Public-private partnerships have run on the same formula for decades. A government trades delivery risk for private capital; an investor trades speed for a durable counterparty willing to sign a long contract. Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum has built a business around altering two variables in that formula: who shapes the terms, and how long the resulting partnership is expected to last. His Dubai-based firm, Inmā Emirates Holdings, claims an average project length of roughly 16 years across its portfolio, against the three-to-five-year cycles typical of private capital.
That 16-year figure comes from the firm’s own accounting, as do its headline totals of more than 35 tracked projects across upward of 15 countries and more than 75 documented interactions with governments. No outside party has audited the aggregate numbers, so treating them as the firm’s self-portrait rather than settled fact is the right starting posture. What can be examined instead is the mechanics: a handful of individually documented deals that show how the approach works when it reaches paper.
Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum’s Alternative to the Tender Process
Most partnerships start with a tender. A government publishes requirements, private bidders compete on price and timeline, and whoever wins inherits a contract designed before they arrived. Inmā, per its own description, works the sequence backward, co-structuring deals alongside state-linked entities before a formal tender exists.
Pakistan offers a dated, documented illustration of what precedes such deals. Khaleej Times reported in May 2023 that Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum led a UAE business delegation meeting Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to discuss cooperation on trade, ports, and shipping. Weeks later, AD Ports Group, together with UAE-based Kaheel Terminals, signed a 50-year concession with Karachi Port Trust to run four container berths at the port’s East Wharf.
Independent accounts of that concession name neither him nor Inmā; the firm places the arrangement inside its portfolio on its own authority. Even read cautiously, though, the pairing of events sketches the method Inmā describes: senior-level relationships first, formal instruments second.
Three Documented Deals, One Method
Green hydrogen in Sindh province came together the same way. Oracle Power, a London-listed developer, entered a joint venture in 2022 with his private office, represented through Kaheel Energy, and trade press later reported approval for a 400-megawatt green hydrogen plant powered by roughly 1.2 gigawatts of wind and solar, conditional on financial guarantees. No competitive bid produced that project; a bilateral relationship did.
Barbados put the method on official paper. Grantley Adams International Airport Inc. signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 with the Office of H.H. Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum and Agencias Universales S.A. of Chile, covering investment, development, and operation of the airport plus a cargo hub and hotel capacity, at a value the government put near BDS$300 million. Talks were continuing as of late 2025 after several delays. Guyana rounds out the set: when the government sealed a US$34 million e-ID contract with Germany’s Veridos in March 2023, he was among the parties present at the signing.
Each case shares a signature. His office or an allied entity appears at the formation stage, sovereign-linked partners supply institutional weight, and the contract term stretches well past anything a conventional bidder would seek.
What a Long Timeline Buys, and What It Demands
A multi-decade holding period changes what a partner must prove along the way. Short-cycle investors need a project to hit targets fast enough to exit on schedule; a 50-year concessionaire needs its government counterparty to stay convinced across administrations. Inmā says it manages that burden through outside review, putting job-creation and service-delivery data in front of independent reviewers rather than certifying its own results. It describes its property development work in Syria the same way, with local partners and local hiring linking returns to the wider recovery.
Those accountability claims originate with the company and lack third-party confirmation, a distinction worth keeping in view. Still, the underlying problem they address is real. A partnership designed to outlive its negotiators needs some mechanism for proving progress in year six or year ten, and self-certification convinces no finance ministry for long.
Consider what the middle of a 16-year commitment looks like from a finance ministry’s chair. Construction milestones have passed, political leadership may have turned over, and the officials now administering the contract never negotiated it. A partner able to produce externally reviewed performance data at that moment holds a very different conversation than one offering its own spreadsheets. Inmā’s framework, if it operates as described, exists for exactly that conversation.
Why the Capital Pairing Matters as Much as the Clock
Where the capital sits may matter more than how long it stays. Inmā rarely presents itself as a sole financier; its model leans on sovereign-linked co-investors whose presence changes a government’s risk calculus. A state-backed operator has weaker incentives to exit early for a quick return, and its continued involvement signals viability to other lenders. On the Karachi concession, the balance sheet behind the terminal belongs to AD Ports Group, itself part of Abu Dhabi’s ADQ holding group, whatever role Inmā’s own capital plays.
That pairing also explains the odder corners of the claimed portfolio. Inmā lists device assembly plants in Nigeria, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea among its ventures, alongside digital infrastructure like the Guyana identification work. Assets of that kind rarely attract conventional infrastructure funds, because they offer no obvious secondary buyer at exit. A structure that treats the government relationship itself as the asset, renewing scope over time rather than engineering a sale, can hold them anyway.
The Bet Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum Is Making
Reduced to one sentence, the wager is that governments will trade short-term price competition for a counterparty willing to stay at the table for 15 or 50 years. Documented signings in Karachi, Bridgetown, Georgetown, and Sindh suggest several governments have taken some version of that trade, though each deal remains at an early or unfinished stage. Verdicts will arrive slowly, on the same long clock the contracts run on.
Until then, the honest summary is that Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum has assembled documented access to government counterparties on terms few private investors attempt, wrapped around a set of portfolio claims that still rest on his firm’s own numbers. Whether the first fact eventually validates the second is the open question hanging over the whole structure.