No, this isn’t a political rally or a rock concert, but the scene outside Emaar’s head office. Over the weekend, the real estate developer put 188 off-plan houses on sale for under Dhs1 million for three bedrooms. The townhouses are part of a development called Mira, which is anticipated to be completed by 2016. The greater area Reem is expected to be home to schools, parks, a go-karting track, a rock climbing wall, a skate park, cinemas and an amphitheatre, among other things.

What set the sample sale apart from others was the price: with a two-bedroom villa at Arabian Ranches being retailed for Dh1.8 million, it is safe to say the Mira townhouses were going for prices well-below the market level. It is estimated that well over 800 potential buyers queued up with the hope of snagging a deal. So what is Emaar playing at?

“It was only a sample size of units being offered to the market – which in the grand scheme of things is not many units – but the publicity which they got from it was worth a fortune because those videos are playing around the globe as we speak” said Richard Paul, Head of Valuations at Cluttons.

The logic being, selling 188 units well-under market value with the hopes of recovering costs through other sales in what will be a much larger development. And while the initial interest garnered by such a sale may help boost Dubai’s real estate portfolio, some say it may be potentially harmful for the UAE’s reputation.

“It gives the false impression that there is a frenzy of demand. The rates of growth that we are seeing in the residential sector as a whole are not that dramatic and they are actually slower than they were towards the end of last year.  It is not the sort of frenzied growth at this stage, but this picture we are getting gives a misleading impression. It give a false sense of the true strength of the market” said Craig Plumb, Head of Research at Jones Lang LaSalle.

“This kind of publicity will, in some ways, scare people off from other markets who might start thinking “we are going back to the situation we had in 2006 and 2007, and look what happened there,” he added.

According to Jones Lang LaSalle’s latest report, the residential market is growing. While the rates of growth in the residential sector as a whole are not as dramatic as the video may suggest, there is demand and prices are increasing. It is important to note that the quarter-on-quarter increase on all properties in Dubai has only been three percent.

“Potentially, you worry that the serious investors – not just the people who are getting down there because they think that it is a crazy deal and that they can buy and then just flip it in a week – will be turned off by such a stunt. (The UAE) wants to be known in the market as a sensible player and somebody who builds good products for good demand in a sustainable market where people can feel confident they can put their money and their big investments into the region.

“But when you have people jumping queues and fighting and acting like they are at a rock concert, it doesn’t really give you that sense of confidence in the real estate market” said Paul.

Clearly this is a strategy which is being used to use lower prices as bait to get traction and garner. Yet, if Dubai is serious about developing long-term maturity, it is in everybody’s interest that we see a period of sustained growth, rather than a shorter period of rapid growth, which will lead to unsustainable prices and unsustainable rents.

Banks in the UAE have been known to ruthlessly chase you to take up one, two or even three credit cards the minute they sniff out a respectable salary. They will encourage you to make use of their advanced cash options, overdraft, car loans, personal loans and the list goes on. Skip one payment and watch as that encouraging energy turns into a high-speed chase where the bank and an external outsourcing agency hunt you down. They have even gone as far as reaching out to customers on their personal social media profiles.

What can really get under your skin is being hunted down despite being ‘innocent’. What if you didn’t miss a payment? What if you were chased for outstanding payments years after you’ve finalised your balance and ended your relationship with that bank? Kipp narrates a story of one of many that have fallen victim to a bank’s unethical procedures…

“In April 2007, I settled all my outstanding balance on my credit card with the bank,” Jon Maylo says (name changed). “I received a final settlement receipt and in August of 2007, I closed my overdraft account with one payment in full. Years later I got a call from a funny lady who was from a collection agency that the bank had hired. She asked me to pay my outstanding due for the overdraft and credit card.”

Maylo laughed, certain that this was a simple mistake, and told her that he has had no outstanding payments since 2007. In fact, he hasn’t even had any dealings with them since. The woman told him that she received certain instructions and no additional information. The only thing with her was a letter from the bank requesting for the payment.

After several more calls and similar requests, Maylo had enough and decided to meet the woman from the agency; Face-to-face and cheque book in hand. “I told her simply that if she could show me evidence that I owe the bank any payment and that it is compliant with Central Bank rules, then I would be glad to pay,” Maylo continues. “She failed to show me any proof except for the same letter from the bank.”

