Good afternoon, friends. The AI valuation ladder gained another rung overnight, the UAE’s autumn calendar is bursting at the seams, and we’ve reached the point in the robots’ world takeover where they are now spending an evening hitting each other.
The private market is being asked to carry a USD 1.2 tn company before it rings the bell. OpenAI is courting top investors for a major capital raise that would lift it to that valuation ahead of a public debut, the Financial Times reports, on the strength of its newest model. The talks are preliminary and the target may move as negotiations run over the coming months, with Sam Altman saying last week that a listing is unlikely before next year.
That leaves the sector’s two biggest names on opposite tracks — Anthropic raising USD 100 bn at USD 2 tn with Nvidia in talks to anchor, OpenAI funding itself privately and staying off the exchange — and MGX holding equity in both.
Dubai is about to find out how many events its calendar (and floor space) can physically hold. More than 100 shows have been packed into the final four months of the year after the war pushed the spring season back, making this the busiest stretch the emirate’s exhibition industry has ever run.
Riyadh’s entry in the same calendar was two humanoid robots beating each other up on the Boulevard in Riyadh in what was Hero Esports’ first event outside China. Saudi has put some USD 250 mn into the company, whose founder, Chinese b’naire Dino Ying, pulled royals, investors and influencers to what Semafor bills as Monster Trucks for the Terminator era. The valuations elsewhere in this note assume the technology eventually finds an audience willing to pay for it.
What we’re keeping an eye on tonight: The US Federal Reserve is set to announce its first interest rate decision under Kevin Warsh, and the market is broadly pricing in a hike after Friday’s higher-than-expected CPI figures. The statement language will move more money than the number, and it will be worth keeping an eye on US President Donald Trump’s reaction to another Fed decision that defies his desires. –Salma
Jordan has made it cheaper for foreigners to win residency or citizenship by investing outside Amman earlier this summer, the latest push to nudge investors towards provinces. The Cabinet cut the provincial thresholds on the job-creating routes while raising the cost of the passive route that lets investors buy citizenship through the stock exchange, and a separate Real Estate Ownership Law opened land outside the cities’ planning zones to non-Jordanians for the first time. The goal is to send foreign money to build and hire in the governorates rather than sit in the capital.
Two very different kinds of foreign money reach Jordan. On one side is individual, small-ticket capital: Wealthy foreigners buying a passport or a residency by buying an apartment, investing in stocks, or setting up small businesses. On the other is big-project capital: Corporate FDI and the sovereign and institutional money behind ports, rail, and power. Jordan’s shortage was never of either — inflows rose 27% in 2025 to about JOD 1.5 bn (USD 2.1 bn), nearly a third of it from the GCC.
The caveat is where the money goes. Roughly a quarter of the total FDI stock sits in real estate, Amman-based economist Ibrahim Rihani tells EnterpriseAM. “That means a big chunk of FDI is going into non-tradable goods that [aren’t] necessarily productive. It lacks that competitive push,” he says.
Foreign money pools in property because the JOD’s peg to the USD makes almost everything else less attractive, Rihani tells us. To defend the peg, the state pays about 6% on government debt, which pulls bank lending toward safe paper and real estate and away from export-oriented ventures. And because the peg holds the JOD firm, a Jordanian manufacturer can’t adjust prices to be more competitive when a shock hits the way an Egyptian rival can under a floating EGP. “Banks recognize this risk and prefer not to lend to export-oriented firms exposed to foreign exchange risks,” Rihani says. “Instead, bank funding flows into real estate, which is shielded from international market volatility,” and foreign investors run the same calculation, he tells us.
The small-ticket money is what the rewrite is built for, and the global immigration advisory firm that advises on these visas says the discount barely figures in how buyers choose. Thresholds “are only one factor determining where investors ultimately deploy capital,” Henley & Partners tells EnterpriseAM, pointing instead to “the underlying commercial rationale, market access, infrastructure, workforce, and long-term viability of the investment.” Its read on incentives lands close to Rihani's, from the opposite side of the table: “Incentives can help shape investment decisions, but they operate alongside these broader economic considerations.”
What Jordan actually sells these buyers is a stable base in a rough neighborhood. Jordan’s draw, Henley & Partners argues, is “something that is not captured by passport rankings alone: a relatively stable regional base for families, businesses, and investments.” Jordan’s land registry data somewhat cements Henley & Partners’ point. Iraqis are historically the top investors in Jordanian real estate, and in the first eight months of 2026, they accounted for 43% of the overall value of real estate transactions made by foreigners.
