AT least 67 Mozambicans have purchased 359 properties in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, with a total value of $78.5 million, according to ‘Working Paper No. 1’ of the European Union Tax Observatory, entitled, Who Owns Offshore Real Estate? Evidence from Dubai.
The average value of each property is about $220,000. The average age of the 67 Mozambicans is 48. Nine of them are less than 35 years old, and eight are over 60. 19 (28 per cent) are women, the official Mozambican news agency, AIM, reported.
Thirteen of the 359 properties are villas and five are apartment blocks. The rest are presumably flats. The value of the Dubai real estate owned by the 67 Mozambicans is equivalent to 0.53 per cent of Mozambique’s Gross Domestic Product.
The Tax Observatory research does not give the names of any of the 67 Mozambicans. A list of names circulating on the Internet is no more than a piece of malicious fiction. The raw data consists largely of numbers, from which nationality and country of residence can be deduced, but which contains no names.
No doubt the names could be obtained – but publishing them would be illegal under both EU and Emirates law on privacy and the confidentiality of data.
The Tax Observatory paper analyses ownership of 800,000 properties in Dubai. It puts the value of offshore real estate in Dubai at minimum of $146bn – which is much more than the 2019 estimate of $66bn for offshore real estate held through shell companies in London.
The largest foreign owners of the Dubai real estate are from India (20 per cent of the total) and the United Kingdom (10 per cent).
Citizens of almost every country in the world have money salted away in Dubai properties, and some of the most startling figures come from the poorest countries. The monied elite of war-torn Afghanistan, for example, have invested the equivalent of 7.81 per cent of the Afghan GDP in Dubai real estate.
[Report may be found HERE , data table is https://gabrielzucman.eu/files/APZO2022Data.xlsx ]
Source: AIM
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