The following excerpt is from The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked The World’s Oil Market, a new book by reporter Leah McGrath Goodman.
The board’s first trip to Dubai did not go smoothy. After meetings with city officials and the DDIA executives, the Nymex directors were looking forward to a night out on the town. They were told that alcohol was hard to come by in a Muslim city, but they’d also been informed Dubai had an impressive selection of exotic prostitutes. “You know what the pecking order is for prostitutes in Dubai? Arab women are the most expensive, followed by the European and American women, then Asians, then Latinas, then, well pretty much everyone else,” says the Nymex straffer who was asked by the board to look into the rates of sex workers for the night (the exchange’s budget, after all, did have a line item for “board entertainment”).
About eighteen of the twenty board members on the trip, according the staffer, wanted to go to the local brothels. “We were staying at the Emirates Towers. When I got back to the hotel that night, a board member was coming in who had two girls with him. At the hotel, you can sign in one hooker, but you have to pay a fee of $100. You can’t sign in two hookers because apparently that would be un-Islamic. The board member wanted me to sign the second girl under my name, because I didn’t have anyone with me. I didn’t want a prostitute under my name, so I wrote another board member’s name instead, and also his rom number. Then I went to bed. Hours later, I get a panicked call from the front desk. They’re telling me to come down, there’s been a big problem.” Read more »
