Freshfields’ email blunder: Orientalism with a Bloomberg terminal

A couple of weeks ago, Freshfields found itself apologizing “unreservedly” for an email in which Ethan Klingsberg, co-head of its US corporate practice, told global managing partner Alan Mason that a spinout of the firm’s legal AI unit should just go to “sophisticated investors that are respected by the rest of the investor community for their leadership,” which “probably” ruled out “Middle Eastern sovereign wealth money.” Mason forwarded the thread to the entire firm by mistake and the screenshots reached the Financial Times.

In February, Klingsberg personally led the Freshfields team advising a Mubadala-led consortium on the USD 6.2 bn take-private of Clear Channel Outdoor. Eight months later he was explaining, in writing, why Mubadala’s money is not the kind you want on your own cap table. Good enough to bill, not respected enough to be seen with.

On its own, it might be a small story driven by fat fingers and errors in judgment that most certainly don’t represent organizations, and definitely carry the best of intentions. But poet Maya Angelou, an erstwhile Cairo resident, had the rule for it. When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Klingsberg was being candid about how much of the Western financial establishment actually thinks about this region. His candor is the point, and it’s not even about him or Freshfields. It just reeks of the normalized disdain for the region, its people, their role, and contributions that have persisted for decades and that a certain echelon of foreign lawyers, wealth managers, consultants, and bankers seem to have not shaken off yet.

It is Edward Said’s Orientalism with a Bloomberg terminal: The region as a resource to be managed rather than an actor to be reckoned with. It is Aaron David Miller recycling Tahseen Bashir’s “tribes with flags” line for Foreign Policy in 2013, which Issandr El Amrani took apart at the time (“it can’t be ignorance that’s the problem here, it’s arrogance”). It is Thomas Friedman’s taxi driver, who has been explaining the Arab world to New York Times readers for three decades without ever getting a byline –– not that Friedman has ever had an original idea about our region either. And all the facile caricatures we’ve had to endure from navel gazers who tell us they try really hard to make the world a better place.

But while this worldview looks like it has not moved enough in the thirteen years since that piece, the numbers and facts on the ground have. This demands respect, shown in the open rather than professed after a leak, and it affords us the luxury of choosing who we let in on the growth of the region every one of them is trying to get into.

Look, facts don’t lie. Doha has closed more peace agreements in the past decade than Geneva, and paid for it in cash and, last September, in airstrikes. The US-Taliban deal, the Chad national dialogue, both 2025 Gaza ceasefires, the DRC-M23 framework and the US-Iran prisoner swap all ran through Doha. Geneva hosted the Syria rounds where the UN’s own envoy conceded a “golden opportunity” had been missed and the Sudan talks the Sudanese army did not bother attending.

Oman raised more from IPOs in 2024 than London. OQEP’s USD 2 bn listing alone was about twice the USD 1 bn that every company listing in London raised that year combined. By the end of August 2025, London’s main market had seen three IPOs raise USD 208 mn, its weakest run in three decades. Asyad Shipping raised more than that in Muscat in one listing that March.

Abu Dhabi’s three sovereign funds manage about USD 1.7 tn, nearly as much as every German company put together has invested abroad in the entire history of the Federal Republic. Mubadala alone was the world’s biggest-spending sovereign investor in 2024, at USD 29.2 bn. Frankfurt, meanwhile, sits in an economy that shrank in 2023, shrank again in 2024 and grew 0.2% in 2025.

Saudi Arabia issued c. 486k new commercial registrations in 2025 (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4). The Netherlands managed 254k starters in 2024 and 10% fewer in 2025, and more than two-thirds of all Dutch businesses are one self-employed person, anyway.

Dubai International (DXB) moved 95.2 mn passengers in 2025 and was the busiest international airport on earth. That’s more than the international passengers handled by JFK, LAX and Miami combined. Paris Charles de Gaulle moved only 72 mn and lost what felt like 430 bn pieces of luggage doing it.

And it is not just volume. More mn’aires moved to the UAE in 2025 than to the United States, the fourth year running at the top of Henley’s table, while Britain posted the largest outflow ever recorded. The “sophisticated” investors are voting with their feet, and they are not flying to Newark.

And Cairo too. Greater Cairo is home to c. 23 mn people, more than Belgium and Switzerland combined. Egypt has 21.3 mn people aged 18 to 29, more than the entire population of the Netherlands. The median Egyptian is 25.5. The median European is 44.7 and the median Italian 48.7. The median American? 39.4.

The populations of the “West” are old, their economies are stagnant, and their money is drying up, but their dismissive attitudes look like they remain unshaken. France was downgraded twice in five weeks last autumn and its presidential candidates are flirting with either canceling the national debt or even more drastic budget cuts, and bond investors are now pricing a sovereign default.

Yet, it feels like we are being continuously scolded and spoken down to by people coming from institutions, ideals, and even countries who refuse to believe that their best days are behind them. If I’m being completely uncharitable, I could argue their largest contribution to the world right now is an open-air museum of what once was, and indoor ones full of artifacts looted from our part of the world and others –– but I digress.

The fact is we do not need to cater to the crowd in DC, London, Frankfurt, Brussels, or Paris. We don’t need their media to spin our stories and convince their audience that we’re some of the “better ones”: that we’re educated, English- and French-speaking, that we don’t wear open-toed shoes all the time, and know their brandy snifters from their champagne coupes. They should be scrambling for our business. We do business with China, the US, Europe, Russia, and India, we are investing heavily in Africa, and we owe alignment to nobody.

What we need is to keep working with everyone, lean harder on regional partners, and stop appeasing, because we are not beholden to Western norms or foreign expectations. Reject US-led escalation in our backyard, slap back foreign condescension, and deepen regional integration. This is not isolationism. It is integration on our terms, outside a set of norms that are dying now and were exploitative while they lived. We are authentically and unapologetically Arab. Our region’s richness in culture is only outmatched by our ambition. We’ve created the most dynamic economic center in the world right now and we’re partnering with everyone on actually making the world a better place.

The capital is here, the energy is here, the workforce is here, the compute is here, and every trade route worth the name passes through here. If you do not respect that, you should not be in business with us. If you do, drop the pretense that you are doing us a favor by showing up, because everyone is clamoring for our business and the queue is long.

The slap does not need a press release. Gulf sovereign funds held 40% of the world’s sovereign wealth in 2024 and are now the swing vote in global capital flows. Every panel review, every mandate, every LP commitment, every co-investment and every board seat is a vote, and the people casting it are the ones who just got called unsophisticated. Nobody needs to write a strongly worded letter. The money moves, quietly, to those who are with us and of us and never needed to apologize, and the only trace it leaves is a smaller bonus pool in London and New York.

Freshfields will be fine. Probably. I don’t really care and neither should you. But the next time a managing partner hits forward on the wrong distribution list or a private WhatsApp chat is leaked, nobody here should be surprised, because they already showed us who they are. Believe them. And the second time, don’t argue: skip the apology and move the mandate.

– Moustafa B.