Working the Middle East, based in London
There are still plenty of Middle East-focused staff who are based elsewhere and fly in and out for meetings.
When JPMorgan appointed a new telecoms, media and technology banker to cover the Middle East last month, it did so despite lacking an established investment banking presence outside Saudi Arabia. Mehmet Abbasoglu, a one-time head of investment banking at Merrill Lynch in Turkey, will be based in London and join a long tradition of 'carpet-baggers' - overseas bankers who nip in and out as convenient.
Although plenty of banks have flocked to the Middle East and banks such as ABN AMRO are reportedly planning to double the number of staff they have on the ground (according to Reuters), many still lack a local presence in region, preferring to serve it out of London.
It's a trend that local luminaries are keen to discourage. At a recent City and Gulf Cooperation Council conference in London, Philip Thorpe, chief executive at the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority, said business should increasingly be done within the region itself: "There's a desire for the intellectual capacity to be on the ground and for the balance sheet to be on the ground. We're very used to having people flying in and out."
Thomas Kelly, director and head of asset management at Taib Bank in Bahrain, argued that carpet-bagging is increasingly anachronistic: "There used to be a perception that people could fly in to the Gulf [to do business] and then fly back again," he said, adding that the region needed to do more to attract staff from Europe to live and work there. "The Gulf is a safe and decent environment."
Jennifer Westall, a lawyer at Eversheds who recently shifted her family to Qatar after the law firm opened an office there, said an office on the ground is becoming increasingly imperative: "You need to understand the culture and the people you're doing business with."
