On October 8, 2008, a group of government officials from the Comoro Islands made their way from their villages to a small airport not far from the nation’s capital, where, on a runway overlooking the Indian Ocean, a private plane stood waiting to fly them to Kuwait. The road that led them there was one of the longest in the archipelago nation – a 20km stretch that skims the west side of Ngazidja, the biggest of the three islands. It is a scenic drive, lined with pineapple, breadfruit, and mango trees, as well as potholes and piles of trash.

The reason for the officials’ trip to Kuwait was economic: their country was completely broke, and had been that way for as long as they could remember. The Comoro Islands, which lie in the Indian Ocean about 200 miles off the east coast of Africa, is one of the poorest nations in the world; the last time a poverty survey was conducted, in 2004, about half of its 800,000 citizens were living on less than $1.25 per day.

Earlier that year, the Comorian government had received a proposal from some visiting Arab businessmen. What if the Comoros started to sell their citizenship to raise funds? There was a great demand for passports in the Middle East, the men explained; for starters, wealthy individuals saw a second or third nationality as a shortcut to make travelling and doing business abroad easier. Some Gulf countries were also figuring out what to do with large groups of Bidoon, or stateless people residing within their borders. The Bidoon have no nationality for various reasons: some families simply failed to register with the state when these nations were formed and were subsequently denied citizenship; others had emigrated illegally generations ago; others still faced tribal, religious, or racial discrimination in Gulf monarchies that reserve citizenship, and the generous benefits that come with it, for those closely affiliated with the ruling cadre.

To document the Bidoon, some countries in the region were willing to pay good money to procure Comorian citizenship in bulk, the businessmen claimed. All the Comorians would have to do was pass a law allowing for this type of transaction, and print some passports.

The Comoro Islands lie between Madagascar and the East coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Photograph: Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG via Getty Images

The Comorian president at the time, Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, and his vice president, Idi Nadhoim, were intrigued. This was money they could use to fix the roads, take care of the rubbish, buy fuel, and build desperately needed infrastructure. Such a destitute country could not afford to be high-minded about a few pieces of paper. Beggar states cannot be chooser states.

But when the time came to discuss the proposal in parliament, Comorian politicians did not see it that way. The offer, they said, was a Faustian bargain. Wasn’t selling citizenship to complete strangers akin to selling a piece of their country’s soul? In a heated session of debate in July 2008, the parliament rejected a proposed “economic citizenship” bill, contending that it would be tantamount to auctioning off Comorian nationality.

However, the politicians were dealing with men who would not take no for an answer. Two months later, the Arab businessmen offered to arrange a “fact-finding mission” to the Gulf states, all expenses paid. Conveniently, the trip was scheduled to take place ahead of the next session of parliament. Six of the law’s most vocal opponents were among those invited.

Ibrahim M’houmadi Sidi, the vice-president of the country’s national assembly at the time, led the delegation. He was joined by Abdou Mouminé, the head of the parliamentary finance commission – who went along, he says, because he believed that the Comoros should open up and invite foreigners to invest. How they did so mattered very little in his eyes. “Here in our country, we have a ticking time bomb,” he told me in December of last year. “We have a university that churns out unemployed young people, and over the years, if these young Comorians don’t find work, it’s going to explode.”

Here in our country, we have a ticking time bomb. If young Comorian graduates don’t find work, it’s going to explode Abdou Mouminé

As the plane climbed higher, the men caught an aerial view of their country, its hilly slopes swollen with green breadfruits that grow year-round in the fertile volcanic soil. The Comoros fits the cliche of an island paradise from above – as pretty as neighbouring Mauritius, Réunion, or the Seychelles, which between them attract hundreds of thousands of tourists a year.

And yet this natural beauty has done little to help the Comoros develop. Most people have not heard of it; many of those who have do not quite believe that it is a sovereign nation at all. In the 40 years since it gained its independence from France, the country has seen around 20 successful or attempted coups d’état – many of them led by foreign mercenaries: these earned the country the nickname “cloud coup-coup land”.

The Comorian politicians could not help but wonder why their nation seemed destined to always be ranked among the world’s poorest. Perhaps, they hoped, this trip would help them begin to turn things around.

The plane began its descent toward Kuwait City some six hours later. When the men disembarked, they were welcomed by a tall, bald man with a firm handshake and a Colgate smile. His name was Bashar Kiwan, and it was he who had brought the economic citizenship proposal to President Sambi. (Although the proposed citizenship deal was with the United Arab Emirates, Kiwan invited the Comorians to Kuwait, a neighbouring country where he lived.) In the previous 12 months, he and the employees of his local company, Comoro Gulf Holdings, had become fixtures of the social scene in Moroni, the Comorian capital, driving around in shiny SUVs, wearing flashy watches, and gaudy polo shirts. Kiwan himself had been visiting the Comoros about once a month since around 2007, coming and going as he pleased from government buildings and throwing parties at the upscale (by local standards) Itsandra Beach hotel.