After having exploded and demanded that she stopped calling, the lady urged Maylo to speak to the bank directly, and so he did. The bank printed out his previous statement which, as he was confident of all along, displayed a crystal clear AED 0 balance. “I asked the representative to explain to me why this collection agency was unleashed on me while I owe them nothing. He of course, had no clue and directed me to the collection department representative.”

Under the rules, announced in early April with a Sept. 30 deadline, any bank’s lending to the governments of the seven-member UAE federation and related entities is capped at 100 percent of its capital base. Lending to a single borrower is limited to 25 percent. There was previously no limit.

The rules aim to prevent any repeat of Dubai’s corporate debt crisis, which erupted in 2009 as the real estate market crashed. The crisis was worsened by local banks’ excessive exposure to government-related entities (GREs).

Because many of the largest UAE banks are over the new limits, and it could be damaging to them and the economy if they tried to sell off loans to GREs quickly, bankers generally expect the central bank to extend the deadline.

But the central bank has not confirmed this and commercial banks have not been able to obtain information on the central bank’s intentions. A meeting between commercial banks’ chief executives and central bank officials last Tuesday failed to clarify the situation.

“Although there were deliberations, we have not received anything from the central bank as of today,” one commercial banker said on Sunday, adding that there had been no news of an extension of the deadline or anything to the contrary. He declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Many bankers think a six-month extension is likely. “We expect the start of implementation to be extended by another six months to end-Q113 and include exceptions that would not derail the overall Dubai GRE refinancing process,” said Bank of America Merrill Lynch in a note last week.

Bankers also expect that no formal sanctions will be levied against lenders which missed the Sept. 30 deadline, given the lack of clarity in the situation.

“We have not heard anything on this,” the banker said.

IMPACT

Since the largest UAE banks have been supporting GREs during debt restructurings, clarity on the issue is important for the economy.

According to an April 9 research note by Deutsche Bank, the exposures of Emirates NBD and National Bank of Abu Dhabi were at 192 and 199 percent of capital respectively. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, another state-owned lender, stood at 108 percent.

A large amount of loan assets did not appear on the secondary market in the run-up to the deadline, a sign that local banks weren’t worried about the approach of the date, said aDubai-based banking source.

A massive sell-off of GRE-linked loans would have been both uneconomic and impractical; for example, NBAD would have had to offload 26.5 billion dirhams ($7.2 billion), equivalent to 16 percent of its loan book, to comply with the new rules, according to a May 23 Arqaam Capital report.

However, some local banks have become less energetic in pitching for new business, bankers said.

“We’re full up so it (lending to GREs) doesn’t turn us on in the same way,” said a banker at a local lender, adding that his institution would have to think carefully about joining deals underway such as the $4 billion fund-raising for Emirates Aluminium.

Local banks have been key to funding loans to local names in the last 18 months, especially as many European banks have withdrawn from the Gulf because of problems in their home markets.

Therefore, any move by local banks to scale back their commitments could have significant repercussions for the UAE economy. Many large-scale infrastructure projects are in the pipeline, such as construction of the UAE’s first nuclear power plant.

However, bankers aren’t panicking just yet.

“They are certainly more cautious, but they are still pitching for business,” the Dubai-based source said of local lenders.

The businesses were excited at the prospect of monitoring second to second details, making promises to their clients that they could actually keep and knowing exactly how many times their advertisements were viewed or even better; clicked. They could keep an eye on everything while knowing whether they were getting their money’s worth.

However, they began to learn that the digital age is a curse and a blessing, because as much as we owe the Internet for our daily dose of work, success, entertainment, connectivity and information it still remains an open sewer and in an open sewer, you can trust very few. Facebook for instance has over 950 million users that sign in from all around the globe which meant that a business could potentially afford to target the eyes of anyone in any part of the world. Having the power to display yourself to the age and gender of your choice to anybody in any city in the world at the click of a mouse sure is tempting, isn’t it?

What if you found out that your hard earned dollars may be going to waste though; going down the wrong end of the sewer? Facebook’s business model relies on its advertising worth and if that worth declines then Google beams. Why would the most popular social network on earth lose its advertising value, you might wonder. Well, according to company filings published by the company, a figure close to 10 percent of their total users have been described as fake accounts and this comes at a time of heavy interrogation and scrutiny for the social giant.

Over 83 million Facebook accounts are deemed to be fake and categorized into different categories of illegitimate accounts. The categories that make them, from an advertising point of view, a waste of space are duplicate profiles – belonging to already registered users –made up the highest percentage. The second was user-misclassified accounts that include personal profiles for businesses or pets and finally the last percentage of illegitimate profiles were described as “undesirable”.

