniel Bates

hen Hugh Evans began organising this year’s Global Citizen festival, he did not have to look far for a headliner.

Before he had even asked, rapper Jay-Z offered his services for free, as did No Doubt, for whom it will be their first show anywhere in more than two years.

It is a mark of how far the festival, which attracts 60,000 people to the Great Lawn of Central Park in New York, has come in just three years that it holds such influence.

The event in September is the most high-profile of the year

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for the non-profit Global Poverty Project, founded by Evans, who has been described as a “prodigy of philanthropy” by the New York Times.

You cannot buy tickets and you gain entry by carrying out actions which earn you points and enter you into a lottery.

The more points you earn, the more chance you have of getting a ticket.

Such activism is designed to help the project reach its goal of ending extreme global poverty by 2030.

It is no small feat given 1.2 billion people currently live in

Philanthropy

“Glitz and glamour of whatever you do is secondary to the ultimate goal of ending extreme poverty in our lifetime.”

Image courtesy of Michael N Todaro

R-L Hugh Evans, founder of the Global Citizen festival and Peter Murphy

such conditions, defined by the World Bank as surviving on less than $1.25 a day.

But Mr Evans, who seems to have an evangelical zeal, sees it as creating a new generation of “global citizens,” activists who donate their time and effort rather than giving money - an approach seen as revolutionary in philanthropic circles.

He says: “What we try to focus on is actions which can only be won through a collective large number of people working together to achieve it.

“What’s the sort of impact that we could make if it was me plus 100,000 people doing the same thing?”

Evans, 31, founded the Global Poverty Project in 2008, inspired by trips in his youth to the Philippines and India, where he witnessed poverty firsthand.

Returning to his native Australia, he resolved to make a difference at the age of 14 and has been doing so ever since.

So far his 35 successful campaigns have included bombarding Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg with 6,000 tweets, resulting in her doubling development assistance to education in countries affected by extreme poverty.

His venture persuaded Dr Rajiv Shah, the head of USAID, to make efficiency savings of $3.2 billion that will be pumped

back into aid and save another 500,000 lives.

His team also encouraged their 500,000 activists to live on $1.25 a day to see what extreme poverty was like.

Evans himself tried it and said he barely survived on an allcarbohydrate diet because that was all he could afford.

Critics, however, have been quick to label the entire operation “hashtag activism” and question if it has a long-term impact.

To an outsider, it does indeed seem like the internet-age version of elected officials getting sackloads of mail from angry constituents.

His latest global campaign #ShowYourSelfie is a bid to urge world leaders at the UN meeting in New York this month to prioritise the needs and rights of young people, from education to gender equality, in the organisation’s post-2015 development agenda.

Evans says he prefers to describe what he does as “welltargeted” rather than “well-intentioned”.

He says he does not want anyone’s money - the project is financed by backers like Bill Gates - adding there is nothing wrong with giving money to charity as long as the charity is “effective”.

“Often we ask the wrong questions about charity. We say:

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Philanthropy

‘What from my dollar gets to the field?” says Evans.

“I would rather ask: ‘Once it gets to the field, does it alleviate poverty?’

“I could easily send all of your dollar to the field and it ends up in the wrong hands, rather than, let’s call it 90 cents to the dollar, actually getting there and alleviating poverty.”

For Evans, the key is changing the systems that keep people poor, issues like financial flows, free and fair trade and stopping corruption.

He says: “It is a scale question for me. I don’t just care about doing good, I want to end extreme poverty.

“If I just cared about doing good I would probably live in Africa full-time with my wife and we would build houses for orphans. I did that for several years and it’s awesome.

“Yes, you wake up every morning gratified because you get to go and build a school and you meet the people but I care about scale.”

Nowhere is this more important than getting the public sector to commit to his goals, something Evans does behind closed doors in addition to his more public role.

He says: “Even the greatest givers know that level of scale can’t meet the reach of, say, the British or the US government that gives $17 billion to $22 billion a year.”

Evans was named Young Australian of the Year for promoting

youth advocacy through his Oaktree Foundation but is now wary of his own government after it reneged on aid promises.

The Global Poverty Project currently has offices in five countries and is looking to expand to the Middle East. Evans says it is “slow progress”, although there was a positive response to fighting polio.

He says: “The Middle East has a hugely important role to play, particularly when you consider that the remaining countries that have a polio endemic - Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern Nigeria - are Islamic regions, so there is an important countenance to say we want to support our Islamic brothers.”

Evans has in the past been billed one of the most beautiful people in the world by Who magazine as well as making a list of Forbes magazine’s under-30 year olds to watch.

But with dozens of ideas in his head - his latest is to get a G20 nation to make a big contribution to the goal of raising $7.5 billion for the Global Alliance for Vaccines - he keeps his feet firmly on the ground.

He says: “There is still extreme poverty in the world. The job’s not even nearly done.

“First principles dictate that we have failed until the last child is not living in extreme poverty.

“Glitz and glamour of whatever you do is secondary to the ultimate goal of ending extreme poverty in our lifetime.”

Bono, Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keys were among the headliners at the 2013 Global Citizen Festival in Central Park

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Cover Story

FAREWELL My Old Friend As the US cult drama Mad Men draws to an end, the only person who won’t be drowning their sorrows in an old fashioned is the show’s relieved leading man Jon Hamm. He talks about life after Don Draper

Elaine Lipworth / Seven Magazine / The Interview People

Image courtesy of Getty Images

By Elaine Lipworth

Hamm’s character Don Draper has been brought to life in 30Tassauds Sep / in Oct Madame New2014 York

Cover Story

n a cafe near the Los Angeles home of the actor Jon Hamm and his partner, the filmmaker Jennifer Westfeldt, the couple have a seat with their names on it. To be precise, they are engraved on a shiny brass plaque on the green leather banquette opposite me when I arrive early for breakfast.

“Er, I don’t know why they did it, honestly. It just sort of appeared,” mumbles the Mad Men star when he arrives. “We were like: ‘That’s nice’. We do come here an awful lot…”

With his dark, grey-flecked hair and expressive blue eyes, Hamm is ludicrously handsome; not that this will be a surprise to anybody who has been watching his alter ego Don Draper on television for the past seven years. But in contrast to the troubled adman, who has a dangerous, unsettled air, Hamm in person seems untroubled: his features are gentler, unthreatening, less dramatic.

He is wearing maroon jeans, a crumpled linen Rag & Bone shirt and a St Louis Cardinals baseball hat. “That’s my team,” says the actor, who was born and raised in Missouri and worked in restaurants, as a teacher and a set dresser on adult films (an experience he has described as “horribly depressing”) before landing the careerchanging role on Mad Men, aged 36.

Hamm has just completed filming the show’s seventh and final season, which will be broadcast next year. Predictably, he will not be drawn on plot details - whether it’s finally all over between Don and his actress wife Megan, whether Don will actually survive the self-destructive cycle of booze and cigarettes. “I can’t spoil anything but there are surprises. In the last episode, Waterloo, the agency [Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce] was sold to McCann Erickson; now things are looking up,” is all he will offer.

The drama has won 15 Emmy awards and had 105 nominations.

“I can’t explain its success,” says Hamm. “For whatever reason, when we started the show there was a parallel between the show’s world in the early Sixties, the post-Eisenhower era in American culture, politics and society, the rise of Kennedy – and the beginning of the Obama era. No one could have planned for that. It just happened.”

Hamm’s acting heroes – Gary Oldman, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Ralph Fiennes – have all cornered him to tell him how much they love his performance: “And I’ve just been like: ‘This is nuts!’ ” None the less, he says it’ll be a “tremendous relief” to move on.

“Being in an emotional and precarious state [as Draper] has been a lot of weight to carry. Acting isn’t lead mining, it’s not physically taxing… except when it is. You talk to [Breaking Bad’s] Bryan Cranston, you talk to Tina Fey (30 Rock) and Hugh Laurie (House). All these guys who have been on shows for a long time say the same thing: it’s hard work.

“But it’s going to be emotional for all of us who work on the show, because we won’t have the job to come back to. We won’t have our friends to come back to. I keep making the comparison with death; you go through stages of grief. The first is denial, the next is anger and you finally get to acceptance. I got to acceptance a long time ago,” he says with a wry smile.

Hamm has experienced considerable loss himself and it has left him with a philosophical approach to his career - and life.

An only child, his parents split up when he was a baby. His portrayal of Don Draper was inspired by his hard-drinking father Daniel, who owned a trucking company.

“My Dad was very much of the same time as Don, he was smart, clever, good with people, everybody’s friend. But he also had a dark side.” Hamm was raised by his mother Deborah, a secretary who died of stomach cancer when he was 10.

His father died 10 years later.

His parents’ deaths put him off religion “fairly early on in a real quick way”, he says.

“That was pretty much it for me. I don’t get the mystery of faith. I’m too much of a math guy. The numbers didn’t add up so I was like: ‘OK, moving on.’ I don’t need an afterlife. I don’t need a second act.”

These early childhood experiences have also left him with a different take on the word parent. “A lot of people have biological mothers and fathers who are absent or abusive and that defines you in the way that it does. My parents were absent because they were dead so there were other people who filled that vacuum - teachers, friends, caring adults who recognised that I was a child, sort of set adrift. It was the ‘it takes a village’ mentality,” he says.

One of Hamm’s surrogate parents was the drama teacher at the academic John Burroughs High School in St Louis, Missouri.

Wayne Salomon spotted his student’s talent in school plays.

“The last thing I wanted to be was an actor, but he was like, ‘You could really do this.’ ” Hamm took his mentor’s advice and moved to LA, where he landed various bit parts in television shows but quit acting for

2014 Sep / Oct

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Cover Story

Hamm’s character bears some resemblance to Draper: he is a smooth-talking womaniser but without the angst. “I liked the story,” says Hamm, “it felt very – wholesome is the wrong word – it just felt pleasant after working on such an unpleasant character for the longest time. And this guy did affect these young men’s lives in the most amazing way.” (Both ended up playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates.) “I’ve played baseball for the better part of 30 years of my life. I can’t do what they do. They learnt it in 11 months.”

Serious about baseball, Hamm doesn’t follow cricket, but is a fan of Indian batting maestro Sachin Tendulkar. He got his cricket education in the UK two years ago while filming the British miniseries, A Young Doctor’s Notebook, with Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, which he also produced. “I got to watch the Ashes, which was fascinating. Dan’s a huge cricket fan, so I was getting the low-down from him.”

He has become firm friends with Radcliffe after meeting him at the Baftas and he was Hamm’s first choice to play the younger version of himself in the drama. “Here’s the thing I told Dan: ‘If there’s anybody that knows what it’s like to be identified with one character, it’s us. We have that in common.

It might be fun for both of us to do something out of the box.’

“It turns out Dan is a massive fan of [A Young Doctor’s Notebook author] Mikhail Bulgakov. Who would imagine that kid, an international superstar, reading some obscure Russian novel. And yet that’s Dan. I think he is massively talented.

For the majority of his teens, he was the most famous person in

Image courtesy of Getty Images

a while in his twenties and returned to Burroughs as a teacher himself. “It was important to me to give back to the place that meant so much to me. I also endowed a scholarship in my mother’s name. She was the person who wanted me to go to the school,” he says.

