Despite the tensions of war, ex-Barclays CEO Bob Diamond is long Gulf. Here’s why 

“I don’t want to be dismissive, there is a war, there is a conflict, whatever term you want to use,” he said. “It’s real, and I’m not going to be dismissive of the impact that’s having on the UAE, on Bahrain, on Qatar. But I will tell you, if you take the time to get here and you’re on the ground, it’s business as usual. The kids are in school. People are working from the office. They’re not hiding at home. They’re doing business. They’re investing.” 

The former CEO of Barclays is in Bahrain to announce that the U.K.-based advisory firm, Panmure Liberum, is opening its first regional office in the kingdom. Diamond’s investment vehicle, Atlas Merchant Capital, bought Panmure Gordon for £15.5m ($21m) in 2017. It agreed an all-share merger with Liberum in 2024. 

Panmure Liberum is now one of the biggest advisors to U.K.-listed companies based on the number of clients, which total more than 250. It specializes in mid-market companies, with valuations below those served by the bulge-bracket investment banks such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. 

Panmure’s move to Bahrain will allow it to serve the whole region and increase the deal-flow for the advisory firm. Activity levels in the Gulf are in sharp contrast to the number of deals announced in the U.K. In the first half of 2026, deals in the U.K. were down 13% compared with the same period a year ago, according to PwC, a consultancy.   

 “You have all the talent in the world in London. It’s still a very attractive place for a lot of people,” Diamond said. “The skill set of advisory is very, very deep. But there’s not a lot of deals. I think the statistics on the number of companies that have gone public or raised equity is paltry compared to what it used to be, and they’re losing out not to Frankfurt or Dublin, but to the U.S. and, more and more, to the Middle East.” 

This creates an opportunity for firms keen to expand. 

“It means that we can build an advisory business here in Bahrain to serve middle market and family-owned businesses, which are dying for cover,” he said. “And we can then expand that to the Gulf Cooperation Council.” 

As one of the smaller kingdoms in the region, Bahrain, says it is able to offer agility and clear and simple regulatory rules to investors. At Gateway Gulf, Mastercard announced an expansion of its deal with the Bahrain-based fintech firm, Infinios, to facilitate business-to-business travel payments. Olayan Kimberly-Clark, the partnership between Saudi Arabia and the tissue paper production giant, announced that it would be expanding production at its Bahrain paper mill. 

“It’s a highly regulated banking sector,” Diamond said about why the kingdom was attractive. “Great banks want great regulation. It’s also a gateway, to steal a phrase from the conference, to the GCC. So all of a sudden, Panmure, which is a U.K.-focused advisory business, is now U.K. and GCC, so we’re very happy with it.” 

Diamond said that there were also opportunities for Bahrain and the rest of the Gulf to develop stablecoin payment systems, one of the fastest ways to reduce the cost of doing business. As a digital currency pegged to the dollar, it is seen as a more secure way to settle transactions. 

“Tokenization is just digitizing assets,” he said. “It’s making them more efficient. All of that relies on blockchain, which is an underpinning of 24/7 instantaneous settlement, a permanent record of every transaction. So, the regulators love it, at a fraction of the cost. It is going to be the future underpinning [for finance]. It’s infrastructure.”