And the sectors that could shift Jordan’s structure sit almost entirely outside the incentives on offer. Exporters in the free and development zones pay 0-5% tax against a standard 25%, a cushion that offsets the price penalty the peg imposes and marks out where foreign investors should be looking, Rihani argues. Pharma is the standout, built around exporters like Hikma and Dar Al-Dawa, and a wave of IT and cybersecurity graduates points to a second, less capital-hungry opportunity.
Some of it doesn’t even show up in the FDI numbers: Hikma raises money on the London Stock Exchange, so “capital raised by Hikma registers in London rather than domestic Jordanian FDI metrics, even though the operational impact is local.” And the domestic bourse has seized up. “Not a single company has gone public with an IPO since 2007,” Rihani says, adding that many equities trade below book value.
Infrastructure is where big foreign capital is still moving at decent scale. Rihani sees the megaprojects as insulated from the peg because their “primary financiers are development finance institutions lending at concessional, sub-commercial rates. Another driver is the GCC’s capital appetite to invest in these projects. “Gulf capital is the launch pad,” Saad Sahawneh, business development manager at Construction Management Associates, which tracks the pipeline, tells us.
What holds that pipeline back, on Sahawneh’s telling, is speed. “It was never the legal framework and never bankability,” he says, adding that the PPP law has stood since 2014 and Jordan has closed 45 projects since 1997. The real bottleneck is the seven years and roughly 10% of capex that big infrastructure projects need before they reach financial close, Sahawneh argues.
A case in point: The USD 6 bn Aqaba-Amman water desalination and conveyance project is a good example of a successful but painfully slow infrastructure project. “That [project] had the strongest lender bench any Jordanian project has ever assembled, and it is now stepping toward financial close. It has also taken years to get there, because the traditional model stacks study on study and every counterparty waits for the layer below. Nothing about Jordan slowed it down. The model did,” he tells us.
And then you have projects that are de-risked by GCC sovereign money and state capital commitment. Sahawneh points to the mine-to-port Aqaba railway project, a USD 2.3 bn mine-to-port link structured as a 50-50 joint venture between UAE’s Etihad Rail on one end, and Jordanian mining and port companies and pension funds on the other. “Because the consortium existed before the project did and the deal sat inside a USD 5.5 bn bilateral package, agreements were signed in April 2026, with financial close targeted for early 2027 and trains running in 2030,” he says.
The bottomline: The money that buys passports and apartments is small, lifestyle money, largely indifferent to the discount Jordan just sharpened. The money that builds ports and factories is big and productive, and it moves on procurement speed, local-currency finance, and the cost of borrowing, none of which a residency-for-investment law touches.
Thewidest protests since Assad’s fallin Syria are entering their fifth day, triggered by the state’s decision to hike fuel rates over the weekend, raising diesel prices by 40%, gasoline by 26-28%, and industrial and household gas by 9%.
Damascus’ balancing act was not enough to stave off the protests: The government increased bread subsidies from 60% to 70%, while also cutting the price of subsidized flour for bread makers from SYP 20k to 15k per ton. Taken together, these moves are designed to offset the impact of fuel price hikes on bread — meaning they will result in keeping the price of subsidized bread unchanged, rather than reducing the price.
Behind the decision is a fiscal picture that fell apart this year amid record global crude prices. Syria posted a USD 1 bn deficit in 1H 2026 after a small surplus a year earlier, with spending up 331% y-o-y against revenue growth of 111%. The full-year gap is projected at USD 1.8 bn — about 5% of GDP. Fuel is the pressure point: locally produced crude covers only about a third of demand, and Syria’s biggest refinery in Baniyas is down for three months for maintenance, leaving the country dependent on crude and fuel imports, mostly from Russia.
This isn’t the first public backlash driven by economic grievances in post-Assad Syria. Freight truck drivers ran a national strike in early February over fees, fuel access, and competition from cross-border truckers; Latakia port drivers staged a sit-in over “special receipt” queue-jumping granted to trucks moving Iraqi crude in late August; and Hasakah drivers walked out over subsidised diesel cuts weeks ago.