Family – in Hamm’s broader interpretation of the word – is the subject of the new film Million Dollar Arm, his first postMad Men leading role. Directed by Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl), it is pure Disney, a funny, feelgood flick along the lines of Jerry Maguire and based on the true story of a broke, desperate LA sports agent, JB Bernstein (Hamm), who dreams up an outlandish scheme to discover new baseball stars.

Inspired by watching Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent, he stages a reality competition show in India. Two talented young athletes, Rinku Singh, played by Life of Pi’s Suraj Sharma, and Dinesh Patel, played by Madhur Mittal (Slumdog Millionaire), emerge as the winners.

Hamm filmed for several weeks in Mumbai. “You can’t get from A to B without something going wrong and yet the people are so welcoming in the midst of all of this chaos, you kind of forget about it.” Was he mobbed by Mad Men fans? “No, it’s hard to recognise anybody, the whole city is like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.” The film follows the winners as they fly to the United States from their impoverished villages and learn to play baseball with the hopes of being recruited onto a Major League team.

Bernstein plans to cash in on the publicity with lucrative deals.

Living up to his character’s name, Hamm is surrounded by some of the female cast members from Mad Men 32

Sep / Oct 2014

Cover Story

“I know Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio. I wouldn’t trade my life for theirs. It’s horrible. You can’t go anywhere; you can’t do anything.”

Hamm with long-term partner and fellow actor and screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt

the world in the eyes of 13 to 18 year-olds but he has handled it all with a grace that is enviable.

Hamm is funny. He played Ted, Kristen Wiig’s self-absorbed boyfriend in Bridesmaids, appeared in Westfeldt’s comedy Friends With Kids, sent himself up as a dim bulb on 30 Rock and he is a welcome guest on many comedy podcasts (his appearance on Comedy Bang Bang as “the Mexican Jon Hamm”, Juan Jamon, is a joy). Has he considered doing standup? “Never. I’ve always had an appreciation of comedy. I used to get Richard Pryor and Bob Newhart records from the library.

I loved George Carlin and Cheech and Chong as a kid. But I know enough comics in my life who do it for a living – Paul F Tompkins, Sarah Silverman and Zach Galifianakis – and I don’t have that ability.”

Post Mad Men, the roles are flooding in and Hamm confesses, “I’m not struggling but that presents another set of difficulties: you don’t know if a project’s going to be good or be bad.”

He downs his coffee and beckons to the waitress for a refill.

“There are a lot of things I wanted which have gone to other people.” For example? “Ridley Scott’s new film The Martian.

It should be amazing, it’s a beautiful script and I was like: ‘I’d like to do that’. They were like: ‘It’s not for you. It’s going to be Matt Damon.’”

Hamm says he has no intrinsic interest in blockbusters and will take interesting roles, whether for cinema or television. A bit of an Anglophile, he raves about Charlie Brooker’s drama

Black Mirror. “It’s brilliant, a terrifying satire, an incredible Twilight Zone-esque series. I look at shows like that and I go: ‘I could do that for the rest of my life.’ ” Having spent the best part of a decade on a programme that many critics regard as “the best television ever”, is he concerned that the defining role of his career is behind him? “No. It is definitely the defining role. So few people have an experience like this but it has been an incomparable run for an actor like myself so I’ll look back on it fondly.”

Global fame does not appeal to Hamm. He claims the recognition he has experienced pales in comparison to the pressure faced by heavyweight film stars. “I’ve seen it. I know Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio. I wouldn’t trade my life for theirs. It’s horrible.

You can’t go anywhere; you can’t do anything. Matt’s actually got the right balance and George has a pretty good life too,” he laughs. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying they have this double-edged sword that you really can’t control.”

With the grind of Mad Men almost over, Hamm is taking time to wind down with Westfeldt. He won’t discuss specifics of their relationship “because it just brings unnecessary and unwanted pressure and attention to it”. Would the couple like to work together again? “Yeah, totally.”

He does tell me they are about to escape LA for several months. For a long holiday? “Holiday makes it seem like something super-planned and pleasant. It will just be me and Jen and the dog in a house on an island somewhere, slowing down and stopping and reconnecting. No I’m not going to tell you where I’m going on vacation,” he says, eyebrows arched, “but it’s an island in America.”

It will, I suggest, have to be a remote island to avoid devoted Mad Men fans. I tell Hamm I read a quote from Westfeldt recently in which she compared the experience of going out in public with her partner to being with a Beatle. “She didn’t mention which Beatle,” he grins. “She could have very well meant Ringo.”

2014 Sep / Oct

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xxxxx

The Road Less Travelled The charming Emirati brothers Mohamed and Peyman al Awadhi are taking a slice of Dubai to the rest of the world, thanks to their award-winning travel series Peeta Planet and a new TV show

By Anthea Ayache

indsight is a wonderful thing, as Mohamed al Awadi has learned. If he could give some advice to his younger self, he says in one of Dubai’s hip eateries, it would be “not to borrow, stay ultra small and not to grow the business before three years. I did the exact opposite.”

He had an early insight into the business world. He and his brother Peyman earned pocket money by working in their father’s clothing business. When it came, many years later, to funding their own start-up, they discovered UAE banks were keener to lend cash for a Bugatti than a business and their restaurant Wild Peeta hit numerous obstacles, from their first site being flooded to making expensive mistakes like investing in a bread oven.

But the two have now grown a hugely successful brand – or

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Sep / Oct 2014

as they prefer to call it, “ecosystem” – with their crowd-sourced TV series Peeta Planet.

Having picked up numerous awards, including outstanding social media project last year at the BroadcastPro ME awards in Dubai, the show is now in its second series and sees the brothers getting to the heart of the world’s lesser-known locales, with the global online community influential in telling them about hidden pockets and connecting them with offbeat characters on the ground.

“I loved series two because we developed all round and that translated into amazing content because we were able to really let go and experiment,” says Peyman.

Today the 13 episode half-hour series is one of the most watched shows on the Dubai One network with 50 million

bUSINESS

viewers worldwide tuning in to see the kandoura-clad pair shed light on the world’s secret alleys and unsung heroes from Rome to Santiago. They have been mountain riding in Chile, discovered street art in Bangkok and eaten authentic falafel in Jordan with the motto “don’t be a tourist. Be a social traveller.”

“We always look for positive stories,” says Peyman.

“When we were in the Philippines, we met two guys who are teaching communities aquaponic farming methods to grow sustainable food.”

The pair went to Payatas, the country’s largest urban dumpsite where, according to Unicef, some 200,000 people live. Mohamed says: “Seeing the level of impoverishment, what people need to get access to sanitation and what they call food - it is inexplicable.

“These two Filipinos are teaching residents to be selfsustaining. It was amazingly inspiring and for me, those sorts of stories are the highlights.”

Staying true to their philosophy, the brothers are embarking on a new series called #MyDubaiTrip. Inspired by the popular #MyDubai instagram drive initiated by

“I am so happy we failed because it taught me everything I need to know to run Peeta Planet today.”

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to create a social media-driven biography of Dubai, the pair are collaborating with Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce (DTCM) to create a new TV show.

“The hashtag movement overlaps with our philosophy of social travel,” says Mohamed. “DTCM is trying to create an ecosystem that is driven by the people so it was an amazing fit.”

Peyman explains the concept of the show: “12 out of 450 of the biggest instagrammers in the world will be flown to Dubai. They will experience 12 itineraries that have been crowd-sourced by popular Dubai instagrammers, people who live in and love Dubai. The finalists will be given different journeys to experience Dubai’s heart and soul, not just what you see on the surface.”

Showing what Dubai has to offer the world is a core message for the brothers, who began exploring different ways to express it with the opening of their Wild Peeta gourmet shawarma restaurant in 2010. It aimed to take the street food snack to another level but only enjoyed short-lived success.

“The UAE can be a difficult place for SMEs,” says

Above – The Al Awadhi brothers in Rome, Italy and Rio de Janerio, Brazil, filming segments of their travel show Peeta Planet 2014 Sep / Oct

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Horseback riding in Santiago and football in Rio: the Emirati brothers are living out their dream

Mohamed. “We tried to apply for an SME bank account but it required a few million dirhams annually. I don’t think any SME can earn that amount within the first few years.”

Peyman adds: “People did not want to invest in a homegrown idea but when they did, we put our growth plans on fast forward and scaled up too fast. We used money to solve our problems instead of sitting down and resolving them.”

“It became unmanageable,” agrees Mohamed. “Looking back, we should have started with a small stand at Ripe [market] every Friday and created a menu with one Emirati shawarma, done that for a year and not spent more than Dh100,000. We spent 300 per cent more than that.”

His brother adds: “By raising so much money we didn’t need and having so many products we didn’t need, we diluted our time and could not do anything properly. We decided to scale

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down to one [restaurant] and then none.”

But Mohamed says he is happy they failed because “it taught me everything I need to know to run Peeta Planet today.”

Do they have any plans to re-open the restaurant? Mohamed thinks it still has potential to take shawarma around the world.

“I believe in it, even after all of our failures. With the success of Peeta Planet, I think it would be a tremendous investment.”

For now though, the brothers have their hands full with the #MyDubaiTrip show and planning the third series of Peeta Planet, a show which has brought them exactly what they strived for.

“We are people who decided at one point in time to do what makes us happy, do what we love and at the same time earn a living,” says Mohamed. “It is more than just starting a business, it’s affording to be happy.”

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2014 Sep / Oct

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VOSS Foundation executive director, Kara Gerson turns on the fresh water tap at Ndonyo Nasipa in Kenya

Gerson in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on a site visit

The first supply of clean water in Latakwen, Kenya (Photo courtesy of Danielle St. Laurent) 38

Sep / Oct 2014

Liberia Students at the Hope Mission School get access to fresh water (Photo courtesy of FACE Africa)

Philanthropy

The Ripple Effect The Voss Foundation aims to provide water and sanitation to deprived African villages but its association with luxury can be problematic

By Daniel Bates

ith its designer glass bottle and sky high prices, you might not associate Voss Water with sanitation and hygiene projects in Third World countries.

But the luxury water brand is linked by more than just a name to the Voss Foundation, launched in 2008 to source water in deprived, poverty-stricken regions.

The foundation prides itself on seeing its projects through to their conclusion, a mantra it says is essential for philanthropy to succeed.

The organisation has just heard back from its very first project set up the year it was founded, a hand-dug water well with a solar pump in Latakwen, in the Samburu region of Kenya.

Since then, children in the area have stopped having back problems because they are not carrying heavy pails of water, the school has doubled in size and a cholera outbreak has been beaten.

Over the past five years, the foundation, which is in part financed by the water brand Voss, has had seven reports from Latakwen and returned to the site twice.

Such a commitment is “one of the things that makes us stand out”, says Kara Gerson, executive director of the Voss Foundation’s New York office.

Over lunch in a Manhattan restaurant, she tells me that to date the organisation has raised $2.3million and set up 69 clean water access points ad well as 159 sanitation field sites in six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

That might sound like a relatively small number but Gerson

says the foundation has turned down “so many partners and so many opportunities because we have such high standards.”

In the beginning, they were burned by what she describes as “major charities” - she will not divulge which ones - who were more interested in large numbers of wells than sustainability.

Now the organisation carries out careful checks before partnering with organisations such as A Glimmer of Hope in Ethiopia or Face Africa to raise the $70,000 or so that each project costs.

