Towering wealth

Why Dubai is so popular with the rich and ambitious

- Phillip Inman

Aidan Doyle was an estate agent in Liverpool before he decamped to Dubai and turned a £30,000 income into £500,000 a year and climbing.

Acting as an agent for buyers and sellers, Doyle's commission has soared beyond anything he could generate in the UK after just three years in the city, one of seven city-states in the United Arab Emirates.

Dubai is becoming a significant threat to the US and Europe as a destination for bankers, hedge fund managers, lawyers and accountants. Its lure is so potent that the city, on the eastern side of the Arabian peninsula, attracts young entrepreneurs, such as Doyle, as well as more established figures. They benefit from ultramodern facilities, such as 5G and state-of-the-art hospitals, to register their businesses, buy vast live-work spaces and trade worldwide.

Last year, the billionaire steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal joined a long procession of wealthy incomers after saying he was quitting Britain in protest at Labour's abolition of non-dom status - an arrangement that allowed him to keep his wealth offshore, free of UK tax. Mittal, 75, who bought a palatial home in a gated community known as the "Beverly Hills of Dubai", was recently joined by Mukesh Ambani, often called Asia's richest person.

Ambani bought one of Dubai's most expensive homes on the beachfront estate of Palm Jumeirah. It has 10 bedrooms, Italian marble, a 70-metre private beach, and set him back $163m (£120m). As one local real estate consultant posted on TikTok: "This isn't a home - it's a statement."