In 2025 alone, the UAE welcomed almost 10,000 high-net-worth individuals in net migration, with the vast majority choosing Dubai as their new home. Companies and wealthy individuals relocate here for many reasons. What strikes me most is not the logistics behind these moves, but the ambition. Dubai feels less like a destination people pass through and more like a city being shaped, year by year, by the people who choose to call it home.

The more time I spend working with clients who have made this move, and the more time I spend in the region, the more I understand why. What has surprised me the most was how far the common perception is from the truth. The assumption has always been that people move here solely for tax reasons. The people I meet are drawn by something much bigger: quality of life, ambition, and the chance to build something lasting. They move here for a life. For stability, for opportunity, and for the feeling that, even in a changing world, the years ahead are theirs to shape rather than simply endure.

That desire for solid ground is not hard to understand. Many of the people I work with have spent decades building something – a family business passed down through generations, a career or a body of work – and, in an increasingly complex world, they are thinking harder than ever about how to protect it and pass it on. Dubai speaks to that instinct. My conversations with clients who move here increasingly centre not on tax planning, but on continuity: on succession, on legacy, on giving the next generation something worth inheriting.

Dubai has also shown that it can maintain continuity. No place is immune to geopolitical shocks but the ability to maintain momentum and business continuity is a different art form altogether.

Dubai has also demonstrated an ability to provide continuity of its own. No place is immune to geopolitical shocks or periods of uncertainty. What distinguishes resilient global centres is not the absence of disruption, but their ability to absorb it while maintaining momentum, confidence and business continuity. That is a different art altogether and one that Dubai has become remarkably good at.

Over the course of thirty years in wealth management, including my time at UCAP Asset Management, I have watched waves of entrepreneurs and business owners search for a place to plant new roots. What draws them to Dubai is not one advantage, but an entire ecosystem built for ambition. The Dubai International Financial Centre is now home to more than 500 wealth and asset management firms, 215 of which have arrived in just the past three years. That is not the sound of capital passing through. It is the sound of a financial community being built, methodically, even through periods of regional change.

It would be easy to assume that capital is fickle, that mobile wealth simply drifts to where the terms are best and will move away again just as easily. But the reality is that being a tax nomad is far from an easy option. It comes with a particular lifestyle, one that demands constantly shifting locations, rebuilding routines and starting over in place after place. High-net-worth individuals, like everyone else, are attached to their homes, their habits and their small rituals. They do not leave lightly, and they do not arrive lightly either. People do not relocate to Dubai unless they believe, genuinely, that it is a place where they can build a good life.

And building a life here takes commitment. Family offices bring advisers, educators and colleagues who cannot simply be packed up and moved on a whim. The people who arrive alongside these families enrol their children in schools, join professional communities, form friendships and put down roots. Every one of these connections is a quiet vote of confidence in the city, and together they make Dubai something far more durable than a convenient address.

This is where Dubai truly distinguishes itself. It pairs world-class infrastructure and connectivity, comparable with any global capital, with a depth of financial expertise built over decades. Despite regional uncertainty, Dubai continues to offer businesses security and continuity. DIFC alone now hosts more than 1,052 financial firms. Step outside its towers and you find a city built for people who want to move fast, think globally, and still come home to something that feels like a life. It offers global reach, genuine openness to newcomers, and a skyline that adds a new possibility every year.

That density of talent and expertise is what gives Dubai its real strength. Its network of asset managers, family offices, private banks, legal advisers and succession planners is not something that can be replicated overnight, and it is not going anywhere soon. This tells you everything: Dubai is not simply a place where foreign wealth is held. It is a place where people start companies, raise families, and build careers of which they are proud. It is precisely why so many in my field, me included, now see it as more than a market to serve.

A competitive environment may be what first draws people to Dubai. But what makes them stay is something bigger: a rare mix of ambition, opportunity, connectivity and community that is genuinely difficult to find anywhere else. Dubai is no longer simply an efficient address on a map. It is becoming a true home for wealth, talent and the kind of ambition that wants room to grow. I have watched this story develop over recent years, and I have no doubt the best is still to come.

By Effimia Geraki, Managing Director, UCAP Asset Management, Middle East

Companies that opened a small development team there years ago usually still have it, and it is usually bigger than they planned.

What has changed is the reason employers give. Cost used to be the first thing anyone said out loud. Now it tends to come third or fourth, after the size of the talent pool, after the language range, after the plain fact that a team in Bucharest or Cluj shares most of a working day with colleagues in Dublin, Berlin and, at a stretch, the US east coast.