The Voss Foundation has realised that anywhere between 40 to 80 per cent of wells fail in four to five years and has gone back to a “great number of them” to do repairs, Gerson says.

Follow-ups do not just include statistics but video interviews, written reports and texts showing what is happening on the ground day by day.

The aim is to give people the boost they need to help themselves, such as when the foundation built wells for female artisans and enabled them to sell woven baskets and face masks through the Voss African bazaar.

Gerson says: “Our mission is not just about clean water and dirty water. We use access to clean water, hygiene and sanitation as a means to enable community driven development.

“It is what we call the ripple effect of clean water so it is not a single issue. We view it as the foundation to all these other vital development goals, which are not as achievable without these basic needs.”

It was on a trip to Africa in 2008 that Knut Brundtland, the former chief executive of Norway-based Voss, came up with the

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Philanthropy

“The bottlers feel they are up against the wall, combating a lot of negative press about their carbon footprint and water privatisation.”

Gerson, centre, on the Women Helping Women donor trip to Ndonyo Nasipa, Kenya

idea of the Voss Foundation, after being appalled to see women and children lugging water for miles just so they could survive.

Now the foundation has three full-time staff in its New York office, two in its Oslo office and a number of interns and volunteers.

Donors are mostly Europeans and Americans or corporations and managing their expectations is one of the challenges the foundation faces, Gerson says.

“Someone will say we really want to do this and you have to explain to them this is not the appropriate technology for this community.

“Donors have their own reasons and they’re totally valid but it’s sometimes hard to match it with what the community needs and that is another place where we play a really important role - representing the community’s needs.”

Another issue the Voss Foundation faces is its relationship to Voss Water, which was set up in 2000 by Norwegians Ole Christian Sandberg and Christopher Harlem.

The water firm hired Neil Kraft, a former creative director for Calvin Klein, to make a glass bottle inspired by the perfume industry and to create a “new way to think about water, beyond refreshing to beautiful”.

Voss’s brand strategy was initially limited distribution at upscale establishments like five-star hotels and exclusive restaurants, where it cost up to $64 for a 12oz bottle.

Celebrity fans followed from Madonna to Gwyneth Paltrow while Beyonce and Jay-Z have been spotted sipping on the drink.

Such branding presents something of a paradox: for all the good work of the foundation, being tied to one of the most exclusive and expensive water brands in the world is problematic - for potential donors as well as consumers.

Author Elizabeth Royte, who has written about the bottled water industry, said she was sceptical of what she thought could

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be a case of “greenwashing”, or using green policies as a public relations exercise.

“I think the bottlers feel they are up against the wall, combating a lot of negative press about their carbon footprint and water privatisation,” she says.

“Voss is still producing a largely unnecessary product at great cost to the environment and perpetuating the notion that drinking branded and pricey bottled water imported from far away is glamorous or chic.”

Voss Water would not disclose revenues, profits or sales figures, citing the fact it is a private company.

It would also not disclose how much it donates each year to the Voss Foundation.

In 2011 however, the total amount the foundation got in contributions from all sources, including Voss Water, was just $80,000.

That same year Voss Water announced it had received $18 million in funding from private equity companies Juggernaut Capital Partners, LP and Centra Capital AS and embarked on a huge advertising push.

Ken Glibert, Voss Water’s chief marketing officer, says the company does not link its donations to the Voss Foundation to sales because it wants to make its giving unconditional.

He says: “I sleep well and I know there’s going to be criticism but I know what we do and what we do is something important that I am quite proud of.”

In the coming months, the Voss Foundation has plans to bring its Women Helping Women event to Dubai, having already proven a hit in cities like New York and San Francisco.

The upmarket luncheon aims to fundraise for clean water and sanitation for African women and their communities.

Gerson explains the appeal of the Middle East is that it has a network of potential donors - and many women who will want to hear their message.

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2014 Sep / Oct

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philanthropy

THE HUMAN TOUCH Saher Shaikh is on a mission to transform the lives of thousands of labourers in Dubai

By Madeleine Lee

ne chance moment in an otherwise nondescript day often holds the power to alter the path of your whole life. For Saher Shaikh, the British-born founder of Adopt-a-Camp, a charity which aims to improve the lives of the men who build Dubai, that moment came nine years ago after she moved to Dubai from Canada, where she was working in retail banking. Standing in a queue in Spinneys in Dubai Marina waiting to pay for her groceries, she noticed a labourer in front of her struggling to pay for his lunch.

Saher Shaikh, founder of Adopt-a-Camp

It was “the tiniest bread roll and a small bottle of laban,” she recalls now. Although Shaikh, 37, did not realise it at the time, it was the catalyst that transformed her life. “I looked at my basket and then I looked at what he was trying to buy and thought: ‘It isn’t fair,’” she says. On an impulse, she spoke to him in Urdu and offered to pay for his lunch to celebrate her son’s birthday. Having been told he could have anything he wanted, all he chose was a small bottle of milk.

“It struck a chord with me. Had he taken advantage of the offer, the whole experience might have turned out differently,” she says. From that point, Shaikh started helping other labourers, who were mostly illiterate, to use the ATM at the same Spinneys

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and began to talk to them frequently, earning the nickname bhaji, or big sister. It is this that underpins her main mission: “I am the mother and sister they do not have here and my message to them is that they are not alone, that the people of the UAE care about them very much.”

Shaikh, who has Pakistani and Afghan roots, began visiting labourers in their camps and was humbled by the spirit of their generosity as they rushed about trying to find juice for her, remembering that she liked it. “I feel very often it is the ones with the least who give the most,” she says. With her own money, she began assembling care packages for the men using the same products her family used, including good quality shampoos and colognes. It was not until her fourth trip to the camps that she was politely informed they preferred basic talcum powder and soap. She laughs now at her own naivety.

Life-changing initiatives While she now has a raft of eager volunteers to help assemble thousands of care packages today in partnership with Dubai Chamber of Commerce, Adopt-a-Camp, which began as a tiny sapling in 2005, has now grown to an organisation which works in functioning camps as well as taking care of abandoned camps where employers have absconded, leaving men stripped of salaries, food, water and electricity. With assistance from the Ministry of Labour, Shaikh helps the men until they find work or return home and organises emergency appeals for donations.

Adopt-a-Camp has come a long way since that incident in a supermarket. It hosts a number of initiatives in Dubai’s labour camps under its umbrella, including English language and hygiene classes. Perhaps the one that makes the biggest difference is the scholarship fund, which helps to lift these men “out of the cycle and become real citizens” by funding their studies to gain an IELTS English language proficiency certificate. The dynamic Shaikh even enlisted the help of singer Joss Stone during her recent world tour.

The first two years were funded by Shaikh’s prize money after she won Kraft-Philadelphia’s Most Inspiring Woman in the Gulf competition. The computer hardware firm IBM now funds the scholarship programme. This year, six men are enrolled in the scholarship at the American University of Dubai with the

philanthropy

hope of obtaining the life-changing qualification. “It’s for them to take off and fly. And they will,” Shaikh says confidently, highlighting one of its recipients, Roshan, as a case in point.

Stranded in an abandoned camp in Dubai during the financial crisis, he had lost his job as a labourer and resorted to making a living scavenging for tin to sell on the streets of Sharjah. Under the eagle-eyed guidance of Shaikh, Roshan obtained his IELTS and landed a job as supervisor for a large company with “12 people under him to boss around,” says the founder. It is just one story illuminating how a life can be changed by giving someone less fortunate a chance to change their own destiny.

So far, Adopt-a-Camp has 50 camps and 52,000 labourers under its wing and has helped an infinite number more since the initiative was born. In 2013, 10,000 volunteers took part in the Ramadan care packages programme where boxes of goods, including tea, prayer mats, noodles and soap, were assembled and delivered to 5,000 labourers. This Ramadan, as another way of bringing labourers into the community, Shaikh helped organise an iftar at Dubai’s Repton School. About 1,500 men attended, playing games and praying side by side. “We are all just human beings and it was so nice to see this humanity shine through,” Shaikh says.

Legacy Mother to four children- Shazil, nine, Shazain, seven, Sasha, three and 10-month-old Shiraz - Shaikh is supported in her efforts by her husband Shamrez, 40, whom she describes as “the nicest guy in the world”. Her simple philosophy is if everyone reaches out to one group of people, regardless of social or economic standing, these “circles of caring” will all eventually overlap and the world could be a very different place. “I feel so strongly about it, I can’t even put it into words,” she says. It is the reason she would not expand to other countries in need like Pakistan, Afghanistan or Syria because she feels it is important to be present and hands-on in one’s own community.

Besides, with four children under 10, she already has her work cut out and at the time of the interview, the whole family was preparing for a trip that involved pit stops in London, Worcestershire, Nova Scotia, Toronto, New York, Niagara Falls and the Peak District in the UK. It is exhausting just listening to her schedule and she admits, erupting into peals of laughter, that she must be mad.

Is there one lesson that stands out after nine years? She pauses, thinking. At last she says softly, “To be grateful for what you have.”

“I am the mother and sister they do not have here and my message to them is that they are not alone, that the people of the UAE care about them very much.”

Every Ramadan, Shaikh (top centre), along with volunteers, deliver thousands of food packages to Dubai’s labourers

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October 2-3, 2014 Four Seasons, Toronto, Canada

RUSSELL PETERS Mr. Peters is a Canadian comedian and actor, who began performing in Toronto in 1989. He has set numerous records for sales and attendance at a comedian's performance.

C U R AT E D BY

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Sep / Oct 2014

ROBIN SHARMA Mr. Sharma is the globally celebrated author of 15 international bestselling books on leadership, including The Leader Who Had No Title.

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HON. DR. DENZIL DOUGLAS

Mr. Browne is Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, in office since June 13, 2014. He led the Antigua Labor Party to victory in the 2014 general election.

Dr. Douglas is the Prime Minister of the twin-island Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. This is his fourth term as Prime Minister.

HON. ROOSEVELT SKERRIT

DR. BHUPENDRA MODI

Mr. Skerrit has been Prime Minister of Dominica since 2004. He has also been the Member of Parliament for the Vieille Case constituency since 2000.

A global citizen with 14 residences around the world, Dr. Modi ranks 32nd in the Forbes list of Singapore’s richest and is the key technology and business architect in globalizing the Smart brand.

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philanthropy

L-R The Syrian Supper Club gather at an event in London, Butler in Kilis in Turkey close to the Syrian border.

Helping Hands The illustrations of Syrian refugees by young British war artist George Butler tell a poignant tale, one that is being told at supper clubs across London in a bid to raise money for the Hands Up Foundation

By Gemma Champ

e are used to seeing journalists, cameramen and photographers sheltering from fire as they report on stories in the troubled parts of the Middle East – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan – flak jackets secure and helmets in place.

For 29-year-old artist George Butler, however, there is another side to the violence and danger we have come to associate with these troubled countries – and another way to report on it.

Butler is an unlikely war correspondent. Blond, gentle, rather plummy and unthreatening, he is an illustrator for whom the quiet moments are just as telling as the explosions of battle – something he discovered when visiting Afghanistan as a guest of the British Army, thanks to a well-placed uncle.

“Because it was an unofficial post, I was drawing in the camps and on the odd patrol and that’s what the British troops were doing there 90 per cent of the time,” he says.