Following a report by the BBC, when they investigated the effect that this would have on advertisers, the spokesperson dismissed the problem. ”We’ve not seen evidence of a significant problem,” a spokesman told the BBC.

Whether they may have seen a significant problem is irrelevant, because it is certain that advertisers have and continue to do, as they continue to doubt Facebook and demand proof that the clicks their advertisements are receiving are real. Many companies are beginning to wise up and demand answers, only to find that the social network may be less than hospitable.

A digital distribution firm Limited Press, were one of the many companies that took its own initiative to investigate the matter. According to their own analytics software, 80 percent of the received clicks on its Facebook advertisements had come from fake users, otherwise known as bots.

“Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply,” the UK based company posted on their Facebook page. “Do we know who the bots belong to? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue? No. Is it strange? Yes.”

As per a report by Arabic Daily, Emarat Al Youm, the CBUAE has stipulated several clauses where the bank that you owe will have full authority to demand immediate and full payment.

The newspaper says borrowers will be required to furnish a letter from their employers committed them to have their salary and end of service benefits transferred to the bank furnishing the loan for its duration; so you won’t have a legal choice in the matter and whatever the company owes you will immediately be passed on to your bank.

These specific cases are mentioned below:

1) Borrower is terminated for any reason from his/her employment: Great time to ask for immediate full payment?

2) Transfer of the monthly salary of the borrower or any part of it to another party without the written consent of the bank: Fair enough, perhaps the trust is gone!

3) Failure to pay three consecutive installments or six non-consecutive installments: Also could be considered as justified.

4) Invalidity of customer data: Why not ask for a correction first?

5) Borrower leaves country permanently: Let’s hope that doesn’t happen!

6) Death of borrower: No comment.

7) Bank has the right to obtain an insurance policy on the life of the debtor in case of disability and should be paid by the borrower himself.

The three key forms cover personal loans, car financing and overdraft and they are all binding to all the 51 banks and other financing firms operating in the second largest Arab economy.

Loan and Cheque rules in the UAE have without a doubt hit many hindrances along the way, and with a bankruptcy law in draft there may be a need for some strings to be loosened. Although many figures, including Police General Dahi Khalfan may condemn the law that stipulates prison time in the event of bounced cheques, there appears to be a conflict of interest trapped between the pressure to provide human right freedom and the risk of borrowers fleeing the country.

Furthermore, a Central Bank source informed Gulf News that an additional banking law is being put into place which stipulates that UAE banks have the authority to blacklist you if 4 or more issued cheques have been bounced.

“The purpose of this new rule is to reduce court cases due to bounced cheques especially with small sums,” the source pointed out.

To conclude on a mind boggling statistical note, the total number of the presented cheques were 28,499,858 million worth Dh1, 219,003,518,373.00 which is Dh1.2 trillion, UAE Central Bank statistics showed. Statistics of each month in 2012 were also measured showing a rate of 5.5% of those cheques returned.

Committing yourself to personal loans, overdrafts or even cheques is definitely no breezy matter and the consequences could be dire. Consider all other options and strategies before you plunge into the deep end, and now you have 7 extra reasons to reconsider.

For instance, if you miss a payment for a personal loan, the bank can demand a payment of the entire amount lent in addition to accrued interest and late payment fees. Banks also require loan recipients to submit a ‘security cheque’ as collateral. In the event of a late payment, the bank can chose to cash in this security cheque. When this security cheque bounces you are in hot water.

As per Article 401 submitting a bounced cheque is punishable by a stint in jail lasting anywhere from a month to three years—in addition to a fine. After serving the period, the amount due has to be paid in full—failure to do so could result in more time in jail.

If harsh and outdated are the words coming into your mind, you are not alone. Professionals and experts in the field have called for a rethinking of the current system and repercussions for some time now. After all, shouldn’t the bank also be responsible for a thorough background check to assess the financial stability of the recipient of a loan? Currently the only requirement for getting a loan is a salary of Dh 8,000 and a residence visa. Rather lax criteria considering customers can get loans up to and exceeding 20 times their monthly salary. How exactly does this qualify as evaluating risks?

Or what about current policies in place concerning final salary payments? As per the current regulations a bank can freeze your account if you lose your job. Tough luck, huh? After your last salary is paid to your account, the bank has the right to freeze your account and your credit card. If you have an outstanding amount due for a personal loan, the bank also has the right to take an amount out of your current account and place it in a temporary holding account.