What actually draws employers toward Romanian talent

Romania built a technical education pipeline long before anyone described it as a hiring market. Universities in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Iasi and Timisoara have turned out engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists for decades, and a good share of that output stayed in the country as a local services industry grew up around it.

You notice the effect at interview stage. Candidates have usually worked with distributed teams already, often for foreign clients, and they arrive understanding how a code review across time zones works in practice. That familiarity is worth more than it sounds. A first international hire who has never worked for a company headquartered somewhere else spends the early months learning the shape of remote work rather than learning the job.

Language range is the part employers underrate until they have it. English is standard in technical and commercial roles. French, German, Italian and Spanish appear often enough that Romanian teams have ended up carrying support and finance operations for several European markets at once, which was rarely anyone’s original plan.

The vocabulary problem sitting underneath the plan

Planning gets loose at the moment someone writes “we will use an EOR” on a slide.

Romanian employment law does not recognise a standalone statutory category with that name. What it does recognise is a licensed regime for temporary work agencies, authorised by the responsible ministry, entered on a public register, and subject to conditions that generally include a financial security requirement and periodic renewal of the licence. Under that regime the agency is the legal employer. The person works under the direction of a user company. The assignment runs on a temporary employment contract tied to a specific mission with a defined term and a limited number of renewals set in law.

When a plan says hiring in Romania through an EOR, what sits underneath it is almost always a contract with a licensed agency of that kind. The label travels. The legal structure does not. Worth knowing before you promise a candidate something the paperwork cannot deliver.

How the arrangement runs once someone is actually working

The agency signs the employment contract, runs payroll, makes the statutory contributions, keeps the leave and working time records, and handles the paperwork when an assignment ends. You direct the work itself: priorities, standards, review, the day to day.

Equal treatment is the condition people forget. An assigned worker’s pay and core conditions are benchmarked against what a comparable employee of the user company would receive, so the structure is not a route around local terms. Duration matters too. The mission has a stated purpose and an end point, and both are visible if anyone examines the file later.

Most of the detail sits in the employment code rather than in any single explainer, though a guide to employing in Romania will get a hiring manager oriented faster than the code will.

Where the structure fits, and where it stops fitting

It works well when you are testing whether a Romanian team makes sense, when you need one or two specialists quickly, or when a project has a genuine horizon.

It works less well when the role is permanent, open ended and central to what the company does. At some point the honest structure for that is a Romanian entity with direct employment, and teams that keep extending agency assignments past the point of comfort tend to know it before their advisors say so.

Tax questions belong with your own tax and legal advisors rather than with a hiring plan. Where employment sits, how it is treated, and what it triggers for the company are all fact-specific, and they turn on details a template cannot see.

Questions worth asking before the first Romanian hire

• Is the agency currently licensed, and can you see the registration?
• Who is named as the employer on the contract the candidate signs?
• What comparable role is being used for the equal treatment benchmark?
• What is the stated purpose and term of the assignment, and what happens at the end of it?
• Which statutory benefits and contributions sit inside the quoted cost, and which are billed separately?

None of that is exotic. It is the same diligence you would apply to any supplier about to hold an employment relationship on your behalf. Ask it early and the Romanian hire starts to look like every other hire, which is roughly the point.

CEO has urged Chancellor John Healey to cut spending at next month’s Budget and says government must focus on economic growth

Next boss Lord Wolfson, has called on Chancellor John Healey to rein in public expenditure ahead of next month’s Budget, warning “you can’t spend your way out of a funding crisis”.

Next’s chief executive has pressed the government to curb spending, steer clear of further tax rises and cut through planning bureaucracy in order to stimulate economic growth.

Speaking to the media on Thursday, he said: “The only things that will really change the long-term trajectory [of the economy] are [the] government getting its spending under control and boosting supply-side measures.”

Wolfson, who has led Next for 25 years, added: “You can’t spend your way out of a funding crisis.”

With the October Budget drawing closer, retail chiefs have intensified pressure on the government to overhaul business rates and reduce employment costs, as reported by City AM.

However, Wolfson argued that Labour cannot afford any further tax cuts and should instead prioritise reducing expenditure while committing solely to supply-side measures that require no additional funding. “The UK government is forecast to spend over £100bn more than its income this year, and has little room to increase its borrowing,” Wolfson wrote in Next’s half-year results on Thursday.

