Emirati actual property mogul rubbing shoulders with Trump | USAEMALL.com

When Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani casually mentioned to his long-term business partner Donald Trump over dinner that he planned to expand into US data centres, the president-elect sensed an opportunity.

“He says, ‘I have a press conference in a few days, and I would like to announce that’,” Sajwani said in a Financial Times interview last week in his villa on Dubai’s man-made Palm — a symbol of the entrepot’s excess and its appeal to global millionaires, from footballers to former warlords. 

At a Mar-a-Lago press conference this month the world’s most powerful man described Sajwani as a “great investor”, as the pair stood side by side to announce a $20bn planned investment. This put a global spotlight on the Emirati entrepreneur, who started in food services and has built swaths of the Middle East’s glitzy commercial hub through his company Damac, Dubai’s biggest private residential developer.

The plan to spend $20bn over four years appears aspirational. Sajwani’s data centre company Edgnex does not yet have any contracts with tenants for their 2000MW of planned US data centres. The company, established in 2021, is close to having 15MW of operational data centres in Saudi Arabia and Thailand. The investment would be a large sum for Damac, which had $5bn in cash on its balance sheet as of June last year.

Sajwani says he expects to rely largely on bank loans to finance the plans, adding that the $20bn figure was estimated from “how much we think we can take from management time, land acquisition and our own capability of our own balance sheet”. 

Sometimes called “the Donald of Dubai,” Sajwani is regarded as an outsider by the city’s business community. Belonging to the minority Shia Muslim sect, he is seen as a hard-charging risk taker who has clung on to the rollercoaster of Dubai’s boom-and-bust property market. “The old [Dubai] families don’t really like him,” said a Dubai-based executive who has worked with Sajwani. 

Instead, the real estate mogul has found a US ally. Sajwani and Trump have known each other since 2011 when Damac and the Trump Organisation built the first Trump-branded golf course in the Middle East. 

Plans for a second, Tiger Woods-designed links in Dubai have foundered, Sajwani said, although the project remains on the Trump Organisation’s website. Nonetheless, the families have stayed connected: Trump’s sons attended Sajwani’s daughter’s wedding, and Sajwani said their wives had become friends. 

The Emirati tycoon has ties elsewhere in Trump’s inner circle. He has invested in Elon Musks’ SpaceX and xAI. The 72-year-old was pictured alongside both men at Trump’s New Year’s Eve celebration.

Since the Dubai Trump International golf course, the Trump Organisation has sold its name to developments with other partners in the region: a resort in Oman is under construction, while two towers — one in Saudi Arabia’s second city Jeddah and another in Dubai — are planned.

These Middle Eastern business ties have raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for the president-elect, although he has stepped away from the Trump Organisation. 

Trump’s sons, who run the conglomerate, are hoping to capitalise on the strong post-Covid economic growth in the autocratic, hydrocarbon-rich Gulf region. “If you’re a developer, Dubai is almost a playground for you,” Eric Trump said in an FT interview last year, calling the region’s growth “explosive”. 

Dubai’s latest boom has sent Damac’s sales soaring. Revenue for the six months to June 2024, the latest Damac Real Estate accounts available, hit $1.4bn, more than doubling from $690mn for the same period the previous year. Profit before tax jumped to $456mn, up from $297mn.

Softly spoken Sajwani, whose net worth Forbes puts at over $5bn, is the son of a market trader and door-to-door saleswoman. Local businesspeople remember his first venture in the 1980s as a fast-food outlet in a mall. Sajwani then started an industrial catering company, and bought land and property in Dubai as it was establishing itself as a regional hub in the 1990s. He founded Damac in 2002.

The company barely survived the 2008 global financial crisis, and the bursting of Dubai’s property bubble. “We were struggling to pay salaries,” recalled Sajwani. “I went to the banks in 2008, November, and told all of them I’m in a very bad shape”. He said bankers restructured his debt while he negotiated with landowners and customers.

“The guy has nine lives,” said a Dubai-based international banker. “He’s come close to imploding so many times”.

The company promoted its buildings from China to India, in an attempt to woo new buyers to Dubai’s volatile property market. But its reputation suffered from an association with poor-quality building work. “We had a challenge in 2011 and 2010,” Sajwani said.“We launched some products [ . . .] in a mediocre location. And we sold them very cheap.” He insisted the quality matched the price but acknowledged buyers may have expected better. 

“Were we perfect? No. There were buildings that, I agree, we could have done a much better job,” Sajwani admitted. “We learned the lesson . . . If you look at our buildings, which have been delivered recently in the past few years, I don’t think we had a quality issue”. 

Privately owned Damac’s brash marketing techniques shook up a property market dominated by state-backed developers such as Nakheel and Emaar. As well as complementary flights to Dubai for potential investors, Damac promised free luxury cars to apartment buyers.

Such promotions were criticised as “unethical” in 2014 by Mohammad Alabbar, chair of rival Emaar. But Sajwani called the giveaways “the best and the greatest idea”. 

Damac expanded beyond Dubai, with projects from Miami to the Maldives. However, Sajwani’s overseas adventures initially proved difficult: a 2006 land purchase in Egypt ended in a legal battle with the state following the 2011 ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak. Sajwani was sentenced to five years jail time in absentia over corruption charges in 2011, although Egypt’s prosecutor-general later suspended the sentence. Sajwani has said the trial was politically motivated. 

“After that, I stopped investing in countries where you’re going to have challenges,” Sajwani said. 

The entrepreneur has not always endeared himself to outside investors. In 2022 he delisted Damac’s shares from the Dubai stock exchange, retaking full control. Some investors complained they had funded the company through market doldrums and were being ousted as the share price was turning in their favour. 

Sajwani denies he timed the deal to reap rewards and said market “speculators” prompted the decision: “we didn’t see being public is benefiting us. We were getting a lot of negativity from the speculators”. 

US data centres are his latest risky bet. Edgnex said it initially plans to form joint ventures with established players or potentially buy existing facilities and land prepared for development. Even so, analysts said reaching its goal of 2000MW of US capacity will be difficult in such a crowded market.

“Once you have found the power, as a developer, especially as someone new to the space, the challenge is finding a spot in the queue to get all the equipment you need,” said Pat Lynch, head of real estate adviser CBRE’s Data Center Solutions team. 

“Oftentimes the biggest developers and the hyperscale [tech] companies have bought their ways into the queues several years out.” 

One industry executive said that even a $20bn investment was unlikely to make a mark: “In the context of data centres it is almost a yawn.”

Doubters are unlikely to bother Sajwani. Like his presidential business associate, Sajwani insists that his critics are uncomfortable with his role as a disrupter: “People will tell you, ‘Hussain Sajwani . . . He is a difficult man.’ Which successful man is easy?”