“The film crews and photographers were of course trying to get the action in Helmand Province and on the front line.

And the life that we now know is so important in the camps – between soldiers, and how they keep themselves busy and keep in contact with home – that was overlooked.”

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For Butler, while photography is the perfect medium for action and accurate reporting (though of course filters, cropping and even Photoshop make it less reliable than it once was), illustration offers something else: interpretation and empathy.

“It’s when there’s another layer that’s not as obvious as photography and film. I think that is when drawing becomes so effective. It is a very personal experience and the artist, like the photographer, should really be offering some opinion of their own. You are trying to describe your experience of what is in front of you; you are not trying to make a photographic record.”

In 2012, Butler was in Turkey, hoping to illustrate the arrival of refugees from Syria, but found little to draw from the plain white minibuses that brought them into the country. He got chatting to a man who helped him enter Syria, where he met members of the Free Syrian Army, who were keen to tell their story. The first picture he painted in the town of Azaz was of children playing on a burnt-out tank.

“You walk in through an old minefield, meet the Free Syrian Army, past a blown-up petrol station and through the town and then you come to this battle scene from 10 days before. I just sat down on a bank and started drawing,” he says.

philanthropy

“The kids carried on playing and it was one of those moments, recording exactly what I set out to record, which is this little town after the fighting had stopped. Little did they know the shelling would start again in seven days’ time. It was just a scene of people coming back and looking at these extraordinary monsters in the middle of their village and now children were playing on top of them.”

His attempts to evoke these events have proven surprisingly popular with newspapers, helping to revive the art of reportage illustration and raising money to help Syria’s broken population survive and recover from the horrors inflicted on them over the last three years since the uprising in 2011. His sense of the resilience of the country’s people prompted him on his return to join the team at the Syrian Supper Club, set up by three friends in 2012 to hold regular dinners to raise funds for the growing humanitarian crisis in Syria.

The Supper Club’s work has gone further now with the establishment of the Hands Up Foundation, a charity that will see its official launch in London in November.

It has a simple remit - to provide funding for small but essential projects with direct transparency to the charity’s trustees, ensuring no money disappears, finds its way to the wrong people or is simply frittered away in administration.

“We quickly realised we couldn’t compete with the UN or Medecins Sans Frontieres or the International Rescue Committee or the Medecins du Monde and we should just do specific projects helping a small number of vulnerable people inside Syria,” says Butler. “That meant allocating, say, $16,500 to bags of flour at the start when bread was in shortage or paying for an X-ray machine in Aleppo.”

Those may seem like mere drops in an ocean of misery but the knock-on effect for the population is significant and the results quantifiable – an essential part of the deal Hands Up does with its beneficiaries.

“The project we’re most proud of is the medical salaries, which really ticks all our boxes in that you are helping a huge number of people and keeping the expertise in Syria, if and when we can rebuild it,” says Butler. ‘We are paying for two doctors, three nurses and two porters who are in charge of running an operating theatre inside Aleppo. In exchange, we get quarterly pay slips, lists of people they’ve treated – what was wrong with them, where they are from – and we then pass that on to the donors to say, you gave us $500 last month, that pays for this doctor to do a month’s work and he treated 600 people. It is a cliche but you are actually saving lives.”

The Syrian Supper Club events involve

2014 Sep / Oct

47

philanthropy

a Syrian feast at someone’s home, for which each attendee pays between $55 and $80 (or more should they choose to), with all funds going to the charity. The crowd at the first auction the group ran, which raised just under $100,000, ranged from Syrian expats in Britain, Foreign Office civil servants and BBC journalists, including veteran BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet, to private donors who preferred anonymity. The Syrian educational charity, the Asfari Foundation, has also supported the events.

For the founders, it is a big job undertaken not for money

Butler’s portraits spell out the chilling plight of refugees in Syria 48

Sep / Oct 2014

but for love of the country and there are immense decisions to be made. “We are trying not to spread ourselves too thinly at the moment,’ says Butler. “To give you an example, the project we’d like to do at the moment is to provide prosthetic limbs.

You can buy a prosthetic limb for $100, or you can get one for $5,000 and have rehab for a child till the age of 18, and it is a difficult decision to make: do you treat one person properly, so their life is revolutionised, or do you put 50 people back on their feet for a year and then they will need a new limb? We will probably fall somewhere between the two.”

Photo courtesy of Team Sager

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Special Report Privacy

What Lies WITHIN Behind the bookshelves in the capital’s mega-mansions are bulletproof concealed rooms with anti-intruder systems, steel walls and satellite phones. Lucy Tobin opens the door on the safe cells of the super-rich

— not from fearful individuals worried about the ramifications of political careers spilling over, as with Stein’s character, but from super-rich banking families, stalker-scared celebrities, and cash-hoarding foreigners who want an anti-ballistic space to call their own.

You’ll probably never hear anyone name-drop their panic room as the Kensington crew do about their triple-storey basements, but one prime London agent claims nearly every single one of the capital’s mega-homes — the ones five times larger than the average Zoopla listing, found around Hampstead’s The

London Evening Standard / The Interview People

t’s bedtime but Nessa Stein, the businesswoman played

by Maggie Gyllenhaal in the BBC’s political thriller The Honourable Woman, walks past her immaculate pale green bedroom with its plump pillows. She bypasses her 1920s dressing table, pulls on a silk Bodas slip, then swipes her fingers on a monitor to make a false wall open up. It reveals an artificially lit white cubbyhole, where she curls up in bed.

It’s her panic room.

This strange bulletproof cube might seem a fictional idea, yet demand for these so-called safe rooms is soaring in the capital

The secret rooms that the super-wealthy have built to keep them secure in case of an intruder or outside attack

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Special Report Privacy

“The first rule of panic rooms is you don’t talk about your panic room. You don’t advertise it in your house’s particulars, you don’t talk about it on the golf course.”

Image courtesy of Getty Images

Kensington Palace Gardens is one of the most exclusive and secure addresses in the world with multiple security checkpoints on entry

Bishops Avenue and Belgravia’s Eaton Square — hides a panic room within its four walls. That’s despite the average safe room starting at $98,000 and costing as much as $3.27 million. As the agent puts it: “That’s a lot of money for you or me, but if you’re spending $24 million building a house, it’s not.”

The first rule of panic rooms is you don’t talk about your panic room. They’re hidden behind standard-looking doors or bookshelves. They’re never part of the show-off house tour.

“You don’t advertise it in your house’s particulars, you don’t talk about it on the golf course,” says one foreign tycoon living in London, who immediately breaks his own decree by whispering he’s had one installed. “It’s not like the basement swimming pool or the retractable-roof tennis court — it’s low-key, it’s there for the security.”

The billionaire had his panic room built soon after his first child was born — “you want to protect them, y’know?” For most parents, that means splashing out on a top-of-the-range baby monitor. For the super-rich, it’s a concrete bunker with nuclear, biological and chemical attack protection.

There are two types of safe room for the average zillionaire: one is that underground, concrete cell (anti-radiation as standard, but it’s an extra $147,000 for nuclear protection. One developer tells me that’s a far more popular choice in New York than in London). Or there’s the more common anti-intruder panic room. This is the one you might think is a dressing room or bathroom, unaware that the fluffy Roberto Cavalli towels are hanging off ballistic steel wall panels, or that the racks of designer dresses and suits are the architectural equivalent of Superman, a safe room in disguise protecting people from burglars and bombs.

The wealthy spend a lot of money on the room they hope never to have to enter. Tom Gaffney, president of safe-room specialist Gaffco Ballistics, says: “The panic room has the same finish as any other room in the house. Clients aren’t going to go with lino floors when the rest of the house is white quartz — they spend the money.”

Inside, the “most important thing in a panic room is good communication”, says Paul Weldon, founder of The Panic Room Company, the name behind many of London’s safe rooms. “It might be a simple mobile phone or iPad or satellite phone but you need to stay in touch with police or your own security services. The CCTV is linked to the room too, so the occupants know what’s going on outside.”

The priciest panic rooms have their own air supply, a filtration system to keep out poison gases, independent lighting and plumbing systems, heating and an alarm keypad, all powered by a generator, plus emergency food stocks. It’s more war rations than Whole Foods: freeze-dried meals and tinned meat with bottles of water are the norm. The anti-intruder panic rooms beside bedrooms are only designed to protect their occupants until help arrives — up to about an hour — but bunkers can keep them fed and watered for as much as a week. Most US panic rooms host a secret compartment for a gun. In the UK, homeowners are asked to pick their ballistic protection — a wall that will stop a shotgun’s ammunition, or one that will prevent armour-piercing rounds.

The Panic Room Company has seen a 60 per cent surge in demand since December. “I’m building a room for a client who wants to store artwork worth hundreds of millions of pounds in it,” says Weldon. “It’s a vault and panic room — individuals

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Image courtesy of Peter Wintersteller

Special Report Privacy

don’t trust banks as much as they used to and prefer to have the security in their own properties to look after their most valuable items.”

Then there’s the fact that as people get wealthier, “they get more paranoid”, adds Weldon. “They worry about a basic theft turning into something much worse — a panicked burglar who wants money and jewellery finding the occupants in and ending up stabbing or shooting or kidnapping the kids. We advise people to get into their panic room, contact their security and let the intruders ransack the house while they’re safe — that stuff can all be fixed.”

Gaffney says his super-wealthy customers regularly contract “a safe room for every house” — one for London and another for the Hamptons or the Middle East. “Affluent families, the top tier of the business world and celebrities, want a sense of security,” he says. “I’m seeing more and more demand at the moment.” The September 11 terrorist attacks were the first stimulus: before then, his company built 25 safe rooms a year; within 12 months, that shot up to 200. Now it’s a steady 50 panic rooms a year.

In the UK, the Queen led the way, installing panic rooms encased in 18in thick, bullet-resistant, fire-retardant steel walls at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace more than a decade ago. The royal panic rooms are designed to withstand poison gas, bombs or terrorists attacks; they are equipped with secure communications, beds, washing equipment and enough food

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and water for the royals to survive for at least a week. And Kate and William’s royal apartment at Kensington Palace includes a panic room with an air filtration system, guarding against biological warfare, and an escape tunnel.

But locking yourself in a so-called safe room can have the opposite effect. Billionaire banker Edmond Safra died of smoke inhalation in the panic room in his Monaco penthouse after being convinced by his butler that dangerous attackers were waiting for him outside, when the property was in fact on fire.

That has not put off the super-rich or the biggest institutions.

Bullet-proofed “safe” boardrooms are another booming industry: while middle management suits might think there is nothing special about their meeting rooms, many a board has opted to rip out the beige carpet and walls over a weekend, replace them with armoured steel slabs and have it back to normal for Monday. Some panicked high-profile chief executives have paid as much as $16,000 for bullet-resistant podiums, transported to wherever they give speeches.

“Much of the demand comes from foreigners in London,” adds another safe room specialist. “They come from countries in Africa or the Middle East that are very unsafe and here they want the man on the gate, the CCTV, the underground beam detection, the perimeter alarm and the panic room. They don’t realise how safe London is.” And that’s just how the booming panic room industry likes it.

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2014 Sep / Oct

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Special Report Privacy

In plain sight: Frank Ahearn in Times Square, New York 54

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Special Report Privacy

The Right to be Forgotten Known as the digital hitman, Frank Ahearn is hired by the wealthy and famous to make things disappear whether online or through an illusion he creates

By Heba Hashem

rank Ahearn is as close as you can get to disappearing without using illegal documents or fake passports.

