I wanted to talk to Ian Johnston – lawyer, hard-nosed regulator, and head of the Dubai Financial Services Authority – about football.
Glasgow-born Mr Johnston and I do not see eye to eye on this matter. My Scottish football team is Celtic, currently runaway leaders of the league and destined to be champions for the sixth successive season; his, on the other hand, is another team from the same city (I can’t bring myself to type the name) who have had a hard time of it, financially and footballing, in recent years.
In fact, Mr Johnston’s tenure as chief executive of the DFSA has coincided with the worst period in his football club’s history. He wouldn’t like having that pointed out.
When we were planning lunch, we originally decided on the Capital Club in the Dubai International Financial Centre that serves as a locus for business meetings and social events in the emirate’s investment hub. But the morning of our meeting I had a call from his office saying that the venue had changed. Mr Johnston would like to go to Royal China.
I was happy with that. Nothing against the CapClub, as its members call it, but the Chinese restaurant by the Gate building is one of the best in Dubai, even if it does have a reputation for being a little pricey (like most restaurants in DIFC). And, given our footballing antagonism, a neutral venue seemed a wise choice. You never know what supporters of his team will do.
"I knew you were going to want to talk football," he said as we were shown to a discreet table at the back of the restaurant. It turned out he was disillusioned at the state of Scottish football, and not just because of his team’s dire straits.
"The English league has sucked all the money out of the game in Britain, and that’s had an effect on the quality of players in Scotland. It used to be almost parity between England and Scotland, now Scotland is just getting third or fourth rate," he said, obviously miffed.
That’s the price of globalisation, I observed, and Mr Johnston should be well used to the international forces that shape our lives. Most of his career he has been involved in efforts to develop and adopt international standards of regulation in the financial services industry, first in Australia, where he emigrated with his family as a 10-year-old, then in Hong Kong, and finally in Dubai, where he arrived as the DIFC’s head of policy and legal services in 2006.
He had trained as a lawyer and was running one of Australia’s major trust companies when he took a change of direction to join the country’s main financial services regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. This was a move from private to public sector, but he found nothing bureaucratic and dull there.

Source: The National