So, here is the question do you think UAE banks are given too much power? Surely one should exercise caution and responsibility when applying for a loan; but is the threat of a jail sentence allowing banks to abuse the system? Kipp wants to know your thoughts on the matter. Have you or anyone you know ever been a victim of such abuse? What do you think needs to change in order to have a better regulated banking system?

But just getting social isn’t enough. If you want your company to be a social networking champion, you better be seriously networking and you better be genuinely social. Here in the Emirates, however, companies aren’t as socially-savvy as they should be: in fact it isn’t rare to find local brands that have a mere shell of a profile on a social networking website.

The Test

So, through, not so very scientific means, we decided to put our hypothesis to the test and find out just how socially active are brands here in the UAE. We limited experiment to Facebook, finding pages of a variety of different local brands: ranging from food, cupcakes, furniture and beauty salons. We posted a comment, a complaint or just an inquiry and then measured the rate of response and quality of responses. Because we knew that it might take some a tad longer than the others, we gave it a good two weeks.

Our findings? Well a little bit of good, a little bit of bad and of course some of the ugly.

The Good:

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised, but we got a great response from the team at Cobone. They were the fastest to reply to our inquiries, replying in under 11 minutes. When pushed, Cobone sent us a link to look at more of what we were looking for. Their Facebook page had 9,886 likes at the time of publication.

Eva to Cobone: Planning on buying a smart phone soon, or should i wait for an excellent offer from cobone? Just asking, any super savers for smart phones in the cobone pipe line?

11 mins later: Cobone: Hi Eva! Stay tuned as we’ll try to introduce some great electronics deals, including smart phones!

Eva back to Cobone: the devil is in the details…could you elaborate?

15 mins later: Cobone: We’ll try our best to get smart phone deals to our customers in the near future. Meanwhile checkout our current electronics deals via this link

Now by comparison of the other brands, replying in under 11 minutes makes Cobone look like a Super Social Networker, but in real-time it isn’t the best a company can do. When companies say they are online, what they are really saying is that they are available 24/7. They are saying you must (and can) talk to us because we are extremely accessible and we want to talk right back to you, right now.

I am reminded of the first time we, at Kipp, decided to order a pizza from NKD Pizza-a quick “thank you” on the N_K_D Pizza wall got us a reply and recommendation within a minute. Now that is the kind of social media presence every company should aspire to. [Though, it must be said, that this time around when I was testing out our little theory I was a bit disappointed to get a response from NKD Pizza in nearly an hour.] N_K_D Pizza has 2,500 likes so far.

(CONTINUED TO NEXT PAGE)

For a good part of my first hour at the Dubai Airport Expo, I went from stall to stall inquiring about the special offers on smartphones. Naively, I expected to see at least some kind of discount in the phones on sale, yet what I found was what is commonly accepted by most GITEX shoppers. Though there aren’t real discounts on mobile phones as such, GITEX provides the shopper with a lot of freebies.

Take for instance the first stall that I walked into, CompuMe. For every Blackberry Torch 9860 one bought, the team threw in a free car charger and an original Blackberry bluetooth headset. Then there are the special GITEX “bundles” where stores offer two products at a discounted price: a Blackberry Curve and Playbook for under Dh2k from Jacky’s. But if these aren’t enough to tempt you, surely the good ol’ scratch and win offer from HTC, for buying any one of their phone, may be enough to tempt you.

Given that the phones aren’t any cheaper here at GITEX, I was hoping to save a few dirhams by snagging a great deal with one of the telecos, as I mentioned earlier. But before I go on any further, I have a confession to make, though I said I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted I did have an inclination towards the Samsung Galaxy S series. I was first introduced to the phone by a colleague. I played around with it at work and thought it was a pretty smooth, sweet-looking phone. It was easy to use and pretty to play with. There were other phones on my mind, like the cool Blackberry Torch and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray. But pushed for a choice, it would probably be the Samsung Galaxy; both for its attractive interface and even more attractive price.

But back to my cunning, albeit misguided, attempts to snag a deal here at GITEX; as I approached the Samsung store, the young salesman, or should I say sales boy (complete with a very Bieber-esque hairdo), enlightened me of a fantastic deal from du. Apparently if you bought a few members of the Samsung Galaxy family from du, you would walk away with a data package of 1 GB every month for an entire year. Already congratulating myself for proving the naysayers wrong, my happiness lasted until I walked up to the du stall to seal the deal.

