Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum: The Man Who Built Dubai, and the Court Findings

Two things are true about Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and most accounts of his life pick one.

The first is that he is the principal architect of modern Dubai, a city that in his lifetime went from a trading port with a creek to a global hub with an airline, a financial district and a skyline recognisable from a silhouette.

The second is that the English High Court has made findings against him of a gravity rarely attached to a serving head of government.

The City

He became ruler on 4 January 2006, on the death of his brother Maktoum, but he had been driving Dubai’s development long before the title arrived, as crown prince and defence minister from the 1990s.

The strategy was unusual for the Gulf: build for a future in which the oil runs out. Dubai’s hydrocarbon reserves were always modest compared with Abu Dhabi’s, and the response was to construct an economy around logistics, aviation, tourism, property and financial services. Emirates airline, the Jebel Ali port complex and the free-zone model all belong to that programme.

He also writes. Published poetry in the Nabati tradition is a genuine part of his public identity rather than a decorative detail, and it sits alongside Godolphin, the thoroughbred operation he founded in 1992 and named after one of the three foundation stallions of the modern breed.

The Court Findings

In 2020 the High Court in London ruled on a set of fact-finding applications brought during proceedings with his former wife, Princess Haya bint Hussein.

The court found that he had ordered the abduction and forcible return to Dubai of two of his daughters, Shamsa and Latifa, and that he had conducted a campaign of intimidation against Princess Haya. Amnesty International responded to the judgment directly. In 2021 the court made a further finding that he had authorised the hacking of Princess Haya’s phone, along with those of her lawyers and security staff, using Pegasus spyware developed by the NSO Group, reporting confirmed by the Washington Post.

In December 2021 the court ordered a financial settlement reported at roughly £550 million, among the largest ever made in England.

He has denied the allegations. He did not participate in parts of the proceedings, and issued statements saying the case concerned a private family matter and that he had not been able to put his case before the court.

Holding Both

These are findings of a British court in civil proceedings, not criminal convictions, and that distinction is worth stating plainly rather than blurring in either direction.

It is also not possible to write an accurate life of this man while omitting them. The same period that produced the towers and the airline produced the judgments, and a biography that reports only the construction is not a biography. It is a brochure.