Illustrative engagements

A family in Dubai had run a trading business for three decades under the direction of its founder, who grew the company from a single warehouse into an operation supplying retailers across the Gulf. Two of his three children worked inside the business alongside him. The third had established a career abroad and had little involvement in daily decisions, though she remained an equal shareholder on paper.

When a regional competitor approached the founder with an offer to acquire the company outright, he was ready to accept. He had spent forty years running the business and did not feel obliged to continue simply because it carried his name. His children agreed the offer was fair. What they had not agreed on was how the proceeds would be divided, and how the sister living abroad would stay involved in decisions that used to happen informally over dinner.

Safa Wealth was brought in three months before the sale completed, initially just to review the terms of the transaction from the family's side. It became clear early on that the larger issue was what would follow the sale, not the sale itself. We held a series of separate conversations with the founder and each of his grandchildren to agree a structure for the proceeds. That included a shared account for jointly held assets, and a quarterly call so the sister abroad was never told about a decision after it had already been made.

The sale closed just under a year after the first conversation with Safa Wealth. The founder now serves on the family's investment committee in an advisory capacity, a role he says suits him better than he expected. His children hold equal votes on major decisions, and the sister abroad has missed only one quarterly call in two years.

A family divided its time between a home in Dubai and a townhouse in London, spending roughly half the year in each city depending on the school calendar for the younger children and the business commitments of the father. Over the past decade, the family had gathered a private bank in Dubai, a separate private bank in London, an accountant in each city, and a property manager in London who reported to no one in particular.

Each side operated independently of the other. The Dubai bank held the family's main investment accounts and had no visibility into the London side beyond an annual summary the family forwarded manually. When the family decided to purchase a second London property as an investment, the Dubai-based advisers began drafting an offer without knowing that the London-based property manager had already submitted one on the family's behalf through a different agent. The two offers reached the seller's solicitor on the same afternoon.

The family came to Safa Wealth shortly afterward, initially just to establish what had happened and prevent it recurring. We began by requesting a full set of statements covering every account and property the family held, along with a list of every adviser involved in managing them. Once assembled, we set up a shared calendar of upcoming decisions, visible to every adviser involved, and became the only party authorised to initiate a new transaction above a set threshold on either side.

Eighteen months on, the family's two households operate from the same calendar and the same running record of decisions. The property manager and the two banks each have a direct line to Safa Wealth, which the family says has removed most of the back-and-forth that used to happen when something needed approval from both sides.

An entrepreneur in his early seventies had established three companies over four decades, spanning construction and logistics, along with a small hospitality portfolio he had taken on almost as a hobby in his fifties. None of the three businesses had a written plan for what would happen if he became unable to run them, whether through illness or a change in what he wanted from his time.

His four children all worked somewhere inside the businesses, though their roles had developed informally over the years without any deliberate plan behind them. Two ran day-to-day operations at the logistics company. One managed the hospitality properties. The fourth handled finance across all three businesses, a role she had taken on herself a decade earlier simply because someone needed to and no one else wanted it. None of this was written down anywhere, and none of the children knew for certain what their father intended for the future of the businesses he still, technically, owned outright.

Safa Wealth was introduced to the family through the founder's longtime lawyer, who had raised the subject of succession with him unsuccessfully for years. The first several meetings were with the founder alone, establishing what he wanted for each business, separate from what his children had assumed for years. Only once that was established did we bring the children into the conversation, one at a time at first, then together. The process took the better part of a year and included several difficult conversations, including one in which the daughter who managed finance discovered her role had never been discussed with her siblings as a permanent arrangement.

The family now has a written governance document covering all three businesses, agreed and signed by the founder and all four children. It sets out who is responsible for which business, and what happens if the founder is no longer able to make decisions himself. The document is reviewed annually. The first scheduled update, agreed with the family, will formally give the daughter managing finance the title and authority that matches a role she has already been doing for a decade.

A family had accumulated property and business interests across five countries over two generations: an apartment in London bought in the 1990s, a hospitality investment in Portugal acquired more recently, an operating business in the UAE, and smaller holdings picked up along the way that no single person could fully account for.

Each acquisition had been handled by whichever adviser was closest to the family at the time, usually a different one for each country, and none of them had ever been asked to look at the family's holdings as a whole. When the family patriarch passed one of his adult children a partial list of assets ahead of a planned trip, both of them were surprised by how much had been left off it.

Safa Wealth spent the first several months of the relationship gathering what existed: title deeds, company registrations, bank statements, and the names of every professional who had ever acted on the family's behalf. Several properties turned out to be held in the name of an entity nobody in the family could explain, set up years earlier for reasons that had since been forgotten. One bank account in a fourth country had not been accessed in over six years.

Once the record was complete, we worked with the family to fold every holding into a single legacy structure, with defined lines of ownership and one point of contact for any adviser needing information about the family's affairs. The family now reviews that structure annually, and has already used it once, when the eldest son needed to prove ownership of their Portugal property to a local bank within a matter of days, a task that would previously have taken weeks to establish.

A family had given generously to causes across education and healthcare for well over a decade, almost entirely through the decisions and personal chequebook of the family matriarch. She kept no formal list of the organisations she supported, relying instead on memory and a longstanding relationship with each one.

When her health began to decline in her late seventies, her children realised how much they did not know. They could name perhaps half the organisations she had supported over the years and had no record of how much she typically gave to each organisation, or through what account.

The family approached Safa Wealth to help formalise what had, until then, existed only in the matriarch's memory and a drawer of old correspondence. Over several months, we worked with her and her children to identify every organisation she had supported in the past five years and set up a foundation structure to carry the giving forward on a documented basis.

A small committee of three family members now approves the foundation's giving each year, following guidelines the matriarch helped set before her health made that more difficult. The organisations she cared about most continue to receive support without interruption, and the family now has a written record of decisions that used to exist only in her memory.