About a year ago, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF) injected $7.5 billion into an ailing Citigroup. Kuwait’s fund also invested $2 billion into Citigroup and it put another $3 billion into Merrill Lynch. At the time, officials in the US and Europe suspected SWFs posed a possible threat to western nations’ economies and national security. They rang alarm bells over the funds’ lack of transparency. However, with the financial crisis sweeping the globe, western governments are now begging for investment from the GCC, as the Gulf countries have some of the few large pools of available cash in the world. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown toured the GCC in November, asking the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE to pump money into international institutions and British companies to help dampen the effects of the global crisis. During his trip, Brown told reporters the UK “welcomes investment from