“So there is little or no room for the Government to stimulate growth through spending or alleviate inflationary costs in fuel and energy. […] There are only two effective ways out of this predicament: control spending or boost growth, preferably both.”

Wolfson told reporters that asking Labour for tax cuts would be too “strong,” adding that business should instead hope for the tax burden “not to go up more”.

“Any organisation cannot carry on spending significantly more than its income and, in one way or another, that problem has to be addressed,” he said.

Earlier this week, former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane accused Andy Burnham of presiding over a “traditional tax and spend socialist government with better TikTok videos”.

The Prime Minister hit back at Haldane, his former unofficial adviser, claiming that he is prepared to take difficult decisions at what will be a “challenging” Budget for British households.

Wolfson said the Government could stimulate economic growth by cutting the red tape surrounding building regulations, biodiversity rules and archaeological restrictions, which is “holding us back”. “I think releasing that pent-up demand would do a lot to boost growth,” he said.

Lord Wolfson also defended the natural “evolution” of the high street, amid criticism of Andy Burnham’s plans to revitalise UK high streets by clamping down on gambling and vape shops and reducing business rate bills for pubs.

Frasers Group founder Mike Ashley has dismissed Burnham’s high street policies as “populist,” while JD Wetherspoon founder Tim Martin said it is “not up to” the Prime Minister to choose what is on the high street.

Asked about Burnham’s high street plans, Wolfson said: “The most important thing that the government could do for British high streets is to let them develop. Don’t try to decide ‘this should be a shop and that should be a restaurant and this should be a pub’. Just let the market do its work and transform British high streets into what people most want.”

In the UK, Next’s in-store sales fell by 0.4 per cent in the six months to July, while online sales rose by eight per cent. Wolfson said he anticipates high street sales across the group will continue to decline gradually in the coming years.

He said: “What I’m saying is: don’t try and turn back the clock. If your aim is to get the high street back to where it was, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered a dual message of caution and explosive financial optimism at a recent Scottish summit convened by King Charles, urging the artificial intelligence industry to prioritize “good old-fashioned engineering” while forecasting that his company’s chip sales will double next year.

While addressing mounting public anxiety over AI risks alongside leaders from Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, Huang made it clear that despite safety hurdles, the global AI gold rush is only accelerating.

When asked about Nvidia’s financial horizon amid broader tech scrutiny, the chief executive delivered a massive projection that underscores relentless international demand.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the G20 Innovation Ministerial on Sept. 2, 2026, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

“I expect Nvidia to sell twice as many chips this next year as we do this year,” Huang revealed, attributing the explosive growth to nations aggressively investing in localized AI infrastructure and cloud data centers.

Despite the bullish market outlook, Huang issued a stark directive to tech developers, warning them to keep half-baked products out of the hands of the public.

Britain’s King Charles III (L) walks with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (R) to attend a conference of leaders from the artificial intelligence (AI) sector and government at Dumfries House in Cumnock, Scotland on Sept. 17, 2026. (Jonathan Brady/AFP via Getty Images)

“It is the responsibility of the AI companies ourselves to develop the technology safely and to properly test it,” Huang told reporters. Acknowledging recent industry incidents, he emphasized they serve as a critical wake-up call. “If it’s not ready, just hold it back. You should go as fast as you can, but no faster than that.”

Huang firmly rejected comparisons between the current AI boom and the largely unchecked rise of social media. He argued that AI is a foundational technology — like a newly developed airplane engine — that requires contained, rigorous testing before release. Rather than entirely new regulatory frameworks, he suggested governments adapt the “incredible number of laws” already governing existing sectors like healthcare and transportation, where AI is being implemented.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the 29th annual Milken Institute Global Conference on May 4, 2026. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

Environmental concerns were another major focal point, aligning with the King’s mandate that AI must also serve the natural world. Addressing critics who fear massive AI data centers will drain global power grids, Huang acknowledged the “interesting dichotomy” of AI factories requiring immense energy.

However, he argued this relentless demand will actually catalyze a green energy revolution, sparking unprecedented investment in sustainable power options like fusion, fission, air and hydro.

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“We want to be responsible in advancing the technology. Take responsibility and accountability for whenever there are mishaps,” Huang concluded. “But don’t lose sight of the ultimate prize, which is the incredible impact that the technology can bring to all the different economies and societies.”

NEW YORK — Cerebelly, a manufacturer of organic baby food and children’s food designed to support brain and cognitive health, has acquired Fresh Bellies, a children’s food brand that manufactures plant-based, freeze-dried snacks without added sugar. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition brings Cerebelly and Fresh Bellies under shared ownership while operating independently with their own product line, formulation and brand identity, the companies said.