Originally an undercover investigator for large corporations, the digital hitman, as he is known, learned about skip tracing – or finding people – from another investigator.

“The idea of picking up the phone and extracting information such as bank, phone and airline records to hunt someone down was fascinating to me,” he says.

As privacy laws changed and made it more difficult to locate such data, Ahearn switched sides and began to help those who needed to disappear. The turning point came by total coincidence when he met a would-be client in a bookstore.

The man, who was looking for books about discretion, offshore banking and living in Costa Rica, proceeded to pay for them with his credit card, a huge red flag that could lead to his whereabouts.

Ahearn casually approached him and explained this, winning his very first client and signalling the start of a lucrative new business.

“It turns out he was a corporate whistleblower and concerned about repercussions,” he tells me from his office in Manhattan during our chat.

Ahearn’s clients come from all walks of life but they are not necessarily criminals or those with a murky past. One of his Middle East clients, for example, was a partner in a business that had fallen on hard times and during that period, his father died, leaving him a significant amount of money.

While his partner assumed he was going to use the money to bail their company out of debt, the client knew it would be a losing situation to put more money into the business. So he felt it was best to close the firm.

Outraged at the decision, the client’s partner became extremely aggressive. “Things started to happen, like his car getting scratched, broken windows at his home and soon it escalated into serious threats. The client felt it was best he disappeared because he believed his ex-business partner would cause him harm.”

While all this trouble was taking place, the client was trying to build an online business and needed to stay in his home city until the project was complete.

Ahearn had him sell his apartment and move into a holiday rental that had all phone, television and utility services in the apartment owner’s name and not the client’s.

Next was moving his internet business offshore to the Bahamas using a bank account that accepted sales in another country. After setting up the company’s contacts through a third party service such as Odesk, the final move was for the client to purchase a new home using a corporation and not his name.

“What is important when someone disappears is to create disinformation. You cannot just disappear, you need to trick the predator,” says Ahearn. This means keeping them busy with false leads. Such tactics, depending on the situation, might include withdrawing money from foreign cash machines while travelling.”

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Special Report Privacy

How to Disappear recently climbed to number four on the New York Times bestsellers’ list for non-fiction e-books

A ruling by the European Court of Justice in May this year over the right to be forgotten, which could be used against search engines such as Google to remove links to documents that contain personal information if requested by that individual, will no doubt make Ahern’s job a lot easier. In the first four days of introducing the online form, Google had received more than 41,000 requests from Europeans who wanted the company to remove their personal information from search results. To date, it has received more than 30 million requests for deletion.

But as the recent ruling came from Europe, it does not apply to the US site, so a determined searcher can still track down details on google.com. While the move was met with strong opposition in Silicon Valley, privacy campaigners are citing the introduction of the ruling in Europe as precedence for it to be extended worldwide.

Ahearn says one of the biggest challenges his clients come to him with today is to reclaim their privacy or combat some kind of digital dilemma like untrue, negative, embarrassing or dangerous information that has surfaced online. “These types of situations need to be strategised and executed meticulously,” he says.

“One such client worked at a private equity firm and one morning he was called into the CEO’s office. The CEO showed him a news article about a Ponzi scheme and the criminal who ran the scheme used my client’s name. The criminal was never

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caught and when my client’s name was typed into a search engine, information about the Ponzi scheme and the company he worked for dominated the internet. This was a serious dilemma for him and his company.

“The company hired someone to do website suppression where they build positive information and try to push down the negative information.

“This was a waste because when the suppression stops, the information rises back up. Plus, if someone searched past page three on a search engine they would discover the Ponzi scheme information. The company called me in to assist with the problem. My suggestion was to create an identity for the criminal and give him an online presence that differentiated him from the client. The company thought it was a pretty strange solution but agreed to trust me.”

Ahearn gave the criminal a background from Zurich, schooled in London and divorced from a woman in Brussels.

“Now if someone searches my client’s name, they would see my client the upstanding citizen and the other person who is a criminal from Zurich. Being able to differentiate from the client and the criminal was the solution.”

Our only tool of privacy, according to Ahearn, is to remove ourselves from direct connection and avoid the physical surveillance that tracks our moves in public. “Disappearing and privacy is more of an art than science.”

Your Ideal Stay at Park Hyatt Istanbul - Maรงka Palas

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War Through a Lens A rare glimpse of the brutal reality of life in a conflict zone by award-winning photojournalist Andrew Parsons

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and a Chinook medical helicopter arrived to evacuate him.

I started to take pictures as he was being operated on in the compound and although the sergeant major asked me to stop, Private Graham asked me to carry on. These photos were the first photos of a British soldier seriously injured in Afghanistan to be made public and went on to win me War Photographer of the Year in Paris and London.�

Andrew Parsons, who is co-owner of i-Images picture agency in London, plans to donate all proceeds from his exhibition Royalty, Politics and War - being held at the Ellwood Atfield Gallery in London until September 5th - to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. To date, he has raised just under $50,000 for the hospital.

See i-images.co for more of his work.

Andrew Parsons

It was 2007 and I had been embedded with a regiment on the frontline in Afghanistan for five weeks. We regularly went out on patrols with but this day was different.

We left at dawn on an operation to flush the Taliban out of their compounds. It was a tense operation. After a couple of hours, I was walking along an irrigation ditch with Private Davey Graham directly in front of me.

Suddenly, we heard shouting in Arabic and the sound of gunfire all around us. I fell to the ground and saw Private Graham being shot in front of me. It was clear that we were completely surrounded and at that moment it felt as though we had no way out.

Somehow, we managed to get Private Graham to a safe compound and by then, soldiers had got through to air support

Soldier Davey Graham, 21, from Nottingham in the UK, wiping his forehead after taking over a Taliban compound in southern Afghanistan before being ambushed by the Taliban

An Iraqi woman who is giving the victory sign with a purple finger indicating she has just voted as she leaves a polling station in the centre of Az Zubayr, southern Iraq

“The adrenaline of conflict photography can be addictive but you have to remain level-headed. You tend to evaluate within 30 seconds whether a situation is hostile and whether it is going to work with you or against you.” — Andrew Parsons

Soldiers from the Worcester and Sherwood Forest Regiment checking their weapons before raiding a compound while searching for the Taliban deep inside the Green zone in Helmand Province

Women being scanned before they enter a polling station in the centre of Az Zubayr, southern Iraq, on election day

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Hamilton Grand overlooks the Old Course at St Andrews

A Grand Home The historic Hamilton Grand has been piquing interest among keen golfers

amilton Grand residential estate sits at the top of the world’s oldest golf course in St Andrews on the Scottish coast.

With the Royal and Ancient Golf Club (R&A) as a neighbour, the architectural prowess of the 19th century Hamilton Grand allows it to dominate the landscape around the Old Course, known as “the home of golf” and a favourite of former US president Bill Clinton.

US billionaire and philanthropist Herb Kohler bought the red stone former hotel in 2009 for more than $18 million and spent another $58 million in refurbishments.

Kohler, who owns the second largest private company in the US, hopes to recoup some of his investment by selling the 26 luxury apartments he converted, ranging in size from 1,133sq ft to 2,780sq ft, to “passionate golfers”.

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However, with prices starting from £1.2m ($2m) to £8m ($13.2m) for the penthouse, which comes with an outdoor terrace and panoramic views of the Old Course, the North Sea and the ancient town of St Andrews, it is little surprise the majority of interest is coming from outside the UK. Investors have the option of buying a fully furnished property or core shell apartment. Renting is also an option in the Victorian building, which has all its original features intact and comes with 24-hour security and butler service.

To date, only five properties have been sold, with the Kohler company setting 2017 as a target for a full house.

The majority of sales so far have come from Scandinavian countries followed by “strong interest” from the US, Germany, Hong Kong and Singapore, according to Hamilton Grand sales director Helen Parker.

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As far as interest from the Middle East goes, Parker points out close ties with the UAE business community. Dubai’s ruling family, the Al Maktoums, own a research facility in Dundee, the prestigious R&A has a member from the Middle East and the owner of Highland Springs water company is a UAE national, while there is a high-profile Middle Eastern student at St Andrews university.

“From this circle, we have had interest,” she says. “We may get a non-golfer buyer as we do well from Middle Eastern visitors in the summer and the wives tend to stay in London while the gentlemen come up here to go shooting and hunting.”

However, to date Parker concedes that with the exception of one buyer, “it’s purely a trophy purchase, “ for passionate golfers.

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Kittitian Hill offers an unrivaled opportunity to savour a truly beautiful place in harmony with the people and land.

All properties are fully managed by Sedona Resorts, the world class resort operator.

Set on a stunning 400 acre hillside, a sustainable luxury development designed by world renowned architect Bill Bensley and built by local craftsmen, with villas, cottages, suites, apartments, spa, organic farm, restaurants, shops, open-air theatre at The Village, and a pioneering 18-hole championship golf course designed by Ian Woosnam.

Every residence has been approved for Citizenship-byInvestment with prices starting from US$405,000.

Owning a property on Kittitian Hill qualifies you to become a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis, and the numerous travel and tax benefits citizenship can offer. “We are unsurpassed in both vision and delivery, with proven asset appreciation. Belle Mont Farm Cottages are sold out, with a selection of suites and apartments remaining in The Village�

Pricing includes elegantly designed furniture, conveyancing and surveying fees, and stamp duty.

The application and purchase process is fast and secure using an international escrow agent.

Each owner receives complimentary membership to the Preferred Residences global exchange programme.

Purchasers can select from guaranteed rental return or shared rental income options.

Authorized by the Government of St. kitts and Nevis as an Approved Project for Citizenship-by-Investment

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kittitianhill.com

“Our cottage owners are reaping the rewards of purchasing on Kittitian Hill�

Belle Mont Farm, our unique boutique hotel on Kittitian Hill officially opens December 2014, and is welcoming discerning guests to embrace our captivating experience.

Cottage owners are reserving personal visits in their properties, tasting the home-grown delicacies in our restaurant and gaining income returns on their property investment.

A collection of one-bedroom guesthouses and large great houses crafted in harmony with the tropical edible landscape, Farm-to-Table fine dining restaurant The Kitchen and The Great House which includes our reception, Mill Bar, Workshop Fitness Centre and resort swimming pool.

All guests will depart with wonderful memories of captivating sunsets, star filled skies, culinary delights and newfound friends.

Welcome to a path less travelled‌Welcome to Kittitian Hill.

Kittitian Hill, St. Kitts, West Indies sales@kittitianhill.com

+1 869 466 1712 (St. Kitts) kittitianhill.com 2014 Sep / Oct

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XXXXX

Caribbean Commune A new resort in the island of St Kitts and Nevis is pushing the boundaries of sustainable living and changing how the wealthy holiday

ourism-based economies have been vulnerable in the past. The tiny Caribbean island of St Kitts and Nevis, however, which had previously been dependent on the sugar industry until 2005, when it failed due to falling profits, is now a blueprint for surrounding Caribbean nations.

A key to its success has been its government-sponsored Citizenship by Investment Program (CBI). Foreign investors and their families can apply for St Kitts and Nevis citizenship, allowing them visa-free travel to more than 120 countries, including Canada and the UK – a golden ticket for Chinese, Middle Eastern or Russian investors.