IN CONTEXT- Syrians are already worn out by two years of subsidy cuts. Under Assad, bread and fuel were rationed through the Takamol-run smart card system, which allocated set amounts per family at heavily subsidized prices, but Al Sharaa’s government began dismantling that architecture almost immediately: bread was decoupled from the smart card after the fall, sending the nominal bundle price from SYP 400 to SYP 4k; the standard bundle weight was cut from 1.5 kg to 1.2 kg in February 2025, then to 1.1 kg in May 2026. On fuel, the caretaker transport ministry ended fuel subsidies for public transport in January 2025, before fully liberalizing pricing by July 2025 — a big shift given that in 2024, fuel and cooking gas made up roughly two-thirds of Assad’s price stabilisation budget.
And on a separate but still related track, Syria is turning to Saudi tech firm Cashin to help digitize its fuel supply chains. Under a 10-year agreement signed this week, Cashin will build a “field-to-bank” digital platform tracking petroleum products’ supply chain from production and imports through storage, transport, stations, and financial settlement. Why the digital fix now? Damascus is moving on a fuel and crude leakage problem it inherited from Assad, in an attempt to fix it before the sector settles into old habits. Like many post-conflict societies, Syria is a textbook case of how vulnerable it is to energy-sector corruption and smuggling, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s fellow Noam Raydan wrote earlier this year, citing post-1990 Lebanon and post-2003 Iraq as precedents for how quickly recovering energy sectors get hollowed out by corrupt schemes. Ensuring visibility over crude and petroleum product flows within the country would, at least, make smuggling more difficult. The mechanics are already familiar from the Assad years — an Internal Trade Ministry official acknowledged in 2020 that gas-station workers routinely dispense 30 liters instead of 40 and resell the difference at the unsubsidized rate, and the Syrian Petroleum Company told Levant24 in March that gas cylinders sell in Lebanon for roughly three times the Syrian price, driving large-scale cross-border smuggling.
It’s an ostensibly calmer morning today after several days of Saudi Arabia and the Houthis exchanging strikes.
Riyadh responded to the Houthis’ last round of strikes on Monday by ramping up its airstrikes on Yemen. The Houthis claim Saudi Arabia launched 54 airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Taiz, Lahj, Al Jawf, Marib, and Hodeidah governorates, the group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said. These strikes follow the group’s attack on King Khalid Airbase in Khamis Mushait.
As the fighting wages on, Riyadh is scrambling for an oil exit route. After reports that the Kingdom is trying to increase shipments through the Strait of Hormuz to offset the East-West pipeline shutdown, the Wall Street Journal reported that Saudi crude stored in Egypt can buy Riyadh another week of loadings before Red Sea exports have to fall sharply. The Kingdom temporarily shut the East-West oil pipeline after it was targeted by several drones launched from Iraq on 10 September. Riyadh is trying for a partial restart within days, but full repairs could take six to eight weeks, the sources said.
Iraqi anti-corruption campaign yields another high-level conviction: An anti-corruption criminal court in Iraq has sentenced former Electricity Ministry official Alaa Samir Rashid to seven years after finding him guilty of illicit enrichment. The court said Rashid, who headed the Central Electricity Distribution Company, unlawfully accumulated about c. USD 9.7 mn in cash, and ordered him to repay the gains plus an equivalent fine, bringing the total owed to roughly IQD 25.7 bn (USD 19.5 mn).
Why it matters: Iraq ranked 136th out of 182 countries on Transparency International’s corruption index, and the electricity ministry in Iraq is a sector OCCRP, a global anti-corruption investigative journalism platform, has described as among the country’s largest and most contested lines of public spending, accounts for several of the campaign’s largest cases so far.
ICYMI- Electricity Ministry Undersecretary Khalid Ghazay Atiya was arrested in August after investigators seized nearly USD 5.8 mn in cash and seven gold bullion bars from his properties, and the director of financial affairs at another state electricity distribution was also sentenced to three years for illicit enrichment and ordered to repay nearly USD 1.1 mn.
BACKGROUND- Iraq’s anti-corruption campaign began with the arrest of Adnan Al Jumaili, the oil minister’s deputy for refining, in late May, before expanding to sweep at least 210 officials, lawmakers, and business figures since the 28 June dawn raids. Several first-degree sentences have been issued over the last three weeks, including at least two against electricity ministry officials.
