For all those lawyers chasing princely new clients in the Middle East – and there are certainly plenty of you – beware of the UK’s pervasive ‘know your client’ regulations, which don’t necessarily translate particularly well in that part of the world.
You see, even a sheikh who runs his own country and has half the world’s oil reserves under his palace is still subject to the same humiliating client-registration process as Joe Average. This presents a problem for lawyers in the Middle East, who must be wary of angering their latest meal-ticket by asking for the gas bill to his 400-room palace all just to prove he’s really the right chap and not, presumably, the sort of ‘fake sheikh’ employed by various UK tabloids.