St Kitts has the longest running and most established of all the CBI programmes worldwide and “has allowed the government to attack growth from several directions,” according to Denzil Douglas, prime minister for St Kitts and Nevis.

It also acts as a blueprint for European countries like Bulgaria,

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Hungary and Cyprus, which have emulated St Kitts model to attract wealthy foreign investors to their shores through Immigrant Investment Programs (IIPs). And closer to home, many neighbouring Caribbean countries have followed suit in a bid to help their ailing economies.

Where the tiny island of St Kitts’ strength lies, though, is not in its sole ability to carve out effective immigrant legislation for the wealthy but its relentless pursuit of sustainable living.

“The best asset of this island is its natural beauty and we want to preserve it,” says Val Kempadoo, a former horticulturist, organic farmer and the property developer behind Kittitian Hill, the focal point of a sustainable living project on the island.

The 162-hectare development has four hotels, an organic farm, an ‘edible’ golf course built on organic farmland, restaurants, spa as well as film studios for the local community.

The Caribbean-born entrepreneur hopes Kittitian Hill will

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become a benchmark of sustainability for other large-scale developments.

“Working with the community is crucial to the Kittitian Hill business model, which has been developed to be economically sustainable and based on fair trade principles, active local recruiting, training and collaboration,” says Kempadoo.

In line with this business model, Kittitian Hill is creating an academy to train locals in hospitality whilst employing local contractors to build the project. That means that the millions of dollars spent on constructing the development are feeding back into the local community and having a direct impact on the local economy.

“We are aspiring to make Kittitian Hill a hub for creative arts for the Caribbean and for the world,” says its creator. To that end, Kittitian Hill has incorporated a film institute, a residency programme for artists and writers throughout the year and will host music, art, culinary and literary festivals for guests and locals in the development’s village, which is due for completion in late 2015.

So will the creative liberal ethos of the resort translate to the clientele?

Kempadoo says he is targeting high-end rather than high volume but is aiming for a less conservative clientele: “Our guests are progressive, edgy, arty - filmmakers and advertising executives. They go to the Tate Modern, eat in farm-to-table restaurants and like art, culture and travel.

“People today are seeking authentic experiences. They do not want to have a holiday which they feel is imposed on a

destination but want to feel integrated and meet the local people.”

That all-round experience goes right through to the menus, where the recently appointed chef Christophe Letard makes the Kittitian Hill organic farm-to-table philosophy a reality.

Spearheading the commitment to a sustainable cuisine where the approach to food is seasonal and local, he will create daily menus with locally and regionally inspired fare, all prepared with fresh ingredients directly foraged from the onsite Belle Mont Farm and seafood sourced from fishermen in the community.

Meanwhile, the spa, which will also open towards the end of next year, is set to become a destination spa in its own right with 16 treatment rooms and four specialist rooms, all designed in vernacular Kittitian style. The spa team is currently researching all the local and regional indigenous treatments in order to offer a menu that is rooted in the history and culture of the area.

For Kempadoo, the real success story will the legacy of Kittitian Hill, which has already attracted attention from other Caribbean governments keen to do similar projects. However, he is mindful it is still in its infancy and has plans for future projects, including Kittitian Hill Institute, a place for aspirational thinkers to gather.

“It is important for St. Kitts to be selective and careful about development and focus on high-end rather than high volume tourism,” he says.

“We designed not just buildings and landscapes, we designed Kittitian Hill to be an experience unlike any other in the world.” www.kittitianhill.com

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Global Citizenship

Russia bans dual citizenship Will it succeed in limiting the flow of Russians seeking a second citizenship or spur demand?

he growing Ukrainian crisis has led to the United States and the European Union toughening their position on Russia and enforcing a number of sanctions on the Russian state and economy. The sanctions directly target Russia’s banking, defence and energy sectors, a move designed to rattle its economy and force cooperation with international organisations hoping to resolve the violence that has lasted throughout the year.

Considering Russia’s energy strength and its close economic ties with several EU powerhouses, this is a bold move that is likely to send reverberations across the global economy. Russia’s response to the sanctions is likely to lead to an energy crisis, in which European states urgently look for alternative suppliers and global oil prices fluctuate. These changes are likely to be mirrored across the GCC, albeit to a lesser degree.

Russia’s economic relations with the UAE are largely centred on the banking and retail sector. The UAE’s Minister of Economy, Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansouri, says that “non-oil trade between the two countries soared by 7.5 per cent in 2013 and registered $897 million… Russian and Emirati businessmen partnered in more than 350 joint ventures in the UAE and more than 40 Russian companies opened representative offices in the country.”

When it comes to business in Russia, the country is controlled by a sector of billionaires who have a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth, controlling 55 per cent of the total riches. Russians are keen to ensure this wealth remains in the country but recent sanctions are driving it away. Last month Russian authorities passed a law requiring all Russians with dual citizenships to declare their documentation to the migration service. Russian media have reported Putin approved the idea but said “not to overdo it”, adding: “We must know and have the legitimate right to know who is living in Russia and what he or she does for a living.”

Despite this latest development, those who are eligible to obtain an alternative residence and citizenship outside Russia are unlikely to be deterred. There are many high profile examples of Russian billionaires moving abroad, with London a preferred destination. And this trend is only going to increase as the sanctions grip the Russian economy tighter.

According to a recent report by international immigrant

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investment firm Arton Capital together with Wealth-X, which surveys the world’s rich, Russians represent six per cent of the demand for second residence and citizenship. Arton Capital estimates the number will double next year. The reasons for exploring this avenue remain specific to the individual but it is likely the creation of robust Immigrant Investor Programs (IIPs) and Citizenship by Investment Programs (CIPs) is what attracts them to consider dual residence and citizenship.

The sanctions imposed on Russia are likely to see it expand its economic interests to emerging markets in a bid to develop deeper foreign and economic policy in the Middle East.

However, in a juxtaposition of interests, wealthy Russians are now far more likely to look for a jurisdiction such as Cyprus, Hungary or Bulgaria, which are among the top destinations for Russians to seek second citizenship. Those countries welcome their investment and offer them stability that the Ukrainian crisis has taken away from their own economy.

This level of instability will remain for the foreseeable future and further sanctions seem inevitable. As a result, and despite heightened scrutiny from the Russian authorities, we will see greater mobility of Russia’s wealthiest individuals.

Image courtesy of Getty Images

By Natalie Sauras

It’s all about access.

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2014 Sep / Oct

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lifestyle

Single Group Slayer

Slayer has been in the business of building high-tech, sleek, custom-made coffee machines since 2008. The Seattle-based manufacturer experiments with materials including leather, cooper and Peruvian wood, resulting in striking bodywork but these machines are also technically brilliant. The new Single Group Slayer offers controllable pressure during extraction and is small enough to sit on a kitchen counter, yet powerful enough to handle the highest demand.

$9,000

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gizmos & gadgets

The Cloud

Designer Richard Clarkson has created a hybrid, known simply as The Cloud, an interactive lamp and speaker system suspended from the ceiling that mimics a thunderstorm in your home. The experimental sound system uses either a remote control or motion sensors to detect when a user is close by and then creates a thunder and lightning show dictated by their movements. Music can be streamed via Bluetooth compatible devices and the cloud can also be dimmed or brightened according to your mood.

$3,360

Fujifilm X30

The Fujifilm X30 replaces the X20 compact camera that was introduced in early 2013. The standout feature of the X30 is that Fuji has introduced a new real-time electronic viewfinder (EVF) that promises a large scene view and automatically adjusts its brightness based on the ambient light levels. However, as the lens, sensor and processing engine of the X30 are the same as the X20, image quality is not expected to change - although the new classic chrome film simulation mode will deliver muted tones and deep colour reproduction for more dramatic images.

$600

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Intelligent Luxury The new Mercedes S65 AMG has all the comfort of a private jet and the firepower of a missile

By Simon De Burton

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icture the scene: you’re enjoying a hot stone massage, the air is filled with the ionised fragrance of your favourite perfume, ambient music surrounds you on all sides and the mood lighting is set well and truly to ‘relax’.

But where are you? In a high-end health spa? Or in the back seat of the earth-shaking road burner that is the Mercedes-Benz S65 AMG, the Affalterbach marque’s ultimate four-door continent crosser?

It could be either, but it’s the latter we’re talking about here and it really does have a ‘hot stone massage’ function built in to the seats, a perfume ioniser in the air conditioned glove box and the most awesome audio this side of the conductor’s rostrum at the Albert Hall.

As any serious petrolhead will know, the letters AMG are reserved for those extra special Benz cars that emerge from the production

line at the firm’s high performance tuning centre, where each engine is lovingly hand-built and signed with pride by whichever individual technician assembles it, exclusively, from start to finish.

And it is those specially prepared engines that are the heart of any AMG and of the S class cars in particular. While they are prodigiously powerful (the V12, 5.4 litre, twin-turbo unit in the S65 produces 630 horsepower) it is the huge amount of torque, or pulling power, that creates that unique AMG feeling of effortless superiority which becomes most apparent when the throttle is floored in a middling gear at low revs - and the previously distant horizon is instantly reeled in towards the windscreen.

Yet an S65 is not just about muscle but about refinement too. In addition to the interior’s aforementioned luxuries, it also features aircraft-style rear seats with reclining backs and fold-out foot rests, interior lighting which can be set to any one of seven different

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The Mercedes-Benz S65 AMG costs $253,200; the S63 AMG, which features a 5.4 litre, V8 bi-turbo engine producing 585 horsepower, costs $187,100. Both cars are electronically limited to a top speed of 155mph.

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colours, an electrically-heated centre console (not often needed in Dubai) and, in addition to the Burmester hi-fi and multimedia interface, full wi-fi capability.

And, while the S65 is undoubtedly a missile in terms of performance, it’s also one of the safest cars on the road thanks to features such as infrared night vision cameras, a jet-style ‘head up’ display, airbag seatbelts and a host of other nannying devices which are designed to prevent hapless drivers from ramming the car in front or weaving from lane to lane. It even has something called magic body control which looks out for upcoming bumps in the road and pre-adjusts the suspension accordingly.

But the most magic thing of all is still the thrust of that AMG engine - and, of course, the symphony of sound that emerges from those twin, rectangular tailpipes when the revs are allowed to rise.

And no hi-fi, even a Burmester one, can hope to compete with that.

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yacht

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yacht

Smooth Operator A sleek, black speedboat fit for a tycoon f Batman had a speedboat, it would probably look something like Crazy Too. In actuality, the motor yacht’s owner is Egyptian businessman and billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who built it as a chase boat for his superyacht. Chase boats, often manned by their own crew, do not live on the main yacht. But this luxuriously appointed vessel would make any person feel at home, masked crusader or otherwise.

The three-cabin layout is masterfully designed by Cristiano Gatto Design. Two guest cabins open onto a salon area with an L-shaped couch and a fully equipped kitchen area complete with a 16-bottle customised wine cellar. Forward holds the luxurious full-beam ensuite master cabin.

Sawiris’ design brief was simple: “I would like a total black look.” From the outside the boat looks like a sliver of obsidian gliding across the water. The black is given some reprieve in the interior with shades of beige upholstery in natural linen, chenille and leather.

With many of the amenities of a superyacht, the boat is perfect for a weekend cruise. The internal fixtures sport a bright black mirror finish, while the bathroom showers are tiled with multi-coloured mosaic and the sinks are composed of black glass.

The custom built sound system on board Crazy Too is extraordinary. It delivers impressive power that is difficult to find on boats of this size and everything is managed by iPhone and mini iPads.

The cockpit has six Revel speakers driven by a fully scalable audio distribution system that delivers high output sound quality with 400W per channel. Below, the salon and master cabin have full surround sound, high definition cinema systems. A M7 satellite dome allows the guests to watch prime television from satellites worldwide, including the UK, Europe and Egypt.

Internet access is served by a dual connection 4G router allowing movement from one country to another without swapping SIM cards or changing the unit’s configuration.

To suit the wide cruising range and the experienced crew on board, the navigational software gives professional route planning and target tracking features typically only found on commercial vessels.

An approved daylight view panel computer guarantees the availability of essential information to the captain day and night. The high-speed radar antenna ensures targets do not pass unnoticed at high cruising speeds.

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art

Magic Carpet Childhood playfulness led Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed to reinvent the traditional carpet

hen eight-year-old Faig Ahmed decided to cut up his grandmother’s traditional Azeri carpet, she was livid.

Bored by its conventional interlocking shapes, he decided he could improve it and chopped it into pieces to rearrange the design.

While his family was less than impressed, the early childhood experience proved to be a seminal moment for the Azerbaijani sculptor and artist.

After graduating from the sculpture department of the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art, Ahmed, now 32, went on to work in several mediums, including painting, video and installation. He has been experimenting with carpets for seven years.

Growing up in Baku, Ahmed observed that carpets were one of the most impregnable, unchangeable representations of the Orient. His current work transforms the carpet from a passive object in a room to something provocative.

“Before I tampered with the medium, carpets were perfect,” he says. “They could be absorbed by the interior and they were symbols of comfort and cosiness. After I changed them, they can no longer be absorbed by the interior. They make people think [and make them] not feel comfortable in their presence. Maybe they can even be aggressive.”

Liquid, Faig Ahmed, 2014

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Image Courtesy of Cuadro Gallery

By Nausheen Noor

art

In one piece, entitled Shift, a carpet is tilted at a 45-degree angle and pierced through with spikes. In another, a rug hung on the wall melts onto the floor in pools of coloured thread. In Cone, a traditional geometrical shape is taken from the pattern of the carpet, rendered three-dimensionally, and then superimposed onto carpet.

The juxtaposition of the geometrical form is shockingly alien even though it is one of the carpet’s intrinsic forms.

The carpets are made from naturally dyed silk or wool from Iran. Ahmed employs female weavers from Azeri villages who follow the same techniques as they have for generations. He only changes the concept and design of the carpet. Depending on the complexity of the design, these pieces can take anywhere from two months to a year to complete.

“Subconsciously people want to rely on something really old, to see their roots, and that’s why they’re choosing a traditional carpet. In the same way religion is connecting different types of people from different countries, the carpet is connecting people from this region, this country. I think people who like my work want to feel like there should be a change. They want big changes to happen in their lives,” he says.

Faig Ahmed’s solo exhibition will be at the Cuadro Gallery, DIFC from September 16th to November 30th

Simurgh, Faig Ahmed, 2014

Cone, Faig Ahmed, 2014

Shift, Faig Ahmed, 2014.

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hotels

OLD SOUL Not just a place to rest for the night, these historic hotels are a step back in time

The Savoy London The Savoy opened in 1889 and since then, a host of celebrities, artists, royalty and politicians have roamed these storied halls.

It is where Claude Monet painted his series of the Thames and its bridges, Marilyn Monroe received fittings for the movie The Prince and the Showgirl and Winston Churchill founded his private dining club. The hotel reopened in 2010 after a massive three-year renovation project costing $370 million to restore the property to its Edwardian and art deco splendour.

The history of this hotel is so intrinsic to its character that it employs a full-time archivist and even boasts an in-house museum. Although the view from the suites has changed somewhat over the years, one look at the Thames, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye still leaves hotel guests in awe.

Junior suites from $1,200 per night +44 20 7836 4343

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The Grand Hotel Tremezzo Lake Como, Italy The Grand Hotel Tremezzo is an archetypal Italian hotel; waiters wear pristine white coats with gold buttons at breakfast, which are exchanged in the evening for black variations, paired with slicked-back hair and a charming manner. The century old belle epoque-style hotel has 100 windows offering a glimpse of the prime attraction, Lago di Como, hemmed in on both sides by the steep verdant mountains of the Rhaetian Alps, just a stone’s throw from the Swiss border. The hotel has its own private Venetian

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boat for hire. Guests can take in the nearby sights, including Villa Balbianello, where scenes from Star Wars and Casino Royale were filmed, or lounge in the floating pool in the lake. Three restaurants serve upscale Italian fare and a decorative cocktail and wine bar help guests savour the views.

Starting rate $690 per night +39 0344 42491

Shangri-la PARIS Well-heeled travellers are transported back in time upon entering this iconic building that once was home to Napoleon.

The palace’s façade is inspired by the style of Louis XIV with intricate masonry of stone from L’Oise, handcrafted by the same sculptors that crafted the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace. Since acquiring the property in 2006, Shangri-La has preserved the 114-year-old building by registering the 19th century architectural gem with Monuments Historiques in Paris and maintains the original state of the residence during renovations. With 101 rooms and suits, three restaurants, two of which are Michelin-starred, guests are treated to an authentic Parisian ambiance in the 16th arrondissement overlooking the Eiffel tower.

Starting rate $860 per night phone number +33 1 5367 1964

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dining

Take me out The best in dining within the comfort of your home

Sushi Art Famed chef Joel Robuchon’s 12 restaurants have amassed 28 Michelin stars, more than any other chef in the world.

It is rare that a chef of his calibre would collaborate on a takeaway menu but Sushi Art is no ordinary restaurant.

This establishment aims to provide quality sushi that can be enjoyed at home. The Joel Rubuchon box provides a sampling of the culinary master’s creativity using ingredients that are unusual for sushi, such as kiwi, basil and mango.

The seared scallop nigiri is sublime. The charred exterior provides a smoky nuance to the silken scallop underneath while the miso saikyo lends a touch of umami.

Order online at www.sushiart.ae or call 800 220

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dining

S’wich A passion project launched by longtime friends and former bankers, Bader al Kalooti and Fadel Belmahdi, this eatery dishes out gourmet shawarmas from Dubai Marina. The duo spent months developing the recipes to deliver elevated sandwiches that also happen to be healthy. With over 50 choices of meat, toppings and sauces, there are enough permutations and combinations to suit anyone’s taste. The menu also includes health side dishes such as a clementine salad and quinoa fattoush. Try the roasted duck with garlic and fig jam. The combination is reminiscent of fine duck rillettes topped with sweet and savoury compote, but in a convenient, portable form.

Order online at www.myswich.com or call 800 79424

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Book before

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Summit

Boutique Kitchen Hong Kong 2014

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

Honourable Dr. Denzil L. Douglas Prime Minister of St Kitts and Nevis

Hon. Sergio Marchi Former Minister of Citizenship & Immigration Canada

Richard Kurland Attorney Kurland, Tobe Immigration Law Firm

friends who grew up in the United States and after relocating to Dubai, became nostalgic for classic, American diner food. However, this location serves much more than that.

It throws in some classic southern dishes and each item is made by hand. If late-night fried chicken is your weakness, this crumb-battered version should guarantee you never look elsewhere again. The side dishes, such as battered onions or sweet potato fries, arrive still crispy and hot. All the desserts are made by the same supplier to The Cheesecake Factory. The adorably packaged single serving red velvet cupcake makes the perfect sweet ending.

Hon. Tuariki Delamere Former Minister of For delivery Immigration New Zealand

Jean-Francois Harvey Managing Partner Harvey Law Group

Vitor Sereno Consul-General

call 04 Consulate 388 3549General of

Portugal to Macao and Hong Kong

Larry Wang Founder Well Trend United

Jonathan Cardona CEO International Investor Program of Malta

Bernard Wolfsdorf Managing Partner Wolfsdorf Rosenthal

Limited complimentary passes available for immigration agents and private bankers!

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• Expanded exhibition showcasing the leading investment immigration opportunities the world has to offer • Huge range of topics, with over 30 + countries’ investment immigration programmes covered in the conference • Greater focus on networking with all-new networking opportunities to bring together developers, governments and immigration agents from around the world

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KEYNOTE KEYNOTE KEYNOTE SPEAKERS SPEAKERS SPEAKERS INCLUDE: INCLUDE: INCLUDE:

Honourable Dr. Dr.Dr. Honourable Honourable Denzil L. Douglas Denzil Denzil L. L. Douglas Douglas PrimePrime Minister of St of of Prime Minister Minister St St Kitts Kitts and Nevis Kitts and and Nevis Nevis

Hon. Hon. Sergio Marchi Hon. Sergio Sergio Marchi Marchi Former Minister of Former Former Minister Minister of of Citizenship & Immigration Citizenship Citizenship & Immigration & Immigration Canada Canada Canada

Richard Richard Richard Kurland Kurland Kurland Attorney Attorney Attorney Kurland, Kurland, Kurland, Tobe Tobe Tobe Immigration Immigration Immigration Law Firm Law Law Firm Firm

Hon. Tuariki Delamere Hon. Hon. Tuariki Tuariki Delamere Delamere Former Minister of Former Former Minister Minister of of Immigration Immigration Immigration New Zealand New New Zealand Zealand

Jean-Francois Jean-Francois Jean-Francois Harvey Harvey Harvey Managing Managing Managing Partner Partner Partner Harvey Law Group Harvey Harvey Law Law Group Group

Vitor Vitor Sereno Vitor Sereno Sereno Consul-General Consul-General Consul-General Consulate General of of of Consulate Consulate General General Portugal to Macao and Portugal Portugal to to Macao Macao and and HongHong Kong Hong Kong Kong

LarryLarry Wang Larry Wang Wang Founder Founder Founder Well Trend Well Well Trend United Trend United United

Jonathan Cardona Jonathan Jonathan Cardona Cardona CEO CEO CEO International Investor International International Investor Investor Program of Malta Program Program of of Malta Malta

Bernard Bernard Bernard Wolfsdorf Wolfsdorf Wolfsdorf Managing Managing Managing Partner Partner Partner Wolfsdorf Rosenthal Wolfsdorf Wolfsdorf Rosenthal Rosenthal

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2014?

• Over • •Over 250+ Over 250+ executives 250+ executives executives fromfrom the from immigration the the immigration immigration industry industry industry in China in in China China and and the and world, the the world, world, including including including moremore immigration more immigration immigration agents agents agents and and advisors and advisors advisors to HNWI to to HNWI HNWI thanthan ever than ever before! ever before! before!

• Over • •Over 30+ Over 30+ speakers, 30+ speakers, speakers, including including including Former Former Former and Current and and Current Current Immigration Immigration Immigration Ministers, Ministers, Ministers, Government Government Government Officials, Officials, Officials, Leading Leading Leading Immigration Immigration Immigration Experts Experts Experts and more! and and more! more!

