A Dubai property tycoon’s $10 billion plan to save Afghanistan

Building his empire

For property developers, story-building and towering ambition come with the territory. The story Mr Azizi tells of his own road to success is eyebrow-raising – involving a combination of ingenuity, grit, luck and faith.

It begins with his decision to leave Afghanistan at the age of 27, in 1989. He had been a trainee at a local law office in Kabul. But that year, the Soviet Union began withdrawing the last of its forces from the country after a decade-long, bloody occupation to prop up the communist Afghan government amid widespread revolt. The defeat of the Soviets brought one war to an end only to beget another. The Afghan communist party held on to power for another three years under a state of emergency, besieged all the while by the various armed factions who had driven out the Soviets. Everyone knew another civil war was on the horizon.

During that period, around one in five Afghans fled the country for neighbouring states. One of them was Mirwais Azizi, who took his wife and young children north to Uzbekistan. There, Mr Azizi met an Afghan businessman in Uzbekistan’s textile trade.

With only $500 to his name, Mr Azizi initially asked the man for a $5,000 loan, which he could use to get to Europe. The man countered with a better offer: that he instead loan him two containers’ worth of textiles, which Mr Azizi could sell to pay him back and then pocket some of the profits.

“In the first six months,” Mr Azizi says, leaning in slightly, his tone changing as if he knows he is about to say something unbelievable, “I made $1 million. In the six months after that, I made $7 million. It’s like magic, huh?”

The real explanation, he says, is more prosaic. The ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union created major shortages of goods, and plenty of opportunities for arbitrage. Textiles, in particular, could be imported cheaply from East Asian markets such as South Korea, where they were a critical source of foreign currency. Mr Azizi quickly found he could sell Korean textiles in Uzbekistan at a 500 per cent mark-up. He turned a $100,000 profit on the two containers his friend gave him and soon had customers ordering $150,000 worth of product a week. Before long, he had $7 million in the bank.

One morning, he says, he lost it all – and then some. He had $20 million worth of goods in inventory, most of which he had paid for on credit. While the gradual collapse of the Soviet Union had been good to him, the sudden collapse of its currency, the rouble, had – in mere seconds – cut the sales value of his product to a fraction of what he had paid.

The power this misfortune continues to have over Mr Azizi is clear as he speaks.

He was staying in Moscow at the time. “I used to smoke,” he says. “That day, I smoked non-stop. I smoked all night, too. I didn’t sleep. I started to hear the devil speaking to me.”

His inner monologue suggested he offload whatever product he could, take the money and run from his creditors. He wrestled with that thought the whole night, and in the morning, he says, he resolved to stay put.

Astoundingly, he claims, he received a call around midday from someone he didn’t really know, whom he had met at a party in Moscow the week before. The man was from a now-bust state-owned tyre company, and he was calling round whoever he knew to see if they could help him offload millions of dollars’ worth of tyres. Mr Azizi agreed and immediately began making as many calls as he could. He says he not only made back what he lost but tripled it.

“I closed my eyes and I started praying,” he remembers. “And while I was praying, I started crying uncontrollably.” It was a test from God, he says, and he passed.

By 1994, Mr Azizi had become a major player in the post-Soviet cigarette import business. Though he kept his base in the Uzbek capital, he had a network of offices across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. A chance encounter with a sales agent sourcing from a UAE distributor led him to visit the distributor’s office in Sharjah. That’s when his story in the Emirates began.

Mr Azizi spoke limited English and no Arabic, but his hosts charmed him with their Bedouin sense of hospitality. “They took me everywhere in the country,” he says. “Breakfast in Sharjah, lunch in Dubai, dinner in Abu Dhabi.” Mr Azizi was impressed – not just by the clear sense at the time that this was a country on the rise, but also with the quality of the infrastructure, the houses and the schools. It was a far cry from the post-Soviet world.

“Eventually, they asked me,” he says. “‘Mr Azizi, would you like to move here?’ And I said 'yes. How long will it take to get a visa?'”

His hosts established an office for him and arranged the paperwork within two days.

Within a few years, Mr Azizi left the cigarette business and turned his attention to oil trading, packaging and exporting oil under his own label. He developed a secure foothold in Dubai, which he would eventually develop into a springboard from which to reach billionaire status.

Looking to home

While Mr Azizi spent the 1990s growing richer, his home country Afghanistan was growing poorer. By 1996, a relatively small band of extremist Afghan militants educated in northern Pakistan, known as the Taliban, had entered the fray of Afghanistan’s civil war and taken power. The world is familiar with what happened next – girls’ education was banned, as were most social activities, along with music and television. What little of the economy remained was in its dying throes, and Afghanistan became the most impoverished country in the world. That lasted until the international terrorist group Al Qaeda, whose leaders were sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan, carried out the September 11, 2001, attack on the US, leading America to invade Afghanistan a month later and overthrow that first version of the Taliban regime (the second is the one in power today).