Syria’s locally-issued int’l card, finally: QNB Syria, a subsidiary of QNB Group, has issued Syria’s first locally issued, internationally accepted Mastercard card, in collaboration with Mastercard, with wider rollout to eligible customers to happen in phases. The launch extends Mastercard and QNB Group’s Syria collaboration from acceptance to issuance, after the pair processed the country’s first transaction in over 15 years using an internationally issued Mastercard card last month.
REMEMBER- We reported last month that Syrians were still not able to issue a Visa or Mastercard card domestically, even as banking connectivity to the international SWIFT system was finalized, and the technical reconnection of Syria’s payments system to Mastercard’s and Visa’s global network. That changed this week.
Visa has been moving in parallel: The same week in August, Visa tested its own first live international transaction in Syria, working with Fransabank Lebanon and Syrian payments firm Paymera. Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa took part in the test transaction at a Damascus restaurant, which came two days after the US removed Syria from its state sponsors of terrorism list.
GO DEEPER- This local issuance closes one gap, but plenty remains to rehabilitate Syria’s payments infrastructure. Many players are making bets on filling gaps that traditional banks can’t fill just yet, such as cross-border remittances, merchant acquiring, digital wallets, as we reported in June. And in August, we looked at Syria’s first superapps, which are betting on the recovery even as the payment rails they need are only now coming online.
Saudi Arabia is positioning itself as the transparent alternative to Iran on nuclear. The Kingdom wants to build a domestic uranium value chain — from exploration through yellowcake production — alongside adding nuclear power to its energy mix, Energy and Industry Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said at the IAEA General Conference in Vienna. The minister framed the program as “transparent,” with no activities “in hiding” or at “undisclosed facilities” — a direct jab at Tehran, whose enrichment sites sit deep underground and which has blocked IAEA checks on its near-bomb-grade stockpile since June 2025.
The Kingdom ispursuingthree main tracks to develop its uranium resources — extracting uranium as a byproduct of phosphoric acid production for phosphate fertilizer, developing resources identified at Jabal Sayid in Madinah, and expanding geological surveys for conventional uranium deposits. Jabal Sayid contains around 114 mn tons of ore with high concentrations of rare earth elements alongside uranium indications.
BUT- Riyadh and Washington’s narratives don’t quite match up: There are “no plans at all for enrichment in Saudi Arabia,” US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Monday, according to Bloomberg, describing July’s 30-year civil nuclear pact as being about commercial power generation. Riyadh’s stated ambition runs to the full fuel cycle. Wright’s statement comes as Riyadh is negotiating bespoke bilateral provisions in lieu of signing the IAEA’s additional protocol — the tool that gives the UN nuclear watchdog its most sweeping inspection powers
Qatar is moving LNG again — but force majeure isn’t going anywhere yet. A Qatari cargo reached Pakistan last week after becoming the first known LNG shipment from the country to cross Hormuz since July. But it remains an exception: Hormuz traffic is a fraction of pre-war levels, LNG tankers have turned back from attempted crossings, and QatarEnergy is still cancelling contracted deliveries months ahead.
Why it matters: Six months in, the question has shifted from whether Qatari LNG can move to who can still afford it when it doesn’t. Qatar entered the crisis shipping some 77-80 mn tons of LNG a year — roughly a fifth of global supply — into a market with little spare liquefaction capacity and no meaningful bypass for Hormuz bypass. Europe relied on Qatar for around 10% of its LNG, while major Asian buyers including China, India, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, and Bangladesh depended heavily on long-term contracts. Replacement LNG exists — but six months on, access increasingly comes down to who can keep bidding for it.
Two constraints keep Qatari LNG bottled up: Doha can still negotiate individual Hormuz crossings and ship-to-ship transfers outside the Gulf, but neither carries anything close to Qatar's normal export program. The second constraint is physical: Iranian strikes knocked two of Ras Laffan's 14 LNG trains offline, removing around 12.8 mtpa of capacity that could take three to five years to repair. Undamaged trains have been kept running at reduced rates — a 10-day average of roughly 80k tons in August, the strongest since March but still around 60% below the previous year’s pace.
Not every buyer is losing this the same way: Vulnerability comes down to three factors — how much missing supply a buyer has to replace on the spot market, how easily it can switch away from gas, and whether it can afford replacement cargoes at much higher prices, gas market analyst Giovanni Bettinelli tells EnterpriseAM. Pakistan and Bangladesh — both of whom combine heavy dependence on Qatari supply with limited ability to absorb higher spot prices — sit at the worst intersection. “But in India and Southeast Asia, they will see significant subsidy pressure but for these markets oil products are likely to be the greatest concern, not LNG,” Bettinelli adds.