That Kiwan and the average Comorian live under the same moon and stars is a testament to how unevenly the global economy distributes its gifts. The islands are orphans of a bygone colonial era, alone, isolated and adrift; the Arabic word for Comoros is “Kamar”, or “moon” – a name that speaks to the islands’ beautiful night sky.

Bashar Kiwan Photograph: YouTube

Kiwan is a son of globalisation, a free agent, a man without a country. Born in Kuwait to Syrian parents and educated in the south of France, he is binational, trilingual – he speaks Arabic, French, and English – and highly proficient in the business lexicon of “disruptions”, “impacts”, and “innovations”. Before Kiwan turned his attention to the Comoros, he had made his fortune with Al Waseet International, a tangle of media and advertising companies that employs around 4,000 people in a dozen countries across the Middle East and eastern Europe.

Kiwan’s charisma and business savvy had served him well over the years. He did not just make friends with powerful people; he went into business with them. An early associate was Sheikh Sabah Jaber Mubarak al Sabah, the son of the current Kuwaiti prime minister. Sabah was on the board of Al Waseet and backed a number of Kiwan’s ventures. He gave Kiwan instant credibility. “It was Bashar’s guarantor,” says Mansur Muhtar, an old friend of Kiwan’s in the Comoros. “It meant he could approach investors in the Comoros and elsewhere and say he was working with the Kuwaiti government.”

Still, on the eve of his 43rd birthday, Kiwan’s ambition was not satisfied. On the one hand, he had it all: he lived in a fancy Kuwait City neighbourhood, was married to a gorgeous French woman named Angélique, whom he met on a ski trip in college. The couple had one son, Jad. On the other hand, Kiwan was an expat living in Kuwait, and he had no plans to become a naturalised citizen. The country’s citizenship laws make naturalisation close to impossible, and, in the rare instances when citizenship is granted, distinguish between native-born and “new” Kuwaitis, denying the latter the right to vote and rendering them subject to denaturalisation at the government’s whims.

As a foreigner, Kiwan’s influence in Kuwait was limited. There were no such rules in the Comoros.

Kiwan’s love affair with the Comoro Islands began in the 1990s, when he visited as part of a delegation of businessmen. “I discovered a virgin country that was coming out of a little civil war with some mercenaries,” Kiwan told me late last year. “It was just like heaven.” But the Comoros were so politically unstable during that decade that even the most intrepid businessman steered clear.

By the mid-2000s, the Comoros had become a peaceful democracy, and in 2005, then-president Azali Assoumani invited Kiwan and other businessmen back to the Comoros in the hope of encouraging them to invest. This time, Kiwan sensed an opportunity. He began to make regular trips to the islands, until his visits became a near-monthly occurrence. He introduced prominent figures in the Gulf to their Comorian counterparts, ingratiating himself with the islands’ small business elite. He signed a memorandum of understanding with the Comorian authorities for the establishment of some ambitious projects, including the country’s first commercial bank.

During the 2006 presidential election, Kiwan surveyed the likely candidates looking for a potential ally, and found his man in Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, a relative newcomer to politics. Sambi was a religious man who had studied Islamic political theory but expressed no interest in turning the islands into a theocracy. He spoke of peace, cooperation, and national unity. It was an appealing stance for a population whose brand of Islam is best characterised as “slacker Sunni”.

Sambi was also devastatingly charismatic. With his glowing bronze complexion and a beatific calm, he carried himself – and, observers in Comorian political circles say, considered himself – more like a prophet than a politician. “When he walked into the room, you stopped and stared,” one foreign development professional who met regularly with Sambi during his tenure said. “When he talked, you wanted to believe his every word.”

Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, the former president of the Comoro Islands Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images

Sambi won the 2006 election, and almost overnight, Kiwan became a fixture in the presidential palace. “Bashar had carte blanche. He was Sambi’s de facto prime minister,” Mohamed Sagaf, a former minister of foreign affairs, told me. The new president’s lack of experience soon became apparent. “Sambi’s biggest flaw was that he didn’t have the know-how to run a state,” Kiwan recalled. “It was incredible that he received foreign delegations, but no one was even there to take minutes of the meetings.” The president, in other words, required a manager, an adviser, an éminence grise. Kiwan stepped forward to take up that role.

Kiwan had big ambitions for the Comoros. His inspiration, he says, is the hereditary ruler of Dubai, who oversaw the tiny emirate’s astonishing growth and turned it into a global centre for trade and finance. “Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid [al Maktoum] is a grand visionary, a man who completely transformed a country of 60,000 people, unknown as a travel destination,” Kiwan told me. “He didn’t just change his country – he changed the global perception of the Arab citizen.”