The establishment of a new republic in Afghanistan, backed by thousands of Nato soldiers and tens of billions of dollars in American aid, offered the prospect of something no Afghan alive at the time had ever seen: a unified, democratic country with a free market and a global stake in ensuring its success. Mr Azizi, sitting a three-hour flight away in Dubai, felt he had to go and see it for himself.

Shortly after landing in Kabul Airport in 2002, however, he was extremely disturbed by what he saw.

“This was my country, destroyed completely,” he remembers thinking. “During the 14 years I was away, the people saw only blood.” The trauma Afghans continued to endure, he said, left many of his friends and family in Afghanistan with “psychological problems”. “People needed jobs,” he says, which he was in a position to provide.

As an oil man, he began with enough petrol stations and storage facilities to employ 5,000 people. He divided his weeks between Dubai and Kabul and eventually expanded into property and construction. By one estimate, in the mid-2000s the Azizi conglomerate controlled a 70 per cent market share for petroleum products in Afghanistan. It was also involved in infrastructure works, like sewage systems, in the Afghan capital and the construction of dozens of apartment complexes. But the crown jewel was Azizi Bank, founded in 2006.

In parallel, Mr Azizi was moving into Dubai’s property market, with the launch of his own company, Azizi Developments, in 2007. It was the right place at the wrong time – just months after the launch of his first project, two residential towers for which he had sold about 100 apartments to off-plan investors, the global financial crisis hit.

With the global economy reeling, in the summer of 2008 most of Azizi’s property buyers informed the company that they could no longer afford to make their payments and wanted out. Here, Mr Azizi once again invokes his feelings about paying people back.

“We paid back all of their [10 per cent] deposits,” he says. “Everyone except one person – still, we can’t find them.”

He managed this, he says, by pulling money from his other businesses, though the fact that construction had not started meant that the deposits had not yet left escrow. By this account, his losses amounted to only what was spent in design and marketing.

Mr Azizi was far from the only property developer in the region to have suffered during the financial crisis. But he is well-known among his peers for the force with which he bounced back. One developer The National spoke to attributed this to his willingness to re-enter the market quickly, benefitting as a result from better deals.

The market rewarded him handsomely. By 2018, his project pipeline in Dubai amounted to $12 billion spread across more than 200 properties. Mr Azizi himself had become a feature of Dubai’s landscape in the vein of his buildings and had earned the nickname of the “Afghan Ambani” (after the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani).

Still, he kept one foot planted firmly in Afghanistan. After all, he is $1 billion deep into that country. But now, he says, he is “thinking about building something that nobody else has built in the last 100 years”: a power plant that meets Afghanistan’s needs.

It’s not for lack of trying. The electricity situation in Afghanistan has long been dire. The Soviet war devastated the country’s infrastructure to the point where by the mid-1990s, only one in 10,000 Afghans had access to electricity. Today, even after 20 years of US occupation in which western countries ploughed billions of dollars into the Afghan energy sector, fewer than half of urban Afghans have electricity; in the countryside, it’s one in 10.

Nearly 80 per cent of the country’s power is imported from neighbouring countries, but even that is unreliable and, increasingly, unaffordable. Regular blackouts prevent all manner of critical things, from sewage sanitation to hospital surgery. Afghans across the country frequently burn coal and even rubbish to heat their homes.

But Afghanistan’s hunger for electricity is growing quickly. According to the Afghan Ministry of Energy and Water, the country’s current electricity demand stands at about 1,500 megawatts. Projections from the UN suggest that in the next seven years the level of demand will more than double, to about 3,500 MW.

The greatest opportunity is in renewable energy, such as solar and wind power. Experts say if by 2032 only 2 per cent of Afghan land had solar panels, the country could generate almost seven times the power it needs.

Before the Taliban took over the country, major electricity projects were largely funded by multilateral banks like the Asian Development Bank, one of the biggest shareholders of which is the US. That has now stopped. In 2022, Tom West, who was then US envoy to Afghanistan, gave a clue as to why. “Do we [the US] think the Taliban has earned … iconic infrastructure projects from multilateral development banks?” Mr West asked in a virtual town hall he organised for Afghan Americans. “I would argue no, especially if they’re running some of the ministries that would undertake these projects.”

With multilaterals unlikely to restart their programmes in the near future, the burden falls to the private sector. The Taliban have made limited attempts to attract investment in solar power production. For instance, two and a half years ago it issued an open tender for an investor to produce, transmit and sell solar power in Paktika province. It received no viable bids, in large part because potential investors feared that the high upfront cost and time required for a return on investment were not worthwhile when balanced against dealing with a government no other country recognises and whose longevity is far from assured.

