Bambi in Abu Dhabi

Yeah, true.

Blue Cat

well the schools break up tomorrow so ask me again in two weeks

Roadking

I think after the holiday is when we will see how many have left, this one and summer will probably give a clear picture. We'll see.

Blue Cat

I was at a school event today, 6 classes of 4 year olds being presented achievement awards. Will be interesting to see how many classes there are in September.

Jim Smith

Well two of my friends who work for European controlled companies say one company laid off 50 and the other 30. Also there definitely has been a drop in traffic out of The Gardens on to Shk Zayed Road. Before Xmas it took at least 3 light phases to get onto SZR and I was thinking I would have to leave earlier but suddenly at XMAS it was 1 phase only and they never came back after, as I expected. Agree figures are hard to come by but definitely seem to be less people around, and I guess its not because most people are cutting back on spending?

Blue Cat

another thing is how many Dads are doing the school run, I see alot of Dad's at school these days when we usually never see any.

banter64

I know one family with 3 kids that literally up and went overnight leaving everything.

Being in HR we see is quite alot, it is normally the middle line employees that do a runner although we had one guy who had seem to have settled it all - the day after he flew we had an legal consultants on behalf of HSBC fax us for his whereabouts his debts were in the region of 500k and the car is nowhere to be seen

IndieG

I notice because I see our provisions for bad debts rising sharply month after month on account of skips......

Roadking

But, yet again, there are few actual cases of people who know skippers. Lots of this and that, but few actuals...????

shakh your bootie

Yeah, you rumbled it. It's all a myth, there are no loan skips and no credit crunch in Dubai.

Go buy a villa.

Roadking

Hey, SYB, not saying that. Chill yer jets, man.

Do you know any skips?

IndieG

What do you mean by ''actual" ? Banks provide 100% as soon as a customer is not contactable...

Roadking

Not overly concerned about the banks, they created the problem through poor lending criteria and lack of due process.

Actual refers to anyone on here who "actually" knows someone who has skipped. I'm not saying there isn't a problem, I'm trying to undertsand what is the scale of the problem - and not from a banks perspective. They now have the ideal opportunity to lay off poor underwriting problems and blame "skips".

shakh your bootie

Tchah, ezeee me brudda - me just larking wit ya, seeeen?

No, not a Dubai skip. I knew a grundgie Aussie once that skipped out of the UK with debt, don't believe they ever caught up with him....

Back when I was a student I used to work in the debt collection dept of Citibank - there was a policy there that if the value was smallish (less than 10K) and there was no collection for a couple of years then the debt would get written off....

It's all part of the system - if you lend money, some folk won't be able to pay it back and you gotta be prepared to write it off. Everything's fine so long as you can still turn a profit, like. Least, that's how I see it.

Roadking

I and I be righteous, man.

Problem is the banks are no longer making profits so they will attack the poor sods they foolishly lent money to in the first place.