Europe didn’t dodge the shock — it outspent it: Italy, Belgium, and Poland were Qatar’s largest EU customers before the disruption, Columbia University researcher Anne-Sophie Corbeau tells EnterpriseAM. QatarEnergy has extended force majeure on Italy’s energy firm Edison LNG deliveries until early November, taking the total affected since April to 29 cargoes representing roughly 3.8 bcm, with 21 replaced by late August. Poland’s Orlen used its own LNG carrier fleet to lift replacement supply from US terminals, ICIS gas market specialist Brendan A'Hearn tells EnterpriseAM. “But the biggest deficit is in Belgium, where QatarEnergy has had to sell many of its slots, some of which have not been bought and therefore remain empty.”
A wager on the weather: Consumption held broadly stable year-on-year and most missing Qatari volumes were replaced, but Europe didn’t buy enough extra LNG to keep storage injections on pace. Some of the supply gap has simply moved into lower inventories rather than showing up as shortages today, A'Hearn argues. Europe’s edge into winter is its ability to keep outbidding more price-sensitive Asian buyers for flexible cargoes — but colder-than-expected weather or weaker renewable generation could accelerate storage withdrawals and set off another round of panic buying, Bettinelli notes.
The accidental beneficiary — and the irony: US supply has replaced the large majority of lost Qatari volumes into Europe. US LNG exports were already up 23% y-o-y in 1H 2026 as new liquefaction capacity came online. Meanwhile, QatarEnergy itself is seeking around 2-3 mtpa of US LNG under multi-year agreements through 2031, holding talks with Venture Global, Cheniere, and Woodside — an exit that doesn’t require Hormuz to reopen or Ras Laffan’s damaged trains to come back online.
The Gulf’s listing machine has stalled, and its bankers have gone looking for work. Regional IPO volumes are under USD 1.1 bn this year, behind sub-Saharan Africa for the first time, and the desks built for the boom are billing hours in Cairo, Istanbul and Mumbai instead. MNT-Halan’s EGX float and Adia’s line into India’s NSE IPO are that trade in action. Citi is the dissenting voice, raising USD 40 bn for Saudi clients on a bet that the window reopens.
Gulf banks that staffed up for the IPO boom are deploying those teams elsewhere. Regional IPO volumes are under USD 1.1 bn this year, behind sub-Saharan Africa’s USD 1.37 bn for the first time — a gap Dangote Petroleum Refinery widens when it prices its USD 1.6 bn Lagos listing, Bloomberg reports.
Where the fees went: HSBC, usually top of Gulf ECM league tables, hasn’t closed a Gulf IPO in 2026 despite 50-plus live mandates across MENA and Turkey, capital markets co-head Mohammed Fannouch says. It has led Turkish secondaries instead — USD 552 mn across seven deals, nearly double 2025’s volume. EFG Hermes is leaning into Egypt, working with Citi on a Cairo listing for MNT-Halan’s local arm plus Banque du Caire and Misr Life Ins IPOs. Emirates NBD went furthest, taking majority control of India’s RBL Bank to expand investment banking there and co-arranging Airtel Money’s London listing with FAB.
The EGX is about to find out if international money is still watching.MNT-Halan’s Egyptian arm earned EGX approval for an IPO watched well beyond Cairo. Our friends at EFG Hermes have the mandate alongside Citi, and pitched up to USD 1 bn for the Egypt arm in June, against a USD 1.4 bn mark on the group. Only the local unit lists; the parent, with arms in Pakistan, Turkey, and the UAE, stays private.
MNT-Halan has been on the road in recent months testing market appetite, making in-person and virtual stops in the Gulf, London, the United States, and beyond. One investor we spoke with in late summer described the early look presentation as “very compelling.”
We expect the transaction to hit the market soon. Bloomberg reported in June that the company was eyeing an IPO as early as this year, though its plans could change. The EGX listing committee gave MNT until mid-March to complete the transaction.
Gulf sovereign money is lining up for India’s biggest listing. Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia) and Lunate are weighing sizable anchor allocations in the National Stock Exchange’s (NSE) USD 2.7 bn IPO, Moneycontrol reports, citing unnamed sources. Talks are ongoing and allocations aren’t final, but NSE is targeting a valuation as high as USD 46.3 bn, Reuters reports.
