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"We were given a redundancy package of six months' pay" one former staff member who was laid off last week said.

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A junior level staff member, for example, could earn about Dh80,000 (US$21,780) a month with a company such as Nakheel, according to Simon Hobart, the managing director of the recruitment firm Millennium Solutions.

Everyone was earning big money in the first six to eight months of last year, with the problems associated with that now being enormous, Mr Hobart said. Nakheel was paying people too much, it all went a bit mad. Some of these guys were only 24 or 25 years old. Today, they’d get a third of what they were on.

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