Afghanistan’s best hope, then, would be an investor who could operate on a longer time horizon and for whom profitability is apparently not a concern. Mirwais Azizi claims to be that investor. His energy investment plan includes a 200MW solar plant in Kabul, which he aims to complete this autumn. In the next five years, he plans to build “dozens of power production centres with a total capacity of 10,000MW across the entire country”. The ultimate goal, he tells The National, is not only to power Afghanistan, but to turn it into a net exporter.

In September of last year, Mr Azizi was riding high. He had opened a materials factory in Abu Dhabi to supply his ever-growing project pipeline in Dubai, expanded his property portfolio overseas and made international headlines with the announcement of Burj Azizi.

Honouring his daughter’s memory

The following month, there was a moment in which it was as if none of it mattered. On October 29, he found himself standing beside a hospital bed in Dubai, staring at a much-weakened Farishta. Four days earlier, her condition had become critical. He maintained his sense of hope right up until her final moments, he told The National. But when it became clear there could be no preventing what was about to happen, Farishta lifted her arm from her side to catch his hand. She brought it close to her lips and kissed it.

“After that kiss, she closed her eyes and passed away soon after,” Mr Azizi told The National, as he gently rubbed the spot on his hand where the kiss fell.

Farishta was buried three days later at Dubai’s Al Qusais Cemetery, in a funeral attended by mourners from across the UAE. Many flew in from Afghanistan, too. Among those who gave their condolences in person was Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, UAE Vice President and Ruler of Dubai.

His daughter’s death put the fire of a new mission into Mr Azizi. “I didn’t want anyone else to feel this pain,” he told The National. Even as he was in mourning, he immediately set to work on building her legacy. In January, he took to the stage at the Arab Hope Makers Awards ceremony in Dubai to announce a Dh3 billion ($817 million) donation to the Father’s Endowment campaign, to help build a new cancer research hospital in the emirate.

The hospital he envisions will be part of a larger medical complex, where the world’s top cancer experts and cutting-edge treatments will be available free of charge.

"I’ve made many donations to different charities because I have always wanted to do this. But when my daughter passed away, I became more aggressive with the idea," Mr Azizi said. "I want to build a top-tier medical complex – not just for cancer, but for other specialities as well. I’d like to include a research centre, along with commercial properties, so that all the revenue generated goes back into the hospital. This hospital will not be for business and the commercial properties around it will help sustain it."

"Why do we have to send things abroad, like laboratory samples?” he adds. “Why can’t we have everything here? We want a research centre so that if there are any new treatments or medications, Dubai will be the first to receive them."

True to form, he has taken that mission to Afghanistan, too. On February 20, a few days before his interview with The National, Mr Azizi spoke at a podium at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, surrounded by microphones from nearly every Afghan broadcaster. To his right was the Taliban’s 'Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan' flag, and sitting before him was nearly every senior figure in the Taliban administration, as well as several dozen businessmen and a host of camera crews.

There, he announced, in addition to his $10 billion investment plan, that he was giving $500 million to set up, in the south of Kabul, the Farishta Azizi Medical City, which includes a 400-bed cancer treatment hospital, a 200-bed maternity and gynaecology hospital, an orphanage for 10,000 children, a medical university, a nursing school and residences for medical students and doctors. A video of the project shown to Taliban officials, and seen by The National, also included plans for a girls’ high school.

“I sincerely hope our efforts,” he said, “will serve as a small ray of hope for our people, who have endured many years of hardship and deprivation.”

The crowd sat in stunned silence. The donation was considerable in the context of today’s Afghanistan, but there was also an elephant in the room.

Female education above the sixth grade is currently banned in Afghanistan. The Taliban say the ban will remain in place until the country can devise a more “appropriate, Islamic” system of education. But it is hard to see how this will happen in the near future, given three years since the birth of their administration no such system has been announced.

Many Afghans have tried to lobby their new rulers, privately and publicly, to reopen girls’ schools. Some civil society activists have been jailed for speaking out. There are also members of the Taliban administration who have expressed their support for female education. But by and large, they have done so obliquely.

The Taliban have reacted furiously to lectures from international donors on their position, which has – if anything – only hardened. In December, they announced that the ban applies to female education in midwifery and nursing, too, rendering Mr Azizi’s plans to build facilities for both even stranger.

But if Mr Azizi’s story demonstrates anything, it is perhaps that in view of the bigger picture he is unafraid to take risks. It has always worked out for him before. In his speech to the Taliban officials at the Intercontinental, he made clear that Afghanistan’s only path out of poverty was to open the door to education for all its citizens, including girls.

Then he took some questions, shook some hands and left for the airport, boarding his jet back to Dubai.

Did the Taliban not object to his plans? When The National put that question to him, he replied confidently that in time they would come round. And so that day, at least, no objections were raised.

“They were sitting there [when I said it],” he points out. “They said nothing.”

In front of their richest compatriot – the man who was putting down $10 billion where no one else would, who was spending $500 million more to empower their daughters after losing his own, and who was, to recall his own words, “creating the story of their country” – what was there to say?