At du, I had the misfortune of dealing with, what would have to be, two of the silliest girls in the world. After teasing the information out of them, I came to realise that the special offer with the Samsung phone comes at a price – Dh100 a month to be specific. It is actually a great deal – providing you go with a 1 GB data package, 100 minutes of both local and international calls each, 50 local and international SMSes each. No doubt a good deal, in a country where a data package with “free calling time+smses” and 10 MB of data costs no less than Dh99 a month. Whereas in du, if you just wanted a data package of 1 GB only, you would be set back by Dh200 a month, in Etisalat the charge for the same is Dh145 a month. A bit of a difference, but still too steep in my opinion.

And while I felt almost convinced that I had found the GITEX offer for me, I got severely tempted when I approached the Etisalat podium. There is an excellent offer for the Blackberry Bold 9900: you pay Dh1,299 for the device (which ordinarily is something around Dh2,500) as long as you commit to one of their postpaid packages, Seeing as telecos in the UAE have some of the best data plans for the Blackberry phones, with the price of the social package costing as low as…

(CONTINUED TO NEXT PAGE)

Some time back, after several calls from the Etisalat e-life team, encouraging us to sign up for the package, we finally caved and said yes.

Now five weeks, six Etisalat technicians visits and an innumerable number of complaint calls logged later, our apartment is finally hooked up to the internet. To say the experience was tiring and tedious would be an understatement. Calling it “The most thorough test for sainthood” would be a better fit.

But let’s start from the top, shall we? Prior to our internet upgrade, we were happily on Al Shamil 256Kbps that was oh-so popular at the turn of the millennium. Sure, that meant the illegal downloads we never pursued would have been a prolonged affair. And sure, we could barely watch a video without it breaking up every two seconds to “buffer”—but overall we had no complaints. Of course, this was until we started getting call upon call from Etisalat proclaiming the wonders of e-Life. Though we politely refused, the call center did not take no for an answer.

DAY 1

The pestering lady on the phone assured us that upgrading would be a pain-free move; after all our building had been fitted with the e-Life wall-board units. She also promised that a technician from Etisalat would come to our place no sooner than two working days, to officially make the switch. After that fateful phone conversation, our Al Shamil connection was significantly faster, with a download speed of 3Mbps, even though nobody from Etisalat had been in. Impressed, we enjoyed our almost instant YouTube videos and other legal cyber activities, thinking Etisalat really got a falsely bad rep over this e-Life business. They had upgraded us prematurely and we’d soon be enjoying high speed internet in a couple of days. How silly we were to believe that it would all be so simple.

DAY 7

After waiting a week for the technician to come, we called Etisalat to complain about the no-show. We were promised that another technician will definitely come. “No we can’t give you their phone number, the technician, himself, will call you” was the response we got when we pestered them for more information. And though we were a little peeved, we should have taken this ambiguity as a sign of things to come. Over the next four weeks we had to deal with six different technicians, all entering our apartment promising to hook us up to e-Life and all leaving saying they did not have this router or that cable.

DAY 125,670.64

Even though the whole process seemed like it was going on forever, at least we could still connect to the internet while in the middle of our e-Life crisis. But the straw that broke the camel’s back, was when…

(CONTINUED TO NEXT PAGE)

Though getting a driver’s license in most other countries is a rite of passage, many like myself just dread the idea of going through with it in Dubai because of the horror stories we’ve heard from those who’ve tried. To begin with, before you can even have your first try in front of the wheel, there are piles of paperwork to be done for your file to be ‘opened.’ Then after that you have to shell out an indefinite amount of money in the thousands while you fail road test after road test for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

But I set aside all these daunting stories and decided that it was now time to toughen up, jump through all the various loops and pay them as much as they asked so I could join the group of shiny happy independent drivers. After all, how bad could learning how to drive really get?

WORST.EXPERIENCE.EVER.

Does “worst experience of my life” even begin to describe it?

Not only was it infuriating, painstakingly long and highly uninformative, it was disastrously expensive. By the time I had finally managed to get my license, I had gone for more than a 100 classes over a period of five months, braved six road tests and shelled out just under Dh13,000.

If you got your driver’s license in the early ‘90s, you might be shocked to know that getting a license has gotten as expensive as Dh13,000—but let me assure you I am not the exception. Consider the case of 35 year old Filipina Charmaine Hernane who got a driver’s license this May after shelling out Dh10,000 after four months of learning. Hernane, who works as a training coordinator at Knowledge Village, was pushed to get a driver license when she found out her new job required her to drive. She wasn’t looking forward to the experience: “I heard rumours that it is not easy here, but I said I will just give it try, I didn’t think it would take me this long and that it would be this expensive,” Hernane said with an uneasy chuckle.