Kiwan’s dream was to turn the Comoros into the new Dubai. It was a sign of the times – before the collapse of the global financial system, or the Arab revolutions – that it did not seem entirely unlikely that a well-connected global citizen could transform a destitute archipelago into a Hawaii for Arabs.

Kiwan’s dream was to turn the Comoros into the new Dubai. At the time, it did not seem entirely unlikely

In 2007, Kiwan was named honorary consul of the Comoros to Kuwait. Between meetings, he mapped out a Comorian business empire, drawing up elaborate plans for tourism, development, commerce, and trade, and pitching the projects to investors through a company called Comoro Gulf Holding (CGH). He even started a popular newspaper, Al Balad.

Kiwan estimates CGH ended up raising around $100m. One former manager who spoke on condition of anonymity suggests that the sum was less and that most of the money came from Kiwan, not from outside investors. (Kiwan would not respond to questions or requests for comment after our initial meeting in November 2014.)

As much as Kiwan wanted to contribute to the Comoros, a country in such bad shape needs far more help than private investors alone can offer. So Kiwan gave the Comorians advice on how build ties with Arab countries to raise more funds. One way they could show their commitment to interstate cooperation, he told them, was to give their would-be benefactors something only a Gulf monarchy could possibly demand, and that only a small, remote state like the Comoros could provide.

The answer was passports – in bulk.

As Kiwan tells it, he began to notice an enormous demand for second passports among the Gulf’s middle and upper classes in the mid-2000s, around the time he began his regular trips to the Comoros. People in the Middle East, and particularly those living in marginalised countries or under repressive governments, “live with the hope of obtaining a second nationality”, Kiwan told me. “The dream is to be American, Australian, Canadian.” But if a person could not obtain one of these highly desirable passports, he said, there were still advantages to being a citizen of a relatively unknown state such as the Comoros: it can be easier to obtain a travel visa, for instance, and to do business in certain countries.

Before Kiwan arrived on the scene, there was already a market for second citizenship – but it was targeted at the super-rich. By the 2000s, a small handful of Caribbean islands – notably St Kitts and Nevis and the Commonwealth of Dominica – were readily and legally selling their citizenship to wealthy outsiders, and many major western countries, including the US and Canada, offered fast-tracked residence and citizenship via investor visas, which grant residency in exchange for the purchase of real estate, government bonds, or for putting money into regional businesses. A cottage industry of clever middlemen began to advertise “citizenship by investment” programmes to rich clients and convincing small, mainly island countries to allow for the sale of their passports to wealthy outsiders.

The very existence of this business marks an enormous departure from traditional ideas about nationality, allegiance, and belonging. Perhaps the biggest triumph of the modern nation state has been to convince large groups of people that a status conferred to them arbitrarily upon birth was, in fact, not for sale, and indeed, worth defending unto death. The emergence of the passport industry suggests that comradeship has given way to commerce, and that citizenship is becoming a commodity to be bought and sold. Like ships flying flags of convenience, these days people can carry nationalities of convenience.

The passport industry had thus far only served those who could afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain a second citizenship. But as Kiwan began to take note of its existence, he realised there was another group in the Gulf that needed to acquire citizenship – because they had none to begin with. These were the Bidoon, who lived in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, but were not citizens of any country. Human rights organisations had urged Kuwait and the UAE to take measures to resolve their situation; some of the Bidoon, furthermore, had begun to demand political representation.

As an intermediary, Kiwan would win big, too. He told me that he found willing partners in the Emirati interior minister, Saif bin Zayed al Nahyan, and his secretary-general, police chief Major General Dr Nasser al Nuaimi. According to statements later made by Sambi, the Emiratis pledged to pay the Comoros $200m in exchange for the naturalisation of some 4,000 Bidoon families who would obtain Comorian citizenship documents but not physically move to their “new country”. The actual number of citizenships sold has not been revealed.

In his Kuwait City office last November, Kiwan showed me a leather-bound contract, dated April 2008, signed by al Nuaimi – on behalf of a private corporation – and Mohammed Dossar, then the Comorian defence minister, approving Kiwan’s role mediating a UAE-Comoros citizenship exchange.

Kiwan had convinced key players on both sides to join him. But for the scheme to run smoothly, he had to convince the most reluctant Comorian parliamentarians to make it official – and the best way to do that was to take very good care of them during the trip in October 2008.

After Kiwan picked the Comorians up at the airport, the men were shuttled away in limousines to a high-end Kuwait City hotel to rest up. Over the next three days of meetings, dinners, sightseeing, Kuwaiti business representatives gave the Comorian delegation promises of wealth, investment, and development. Speaking last December, several Comorian lawmakers described attending a lavish dinner hosted by Sheikh Sabah, