A fire broke out at a building in a busy area of Abu Dhabi on Sunday.
Black smoke emerged from a nine-storey building on Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Street shortly before 2pm as firefighters rushed to the scene to extinguish the blaze.
The fire is understood to have begun in Sahil Almadina Restaurant before spreading to the first-floor balcony.
Videos posted online showed a small explosion coming from the first-floor balcony above the restaurant after the fire had started.
The ground floor of the building is occupied by small businesses while residents live on the floors above.
Witnesses who gathered to watch said the building was evacuated by the watchman, Abdulshareef Pachandara, who also called police.
Abu Dhabi Civil Defence were on site tackling the blaze within minutes of smoke rising, they said.
It was extinguished and the site had cooled by about 3.30pm. The fast action prevented the fire from spreading to a neighbouring Baqala grocery store, they said.
The fire left the facade of the building blackened by smoke and caused considerable damage to the restaurant. A fenced-off area attached to the restaurant was also damaged and a water tank inside it was punctured.
Mr Pachandara, 38, said he was alerted to the fire by passers-by who spotted the smoke coming from near the restaurant’s water tank.
The watchman of Al Musallam Jafna Alamari building, from India, said he called police and ran upstairs to tell the residents to leave their flats. Each of the nine floors contains four flats.
“Everybody went down immediately,” he said.
“There were no injuries at all. I don’t know how fire started.”
Abdullah Ali, 36, a builder from Egypt, who lives in one of the apartments, said he was on the phone to his children back home when he heard the sound of a pipe collapsing.
“We went down and found the world upside down.”
He said the smoke was worse than the fire itself.
“We opened the door of the grocery store behind the restaurant to let the smoke out. There were no casualties there, just smoke.”
Mr Ali said Civil Defence were on the scene in minutes and put the fire out quickly.
“By the time we came down, police and firefighters were already here,” he said.
His home was not affected by the fire.
It was the second fire in a residential building in Abu Dhabi over the past three days.
On Friday night, residents in Al Nahyan area reported hearing a loud bang followed by sirens as firefighters reported to the scene to extinguish the fire.
The 12-storey building was evacuated after police arrived and Civil Defence managed to prevent the fire from spreading to neighbouring buildings.
Police said residents who suffered smoke inhalation were taken to hospital.
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Ziina users can donate to relief efforts in Beirut
Ziina users will be able to use the app to help relief efforts in Beirut, which has been left reeling after an August blast caused an estimated $15 billion in damage and left thousands homeless. Ziina has partnered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to raise money for the Lebanese capital, co-founder Faisal Toukan says. “As of October 1, the UNHCR has the first certified badge on Ziina and is automatically part of user's top friends' list during this campaign. Users can now donate any amount to the Beirut relief with two clicks. The money raised will go towards rebuilding houses for the families that were impacted by the explosion.”
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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In 2013, The National's History Project went beyond the walls to see what life was like living in Abu Dhabi's fabled fort:
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Gertrude Bell's life in focus
A feature film
At one point, two feature films were in the works, but only German director Werner Herzog’s project starring Nicole Kidman would be made. While there were high hopes he would do a worthy job of directing the biopic, when Queen of the Desert arrived in 2015 it was a disappointment. Critics panned the film, in which Herzog largely glossed over Bell’s political work in favour of her ill-fated romances.
A documentary
A project that did do justice to Bell arrived the next year: Sabine Krayenbuhl and Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Gertrude Bell. Drawing on more than 1,000 pieces of archival footage, 1,700 documents and 1,600 letters, the filmmakers painstakingly pieced together a compelling narrative that managed to convey both the depth of Bell’s experience and her tortured love life.
Books, letters and archives
Two biographies have been written about Bell, and both are worth reading: Georgina Howell’s 2006 book Queen of the Desert and Janet Wallach’s 1996 effort Desert Queen. Bell published several books documenting her travels and there are also several volumes of her letters, although they are hard to find in print. Original documents are housed at the Gertrude Bell Archive at the University of Newcastle, which has an online catalogue.
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One-day internationals: 31 matches, 35 wickets, average 31.4, economy rate 3.95
T20 internationals: 41 matches, 29 wickets, average 30.3, economy rate 6.28
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Based: Riyadh
Offices: UAE, Vietnam and Germany
Founded: September, 2020
Number of employees: 70
Sector: FinTech, online payment solutions
Funding to date: $116m in two funding rounds
Investors: Checkout.com, Impact46, Vision Ventures, Wealth Well, Seedra, Khwarizmi, Hala Ventures, Nama Ventures and family offices
The specs
Engine: 1.5-litre turbo
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