• Expanded • •Expanded Expanded exhibition exhibition exhibition showcasing showcasing showcasing the leading the the leading leading investment investment investment immigration immigration immigration opportunities opportunities opportunities the world the the world has world to has has offer to to offer offer • Huge • •Huge range Huge range range of topics, ofof topics, topics, with with over with over 30 over +30 countries’ 30 ++ countries’ countries’ investment investment investment immigration immigration immigration programmes programmes programmes covered covered covered in the inconference in the the conference conference • Greater • •Greater Greater focusfocus on focus networking onon networking networking with with all-new with all-new all-new networking networking networking opportunities opportunities opportunities to bring to to bring together bring together together developers, developers, developers, governments governments governments and and immigration and immigration immigration agents agents agents fromfrom around from around around the world the the world world Diamond Diamond Diamond Sponsor Sponsor Sponsor

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Silver Sponsors Silver Silver Sponsors Sponsors

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little black book

Little Black Book Paris Jeremy Hackett is the chairman and co-founder of Hackett, the gentlemen’s outfitters. He dedicates his spare time to interiors.

Paris is one of his favourite places to browse markets looking for vintage pieces to decorate his home or to wander through streets making new discoveries.

One day when walking down Rue de Courcelles I chanced upon a most eccentric building that looked like a Chinese pagoda. It turned out to be Gallerie CT Loo et Cie, which houses the largest collection of Asian art in Europe.

Culture attack The Carnavalet Museum is dedicated to the history of Paris. I like photography and am drawn to the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Atget.

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People watching Place des Vosges is the most beau tiful square in Paris and perfectly sym metrical.

I sometimes go there for dinner.

Images courtesy of Corbis / ArabianEye.com

Fascinating find

little black book

Book browsing I adore the book stalls that line the left bank of the river Seine. I am particularly fond of the cream and red book jackets of old French books. Although I can’t read them, I find them very attractive.

Coffee break the Cafe One of the first cafes I ever went to was bustling the like I Flore on Boulevard St Germain. and cups e coffe d mme atmosphere, the monogra ay ingw Hem st Erne by d ente the fact it was frequ and Scott Fitzgerald.

Treasure hunt

Image courtesy of Getty Images

I often go to the antique markets.

The one in Porte de Clignancourt is said to be the largest market in the world. I once bought a wonderful large glass-framed 1920s mirror that came from a cafe. On another visit I found a 1960s Pierre Cardin mannequin that now stands in my hallway.

I first went to Paris in June 1968, a month after the student riots. I stayed with family friends on Boulevard St Michel and ever since, I have been drawn to the Left Bank. I like the bohemian atmosphere, the restaurants and antique shops.

Rise and shine Before we moved our shop from Rue de Sevres, I would regularly have breakfast next door to our shop. The owners were always welcoming. I would sit outside with a large cafe creme and dip a buttered tartine in it. They sold Cuban cigars there so I would have my first cigar of the day, a small Hoyo de Monterrey.

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DESIGN

Gilded Stage Adding a touch of gold is an unabashedly glamorous and modern way to brighten an interior

Candle holders, Armani Casa, $2,135

Caracole side table, Bloomingdale’s Home, $1,075

Gold screen, Nakkash Gallery, $23,140 88

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DESIGN

Wishbone sculpture, gold leaf and white marble, Nakkash Gallery, $272

Flight sculpture, Michael Aram, Aati $4,818 Arteriors home screen, Bloomingdale’s Home, $1,300

Armchair, $1,905 and arbor etagere, brass and white marble, Nakkash Gallery, $4,000

Velvet sofa, $17,110 and Eden series module tables, set of seven, Nakkash Gallery, $32,669

2014 Sep / Oct

89

Travel

The Fabulous Land Georgia, a country with a rich and complicated history and arresting natural beauty

By Nausheen Noor

country has tried to move past its violent history, look westward and develop its tourism potential.

Travellers who venture here will not be disappointed. Outdoor enthusiasts will delight in the numerous hiking, walking, horse and mountain biking routes that snake through this picturesque country. Summers give the opportunity for paragliding and white water rafting and in the winter, ski resorts proliferate the Caucasus.

Georgians are warm and welcoming. Local wine is abundant (some historians consider this the birthplace of wine) and tables are laden with food that is sublime - grilled river fish, dumplings of ground meat seasoned with spices and khachapuri - ovenbaked bread topped with oozing mountain cheeses. You can forego restaurants for an extraordinary food experience as the roadsides are full of women selling dried fruit, wild honey and freshly plucked fruit.

The landscape is breathtaking. In the summertime, the lush hills of the Caucasus are carpeted in moss, green grass and wildflowers, their scent lingering in the air. The mountains have deep cleaves running through them, as if a deity has run fingers up the terrain, creating shimmering waterfalls, brooks and pools of celadon. There are intermittent signs of human existence in this otherworldly land with remotely perched medieval monasteries.

These images will remain in your consciousness long after you have left.

courtesy Corbis / ArabianEye.com Image Images courtesy of GettyofImages

efore becoming independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, Georgia had a long and rich history that was strongly entwined with its neighbours - Russia to the north, Persia to the southeast and Turkey to the west. This melange of influences, a collision of Europe and Asia, is reflected in the country’s unique architecture, art and food. But Georgia’s most valuable asset is its natural landscape, a terrain with such striking beauty, it is easily one of the most gorgeous places on earth.

Georgia’s deeply complicated history is full of contradictions.

Over the centuries, it has been ruled by empires of the Mongols, Persians and Arabs but the spoken ancient Kartvelian language has obscure roots and is related to no other on the planet. In the past century, it was a favourite holiday destination for the Russian elite, attracting artists and writers. The poet Alexander Pushkin called it “the fabulous land”. But it is also the birthplace of the dictator Josef Stalin, the country’s most notorious son.

Post-independence, Georgia underwent a period of corruption and economic stagnation. Due to severe electricity shortages, the country spent much of the 1990s in darkness. President Eduard Shevardnadze (also the former Soviet foreign affairs minister), was ousted in 2003 with the Rose Revolution, when there was a change of government, but internal strife continued with the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, resulting in a brief, disastrous war with Russia in 2008. In recent years the

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Images courtesy of Corbis / ArabianEye.com

Travel

Where to Go

Kakheti

Svaneti

Tbilisi

Batumi

The capital is a city full of hints of its past as a Eurasian crossroad. Winding lanes, old houses with balconies, stone churches and numerous bars and cafes teem with people.

The city is paving its way into the future with many prestigious building projects including five-star hotels, shopping malls and leisure facilities.

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A remote, isolated medieval region in the high Caucasus that has resisted outside influences, with residents retaining their traditional way of life. The region is rich in church art with many of the tiny village churches boasting frescoes 1,000 years old.

Some regard Svaneti as the most authentic part of the country.

A semi-tropical town on the Black Sea coastline filled with holidaymakers and buzzing with a party atmosphere during the summer. Batumi, with its charming fin-de-siecle architecture, developed in the late 19th century as the western station of a railway.

Image courtesy of Getty Images

This is Georgia’s prime wine-growing region with lots of vineyards to visit, some even with overnight stays. Every village grows its own variety of grape. Once an independent kingdom, you’ll find splendid examples of medieval architecture in the region’s churches, mansions and castles. The harvest season, in September or October, is accompanied by many feasts, celebrations and festivals.

Travel

Where to stay

Rooms Hotel

Hotel Kabadoni

The sleek hotel, a striking structure of wood, glass and steel, features 156 rooms, all with views across the dramatic Caucasus mountain range with peaks that reach 5,000m. Relax in the cosy bar with its own fireplace or the sweeping sun terrace that provides a magnificent vantage point to soak in the rugged surroundings.

Some say this is the region where wine was invented. The rooftop terrace commands spectacular views of the Alazani valley. The restaurant specialises in European and Georgian fusion dishes and boasts a superb Georgian wine list. The hotel organises tasting trips to nearby vineyards.

From $115 per night 1 Tamar Mepe Street, Sighnaghi +995 32 224 0400

From $105 per night 1 V Gorgasali street, Stepantsminda +995 32 271 0099

Citadel Narikala

Perched atop the old town of Tbilisi, this hotel is located just below the city’s landmark, the Narikala fortress.

With modern amenities in a medieval setting, there is even a small museum in the lobby where you can find archaeological artefacts unearthed during the construction of the hotel. from $250 per night 20 J Ajiashvili Street, Tbilisi +995 32 290 4141

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fashion

peacock plumage Add a touch of flamboyance to sombre attire with some nifty tailoring

Gossip cufflinks, Monsieurfox.com $275

Wool blazer, Alexander McQueen, Bloomingdale’s Dubai $2,028

Gucci / 2014

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Crocodile loafers, Dolce & Gabbana, Dubai Mall $7,500

Interaccio leather backpack, Bottega Veneta, Mall of the Emirates, $3,016

Images courtesy of Corbis / ArabianEye.com

Briefcase, Dolce & Gabbana, Dubai Mall $2,218

fashion

Gold playing card cufflinks, Foundwell, MrPorter.com, $8,438

Leather belts, Versace, Dubai Mall, $525 - $675

Waffle knit cashmere cardigan, Doriani, MrPorter.com, $963

Leather biker jacket, Balmain, Galeries Lafayette Dubai Mall, $4,622

Cabaret dancer pocket square, Monsieurfox. com, $85

Salvatore Ferragamo 2014

Sandals, Versace, Dubai Mall, $595 - $1,125

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95

horology

The Beauty in the Beast Invented over 200 years ago by the founder of Breguet, the tourbillion is the reason why most mechanical watches are so expensive.

Here are three that are rather impressive

Breguet Tourbillon Messidor

The Breguet Classique Tourbillon Messidor design salutes the master’s ingenious invention which he patented, according to the French revolutionary calendar, on 7 Messidor Year IX (June 26, 1801). Driven by a hand-wound movement and lodged in a spacious looking carriage, this uncluttered tourbillon design adds to its distinctive character. Its trim design features curving, swirling bridges and bars that add an unexpected look to the composition. Its discreet sapphire crystal stresses the entire design’s airy construction, providing a transparent background for the steady pace Starting at $153,684

Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar Handwerkskunst

IWC Portugese Siderale Scafusia

It took a team at IWC 10 years to develop this complex masterpiece, which is made to order on special request. The dial features a constant-force tourbillon together with displays for the 96-hour power reserve and the third dial dictates sidereal time, used by astronomers to calculate the position of stars. The reverse reveals an extravagant display. It shows a section of night sky, tailored to your location. The outer dials feature a calendar and an engraved circle representing the horizon as seen from your location (in yellow).

Starting at $750,000

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The Handwerkskunst is limited to 15 watches in platinum cases with a solid white-gold dial. It is generously decorated with tremblage and a manually executed, remarkable threedimensional relief engraving. The handpainted numerals of the characteristic outsize date are noteworthy as well.

Inside the movement, the tourbillon and intermediate wheel cocks as well as the rotor, are hand-engraved. The three segments of the three-quarter plate are decorated with solarisation.

Starting at $357,700

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Our quest for perfection.

Senator Chronograph

Senator Chronograph. Start. Stop. Fly-Back. Central stop seconds hand, 30 minute and 12 hour counters with flyback mechanism; small seconds counter; and Glashßtte Original’s compelling Panorama Date display. Featuring an exceptional 70 hour power reserve, this new masterpiece makes time a true pleasure.

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