Reuters Investigates

Dubai comeback already?

We went behind the scenes of Dubai’s debt debacle last November and found a much more sober city-state starting to rebuild itself from the $59 billion hole that was dug by the whizz kids who had powered its transformation. Loans don’t come as easy — particularly the nod and the wink of association with the royal family isn’t cutting it like it used to.

Some people see a connection between the crisis and the fact that Dubai has also started to tighten up on its trade with Iran, in line with broader international sanctions, but we’re not so sure about that.

What did come across loud and clear in our reporting is that the new-new Dubai is currently being led more by older, senior types who had been thrown off the ladder by the MBAs and the like on their way up. Some of the financial types we spoke to worried about this: we don’t need civil engineers, one said, we need financial engineers. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Morbid money-spinners

If the life settlements market seems ghoulish, here’s a British scandal which isn’t doing the image of the business any favours. It’s one of the worst the country’s seen.

Around 30,000 mainly elderly investors in the UK put their money into a company called Keydata, hoping to make a little extra cash to fund their own retirement with the promise of a healthy return.

What they were buying sounded kosher, even if it did depend on how fast their wealthy American counterparts were dying. Of course, the investors may not have known that.

As is so often the case with these things, the projections were a little optimistic. And then some other irregularities blew up. Around 100 million pounds went missing, one of the business’s partners dropped dead in Singapore and the investment company was shut down by the regulators, leaving British pensioners like Tony and Pam Tobin out of pocket.  The Serious Fraud Office is investigating.

Undeterred, the other key character behind Keydata is determined to fight the regulators’ decision.  ”I am someone who can make the impossible possible,” he tells us.

Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip?

Have Europe’s unions had their day?

Here in Europe, as spending cuts bite ever deeper, you might expect people to have taken to the streets in their thousands and be up in arms, in defence of the hard-won rights that this round of austerity is threatening. Some are, but not in anything like the numbers they have been in the past. With a Europe-wide day of action coming up on Sept 29 that may change…

But, so far at least, the most remarkable thing has been just how tame the strikes have been, how ineffective the unions look. Why is it that? Are Europe’s unions less powerful? Or less relevant? Sarah Morris in Spain and Gavin Jones in Italy found a host of reasons why young and old today are not rallying to the cause — and not just that they’re scared of losing their jobs.

Winning the popular vote in Venezuela

The results of Venezuela’s parliamentary election are in and, as we said in last week’s special report, it’s not enough to win the popular vote. The opposition to President Hugo Chavez say they have won 52 percent of the vote, but that gives them only a third of the seats in parliament. Read our latest story here.

Still, it was a major blow to Chavez and raises opposition hopes of defeating him at the next presidential election in 2012.

To see the special report on the opposition in PDF format, click here.

It’s all Brazil, all the time

Another day, another Brazil story. No, not Petrobras, though that is worth reading too.

Luciana Lopez has a story about soy and shoes. It might seem like an odd combination but the two are important industries in Brazil which is undergoing an economic transformation as it comes to terms with China’s growing global clout.

Agriculture is booming, helped by China’s appetite for soy, but factories that used to produce shoes for the global market are struggling to compete with cheaper Chinese goods.

The question is will Brazil be able to take advantage of the huge benefits from China’s growth without seeing its manufacturing industry wiped out. Read the full story here.

And if you missed our special report on Dilma Rousseff yesterday, here it is again.

In case you missed them

Just because it was summer, doesn’t mean we weren’t busy here at Reuters. Here are a few of our recent special reports that you might have missed.

Tracking Iran’s nuclear money trail to Turkey. U.N. correspondent Lou Charbonneau – who used to cover the IAEA for Reuters –  followed the money to Turkey where an Iranian bank under U.S. and EU sanctions is operating freely. Nice to see the New York Times follow up on this today, and the Washington Post also quizzed Turkey’s president about it.

Blue-collar, unemployed and seeing red – Chicago correspondent James Kelleher went on the road for this story about the long-term unemployed and what that means for Obama and the Democrats at November’s midterm elections.

Even though he’s been forced to move back in with his parents and has virtually no income, Stevenson opposes Obama’s proposal to let some tax cuts for the wealthy, dating back to George W. Bush’s presidency, expire at year’s end in order to raise revenue and reduce the deficit. 

“How is more people, keeping more of the money they earn, bad for the economy?” he said. “The answer is — it’s not.”   

Enter stage left — Brazil’s next president?

Not every president has a police mugshot, but it’s not so surprising in Latin America.

A special report out of Brazil today sheds new light on Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla leader who is likely to be elected the booming country’s next president. She spent nearly three years in jail in the early 1970s and was tortured by her military captors. She’s come a long way since then.

The product of more than a dozen interviews with Rousseff and her top advisers, the story gives a glimpse of how Rousseff could govern at the helm of a country that, with India, Russia and China, is among the worlds few economic bright spots.

The upshot: while Rousseff is not the leftist-in-waiting that many investors fear, there is legitimate concern that hers could be a status-quo presidency, unable or unwilling to push through major reforms to Brazil’s tax, labor or fiscal structure. As a result, there is a risk that Latin America’s biggest economy could eventually stagnate under her administration.

Watch Brian Winter discuss the October 3 election on Reuters Insider here.

Dive in, the water’s fine

Special reports are the best of the best from Reuters, and this is the place to find them. We’ll be featuring investigative stories, in-depth profiles and long-form narrative stories here.

Reuters has a global Enteprise Reporting team with editors in New York, London and Singapore, drawing on the work of some 2,900 journalists in 200 bureaus around the world.

To kick it off, take a look at this story from Frank Jack Daniel in Caracas. Venezuelans will elect a new parliament on Sunday and the opposition is hoping to make a dent in President Hugo Chavez’s power.

Chavez has dominated politics for more than a decade — as one opposition figure put it: “In Venezuela, you have to win elections like David beat Goliath.” FULL STORY

We’ll have more on Latin America tomorrow with a profile of Dilma Rousseff, the frontrunner in Brazil’s presidential elections.