One bank is betting the Gulf window reopens. Citigroup has raised over USD 40 bn for Saudi clients year-to-date and has lifted its internal exposure limits on the Kingdom since the Iran war began, Citi Saudi Arabia Chief Country Officer Fahad Aldeweesh tells Semafor, citing the Kingdom’s “strong economic resilience and financial resilience.” He calls Saudi Arabia a “high priority market,” expects IPO activity to recover in the coming months, and plans to keep expanding a Saudi team that currently numbers 35.
MENA’s most valuable fintech just repriced itself 44% higher without going near a stock exchange. Tabby raised USD 233 mn at a USD 6.5 bn valuation in a series F led by Hong Kong’s Blue Pool Capital, with existing backers HSG, Wellington Management, and Arbor Ventures taking part, the company said in a statement. It was last valued at USD 4.5 bn at its share sale in October 2025.
“The proceeds are primarily about giving us the capital to go deeper in our two core markets,” CEO and co-founder Hosam Arab tells Reuters, meaning Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Part of the round also gives employees liquidity, extending share tenders Tabby has run since 2023 that have facilitated more than USD 100 mn in share sales.
Abu Dhabi has a chipmaker heading for a US listing. MGX-backed Altera has confidentially filed for an IPO that a previous report said could raise over USD 2 bn as early as this year, Reuters reports. Altera is pitching its reconfigurable chips as a companion to GPUs — targeted support for data center networking and lightweight AI inference — as it looks to ride Wall Street’s appetite for AI. It hasn’t specified a share count or price range.
Egypt is heading back to international debt markets before year-end. The Finance Ministry is weighing a return between October and December to narrow the financing gap, a senior government official tells us. The cabinet approved measures last week under the ministry’s FY 2026-27 issuance plan targeting some USD 3 bn of international bonds — a mix of conventional and “innovative” instruments plus credit-guaranteed panda bonds — to be executed as demand and market conditions allow.
Space42 and Viasat are putting USD 1 bn behind their satellite-to-smartphone venture. The ADX-listed space tech firm and the US satellite operator have signed the agreement formally establishing Equatys and committed as much as USD 1 bn in equity, per an ADX disclosure (pdf). Each co-founder commits USD 400 mn, with Space42 adding another USD 200 mn in a future round alongside outside investors; longer term, the two see the JV funded by a mix of their own equity, debt financing, and third-party capital.
ALSO WORTH KNOWING
Financial infrastructure firmTarabuthas raised USD 50 mn in strategic funding, with Riyad Bank, Alawwal Investment’s X-Tech Fund, and Gulf International Bank taking part alongside Al Zamil Group, Kanoo Investment Projects, and other regional institutions, according to a press release.
Abu Dhabi-based Synapse Analytics has raised USD 13 mn in a series A, taking total funding to USD 17 mn, the firm said in a press release. Paris-based Partech led, with Jordan’s Silicon Badia and Cairo-based Algebra Ventures participating. The capital goes to hiring, product development, and international expansion.
XRG closes its Southern Gas Corridor investment: Adnoc’s global investment arm completed its acquisition of an equity stake in Azerbaijan’s Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) from the country’s Energy Ministry after clearing the required regulatory approvals, according to a press release (pdf). XRG didn’t disclose the size or value of the stake, though Trend.az and Egypt Oil & Gas reported it at 12.5%.
OCP is starting to put its own phosphates into batteries: OCP Green Energy has commissioned Morocco’s first utility-scale lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery storage system at its Benguerir mining site, Morocco World News reports. The facility cost MAD 170 mn (USD 18 mn), backed by an additional USD 20 mn from the African Development Bank-managed Clean Technology Fund. The company is separately working with Mohammed VI Polytechnic University on producing LFP material from its own phosphoric acid, with a domestic battery supply chain as the longer-term goal.
The 25 MW / 125 MWh battery energy storage system is expected to cut Benguerir’s peak electricity costs by an estimated 25% once fully operational. It pairs with the 67 MWp of solar already on site, part of a 202 MWp portfolio across three OCP locations.
Bigger and better
Emirati leisure and entertainment developer Miral is committing over AED 12 bn over the next five years to expand and upgrade Yas Island, adding new attractions, rides, experiences, and hotel capacity as Abu Dhabi pushes to deepen its global tourism footprint, according to an Abu Dhabi Media Office statement.
