Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates

 

Nigerian Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Mohammed Rimi, has advised Nigerians coming to Dubai f webapex.net or genuine businesses to consult with the Embassy or the Consulate before embarking on such ventures.

The ambassador gave the advice in westernmagazine.org an interview in Dubai at the 5th Edition of the Global Business Forum (GBF) on Africa tagged `Scale-Up Africa’ which kicked off on Monday.

Rimi said that it was always better to le

“In fact, if they need assistance, we will try as much as we can to provide them with such. There are those who alre v ady have their contacts before coming.

“For us to keep track of genuine businesses, they need to let us know; even if they have a partner here when they come.

“They should let us know who their ysin.org partners are when they come here and what they are doing. Fine, if they have .

“If not, we can also do some due diligence for them,” he said.

According to him, If you tell me you are dealing with Company A and that you are coming to meet with that company, whether you ask us or not to do due diligence, I will try to find out what that company is all about.

“Because a lot of the businesses happen which are not documented by the Consulate.

“So, it very difficult sometime for us to say there is this number of visitors coming to do business here in Dubai. So we do not have the statistics of people coming to do business in Dubai,” Rimi said.

On the image of Nigerians in that country, the ambassador said that the UAE Government and its citizens had high regards for Nigerians and Nigeria.

He noted that 98 per cent of Nigerians living or visiting in Dubai were well behaved.

The ambassador, however, said that there were over 10,000 Nigerians living in Dubai,.

Rimi described the government of UAE as very liberal and tolerant to all.

According to him, the country’s government had seen the world and equally moved round the world to see what was happening around.

The first session of the Forum examined key trends and technologies driving business growth across the African continent.

Industry experts who spoke at the session noted that the new technologies and trends were reshaping Africa’s economic landscape and creating plenty of business opportunities and investment prospects which were not there before.

The Group Chief Executive Officer, Emerging Africa Capital Group, Nigeria, Mrs Toyin Sanni, during an interactive session entitled “Linking Back – the Entrepreneurial Support Chain’’, shared her views on a changing business landscape in Africa.

“A great deal has changed and there is now a lot more support. At the beginning of my career I was dependent on the goodwill of my superior – now we have in-house mentorship programmes.

“I’m happy to see entrepreneurs coming to the table,” Sanni said.