The UAE may be the least corrupt country in the Middle East, but its record is hardly unblemished. The biggest issue the nation faces is its woefully inadequate anti-money laundering framework, with complex and opaque company and property ownership structures making it all too easy to embezzle funds in the country.
In fact, the UAE has been embroiled in several major cross-border corruption scandals over the past few years. One notable example is the Luanda Leaks affair, concerning a dossier of 715,000 emails, charts, contracts, audits, and accounts that seeks to show how the former president of Angola's daughter Isabel dos Santos built her $2 billion (£1.4bn) fortune, which three separate countries have now frozen. She adopted the UAE as her country of residence after the scandal.
Transparency International notes that the UAE has also begun to show "worrying signs of decline", including a reluctance amongst citizens to speak out against corruption in the face of harsh government penalties.