The investment is separate from thepreviously announced Disney project and will fund a pipeline spanning existing theme park and attraction expansions, alongside new experiences tailored to shifting visitor demand.
Building for the afterparty
Expo 2030 Riyadh is bringing private capital into its development pipeline, signing a SAR 3.2 bn joint venture with Mohammed Al Habib Real Estate to develop Expo Village, according to a press release. The village will include around 2.3k residential units with capacity for roughly 5.5k residents, alongside retail, dining, amenities, and services. The agreement reflects a push toward “building effective partnerships with the private sector,” Expo 2030 Riyadh CEO Talal Al Marri said.
Built for Expo, but designed to stay: The village is designed to serve the six-month event and retain its value after it closes. “The project is conceived as a new district of Riyadh — a destination for the city and for future generations — built around a high-quality public realm: shaded, climate-responsive, walkable, and connected to nature,” Executive Director and Head of Design Giovanna Carnevali said on LinkedIn.
First foreign flag
Real estate developerVA Groupis now the first international developer to take on a phase of Oman’s Port Sultan Qaboos Waterfront Masterplan, with the real estate developer securing long-term land rights at Oman's historic Muttrah waterfront in partnership with state developer Omran Group. The 18.5-hectare mixed use development will combine residences with leisure and retail facilities. No details on the investment value were disclosed.
First in line
Qatar has folded a payments wallet into company registration: Businesses in Qatar can now apply for an Ooredoo Money merchant wallet directly within the commercial registration process on the Commerce and Industry Ministry’s Single Window Platform, under a cooperation agreement signed with Ooredoo Fintech Qatar. Ooredoo Money is the first fintech to join the platform. The tie-up cuts reliance on manual transactions and paper documents, the ministry said.
IN CONTEXT- Ooredoo Money first entered digital payments in 2022, when the Qatar Central Bank issued it and iPay by Vodafone Qatar the country’s first digital-payment-service licenses. The central bank has since licensed 15 fintech companies under that framework.
Russia made its first resupply mission to Syria’s Tartous port and Hmeimim airbase facilities since last month’s agreement on the future of Russian military presence in Syria, Reuters reports. Last week, the four-vessel convoy arrived at the Mediterranean port of Tartous carrying supplies including ammunition destined for Hmeimim and Tartous, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Under the new deal signed on 9 August after 18 months of negotiations, civilian facilities used by Russia are to be transferred to Syrian control and military sites will be turned into joint training centers with continued presence of Russian forces.
Wanting a piece
TotalEnergiesis seeking a 10% stakein the USD 15 bn Basra-Baniyas pipeline Iraq is planning to build as a bypass to Hormuz, CEO Patrick Pouyanné announced following talks in Paris with Prime Minister Ali Al-Zaidi. The push comes as the French energy major announces its commitment to raise its investments in Iraq by 4 USD bn to USD 16 bn. About the project: If it reaches a final investment decision, the pipeline linking Iraq’s oil-rich Basra to Syria’s Baniyas on the Mediterranean would take four years to complete construction. As of now, the consortium planning to lead the buildout is composed of US energy giant Chevron, Qatar-based UCC Holding, and US investment firm TI Capital.
Against the wind
Abu Dhabi flag carrier Etihad Airways is flying 15% more than last year, despite headwinds like geopolitical disruptions and rising costs, Chief Revenue and Commercial Officer Arik De tells our UAE desk. That’s a step up from the airline's previously published figure of 10% more summer capacity y-o-y, disclosed in June. Etihad’s planes are running at roughly 90% full, De says.
IN CONTEXT- It has been an unforgiving year for Gulf aviation. The Iran war forced airlines across the region to reroute, spiking fuel costs and grounding flights outright. The International Air Transport Association expects Middle Eastern carriers to post a combined loss this year, the only region forecast to be unprofitable in 2026. Emirates and Qatar Airways both pulled back summer capacity in response.
Traveling cup
Kuwait will host the Saudi Super Cup for the first time, with the Saudi Arabian Football Federation selecting Kuwait’s Altai Media Group as its official partner for the 2026-27 season, Saudi’s state news agency SPA reports. The tournament runs on 19-23 December at Jaber Al-Ahmad International Stadium, featuring Al Nassr, Al Ahli, Al Qadsiah, and Al Kholood.
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