Cerebelly’s product line currently includes purees, smoothies and snack bars. The company said the acquisition will expand its product development capabilities for additional formats and snacking usage occasions.

“We are not merging these brands — we are amplifying them,” said Jodie Wing, chief executive officer of Cerebelly. “The children’s nutrition category is large enough and the unmet consumer need is significant enough that two differentiated brands, operating with shared operational strength, creates more value than either could achieve alone. This is a platform play, not a consolidation.”

The acquisition will enable Fresh Bellies, founded in 2015 by Saskia Sorrosa, access to Cerebelly’s supply chain infrastructure to meet demands.

“Fresh Bellies has always been about giving children a bold, adventurous start with real, whole food,” Sorrosa said. “Joining forces with Cerebelly gives us the ability to say ‘yes’ — yes to more retailers, yes to larger and more frequent orders, yes to more innovation and exciting new products, and yes to meaningful certifications that set our products apart. This partnership gives us the runway to grow in ways we’ve always known we could.” 

Three company directors have been fined in the first prosecutions brought by the Insolvency Service for failing to comply with Companies House identity verification requirements.

Jill White and Marc Dillon, directors of White (Reading Properties) Limited, and Modinat Banjo, director of J Isogony Apparel Limited, were sentenced at City of London Magistrates’ Court yesterday.

The Insolvency Service said the convictions serve as a warning to directors that they must verify their identity or risk prosecution.

Identity verification is a central part of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, which strengthened the powers of Companies House to improve the accuracy of the company register and tackle the misuse of UK companies for criminal purposes.

Newly appointed directors have been required to verify their identity with Companies House before acting as a director since 18 November 2025. According to the government’s guidance on the changes to UK company law, that date also marked the start of a 12-month transition period.

Existing directors are required to verify during that transition period, when filing the company’s next confirmation statement. Business Matters has previously reported on the rollout of the identity checks for directors and people with significant control.

White, 62, of Speen, Buckinghamshire, acted as a company director despite not verifying her identity, according to the Insolvency Service. She participated in board-level decision making and signed company accounts while unverified.

She completed identity verification in early September 2026, around nine months after the deadline and shortly before appearing in court.

Dillon, 62, of Atlanta Close, Benson, Oxfordshire, had verified his own identity. He was prosecuted for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent White from continuing to act as a director while unverified, despite being aware of the legal requirement.

The Insolvency Service said that, as a director of White (Reading Properties) Limited, he had a legal responsibility to ensure the company did not allow an unverified individual to continue acting as a director. Both were also convicted after the company failed to file a confirmation statement on time.

White was fined £166 and ordered to pay costs of £85 and a victim surcharge of £66. Dillon was fined £307, with costs of £85 and a victim surcharge of £123.

Banjo, 50, of Thornham Street, London, continued acting as a director despite failing to complete the mandatory process. She signed and delivered company accounts on behalf of J Isogony Apparel Limited while unverified, and completed verification on or around 28 May 2026.

She was also convicted after failing to file a confirmation statement within the statutory period. Banjo was fined £80 and ordered to pay costs of £85 and a victim surcharge of £32.

Daniel Hart, senior criminal lawyer at the Insolvency Service, said: “Identity verification is a legal requirement for company directors and forms a key part of efforts to improve the accuracy of the Companies House register and tackle economic crime.

“These prosecutions demonstrate that directors have responsibilities not only for their own compliance but also for ensuring unverified individuals do not continue acting as directors on behalf of a company.”

He added: “In both cases, multiple opportunities were provided for the directors to comply with the requirements before enforcement action was taken.

“There is no option to opt out. Directors who continue to act without verifying their identity risk investigation and prosecution.”

Martin Swain, director of intelligence and law enforcement engagement at Companies House, said the cases “mark an important milestone in strengthening the integrity of the UK’s company register”.

“These cases send a clear message that identity verification is not optional,” he said. “The vast majority of directors and people with significant control will comply with the new requirements, but where individuals fail to meet their legal obligations, Companies House will take appropriate enforcement action.”

Experts had predicted when the rules took effect that the corporate register would shrink under the new director verification requirements, and the checks were followed by a fall in new company registrations.

The Insolvency Service said verification can be completed online through Companies House free of charge or via an Authorised Corporate Service Provider.

About the author

Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk

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