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Gargash Underscores UAE Stance on GCC Monetary Union

DUBAI — The UAE government reiterated its decision to withdraw from the GCC’s planned monetary union, one day after four of the group’s six members vowed to forge ahead with the project on their own.

The government pulled out of the monetary union last month, citing its disappointment that the GCC had chosen to base the group’s central bank in Riyadh instead of in the UAE. The announcement came as a surprise and threatened to derail the group’s troubled project to unify their monetary policies and form a single currency.

“We still stand by our decision of withdrawing from the monetary union,” Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Dr. Anwar Mohammed Gargash said, after a meeting of GCC foreign ministers in Riyadh. “The UAE has made its stance public and clear... This is a joint action... and it is normal to have divergent views in a joint action,” he said. Gargash’s counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait agreed on Sunday to proceed with a plan to create a joint monetary council, without the UAE or Oman, which had dropped out of the project in 2007.

The official UAE news agency WAM reported that Gargash wished the other member states in the monetary union good luck and added that the UAE had taken a sovereign decision that still holds. —