Neil Barnett

A faraway place we should care more about — as Gulf investors clearly do

Neil Barnett reports from Tbilisi

issue 12 December 2009

You may have seen the recent Georgian marketing campaign on BBC World and CNN, which looks like a splicing of The Apprentice and the title sequence from The Professionals. Among the familiar names dropped in the ad, such as HSBC, is an enigmatic one, Rakia. And this, it turns out, is not Bosnian firewater, but the acronym of the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority, which is presumably a sovereign wealth fund from that microscopic Arab emirate — though its website presents it as an inward investment promotion body, something quite different.

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