According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), “The tightknit business community here has been rocked by a series of probes into alleged financial misdeeds at some of Dubai's biggest and best-known financial and real-estate firms. As word of fresh arrests and police interrogations leaked out over recent months, government officials and executives at companies involved have disclosed little about the probes. That has raised fresh questions about transparency and due process in the emirate.”

In response to the news, Dubai’s public prosecutor Issam al-Humaidan has commented: “The strictness with which some violations that emerged in the recent past were dealt with, confirms the government's commitment to maintaining the highest global standards in fighting corruption and enhancing its achievements in the economic, financial and legislative fields," reports ArabianBusiness.com.

Similarly, the office of Dubai leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum has warned that "there will be no tolerance shown to anybody who tries to exploit his position to make illegal profits" (The Economist Intelligence Unit, EIU).

"It's a message to those inside as well as the outside. Insiders have to play by the rules," said Eckart Woertz, an economics analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, in an interview with WSJ. "And to outsiders, that [are] here, we do play by the rules."

However, according to a report in The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, critics argue that “the anti-corruption drive merely addresses the tip of the iceberg, ignoring some of the underlying problems of doing business in Dubai, where state-owned companies rarely issue economic data and regulations are sometimes applied unevenly.”

The same report quotes Christian Koch, director of international studies at the Gulf Research Center, who claims: “The authorities are having to bring these cases to light because if they did nothing, they were bound to emerge on their own…Fighting corruption may be painful in the short term, but it is absolutely necessary for sustained economic growth.”

On 23 September, the EIU reports that none of those held in connection with the cases has been put on trial yet.