A United Arab Emirates plan to attack Qatar’s financial system has been revealed in a folder of an email account belonging to the UAE ambassador to the US, Yousef al-Otaiba.
The Intercept, a US-based investigative website, obtained the folder and exposed the plot, which involves an attack on Qatar’s currency “using bonds and derivatives manipulation”. Also one of the plan’s stated aims is forcing Qatar to share football’s 2022 World Cup, according to the outline.
According to the Intercept, Luxembourg’s private Banque Havilland - owned by the family of Britain’s controversial financier David Rowland - developed the plan for the UAE.
Its objective is to push Qatar’s economy to collapse, reduce the value of its bonds and increase its credit cost, ultimately creating a currency crisis that drains the country’s reserves.
Regarding the 2022 World Cup, the strategy laid out in the document calls for using a public relations campaign to point the international football body FIFA to Qatar’s dwindling cash reserves, making a case that the country cannot afford to build the necessary infrastructure.
The blockade is already raising prices for infrastructure supplies and recruiting top officials to work in Qatar has been difficult, the slides point out, Aljazeera reported.
The outline concludes with the hope that the economic war will make it harder for Qatar to continue building stadiums and other assets needed to host the games: “If Qatar now spends its reserves on protecting the currency and domestic credit markets, there is less dry powder to fund the infrastructure spending.”
The UAE, according to the document, hopes to make a push for the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council to host the global sports event across the member nations, rather than in Qatar alone.
On October 20, several weeks after the Intercept first obtained the document outlining the plan, a well-funded Twitter campaign was launched with the goal of taking the World Cup from Qatar.
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