Charmaine Hernane: “Be really prepared financially, and also mentally.

And though Hernane was fortunate enough to have her learning costs subsidised by her employer, as she continued to fail the road tests, she felt the pressure to get a license building up. When asked what advice would she give someone attempting to get their license, Hernane said: “I don’t think you can do anything to make it less expensive, because you don’t know on what basis they fail you. So all I would say is make sure you have more than enough money before you start because there is no stopping once you’ve paid Dh5,000 or more. Be really prepared financially, and also mentally. You have to be really prepared.”

Hernane’s words of wisdom strike me as particularly pertinent, for when I approached driving institutes to get a quick estimate before I committed, almost each one promised me the process should set me back no more than Dh4-5K. Of course, once you’ve paid the initial Dh5,000 it is pretty damn difficult to step away or start afresh.

NO PRICING REGULATION

I called up Ahmed Bahrozyan, the chief executive of licensing at the RTA to find out more of the RTA’s role in monitoring the prices driving institutes charge their students in Dubai. While he pointed out that driving institutes keep their prices relatively similar to stay competitive, he noted the most important thing was for the student to have the right to chose: “As long as the choice exists for the customer we do not get involved with the pricing that the driving institutes charge because it is the institute’s right to provide additional services and the customer has the right to pay for them, but as long he isn’t being forced to pay. “

Ahmed Bahrozyan: students can launch a complaint with the RTA and a special committee would than test the student

RTA’S SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON COMPLAINTS

Bahrozyan noted the two reasons learning how to drive can get expensive in the UAE, is if the student has opted for a special program (VIP or Friday classes only) or if they keep failing their driving tests. In the latter case, Ahmed advices students to either switch institutes if they are not pleased with the training they are receiving (and approach the RTA if the institute isn’t cooperating with the transfer) or alternatively after failing five tests the student can launch a complaint with the RTA and a special committee would than test the student.

And though the possibility of opening a case with the RTA was something I heard of for the first time when I spoke to Bahrozyan, a student would have had to fail at least five classes before they could avail of this service. Before the fifth road test, the student would already paid and taken extra classes and tests.

That could be why I’ve shied away from this subject for so long, because I suspected it might be a personal grudge which no one else shared. However, after a strange little weekend, I can no longer avoid it; I have been begged – literally, begged – to write about HSBC here in the UAE.

And not just by one person. This weekend alone, four separate people have mentioned HSBC to me independently. That’s why it has been strange. In various different social circles people have been whining about this specific bank, and telling me their stories of woe. And over my years here in Dubai, every so often other people have told me about how HSBC has failed them. Like I say, if it was just me I’d leave it alone, but it isn’t just me. It’s lots and lots and lots of people. And they’ve asked me to write something.

Like a friend of mine who had a car loan with HSBC. He saved desperately to pay it off early, because he could no longer face the monthly calls from the bank telling him his cheques were unacceptable. He wrote them all out at once in the presence of the HSBC bank manager, and they were acceptable then. But for some reason, months down the line, they were suddenly unacceptable. HSBC called him dozens of times, often when he was abroad (he said he’d been called at three in the morning because of time differences). They insisted he come to the Jebel Ali branch (miles from where anyone works, let’s face it) to give new cheques. He told them where to go, but said if they sent a driver down to him to collect new cheques he’d write a few out. After a few days of pointless arguing the bank relented, but the whole episode repeated itself monthly. Isn’t it funny how the cheques were unacceptable, but not so unacceptable that HSBC couldn’t cash them after a day or two of him refusing to visit the branch?

Or how about a woman I met at the weekend who was offered an account upgrade by HSBC. The new account came with lots of benefits, she was told, so she said okay. She was then informed that to upgrade her HSBC would have to close her current account and open a new one. “But,” my new friend said, “I have standing orders and direct debits on my account, won’t this be a problem?” She was assured that it would not be a problem, and that all standing orders and so on would be transferred. You can guess the rest – within weeks, debt collectors were chasing her as her arrangements had evidently not been transferred. In a country that locks you up for bad cheques, this is pretty serious. Trying to resolve the issue over the phone she was put on hold by HSBC for more than two hours. She had other stories about the bank, but I don’t have space here.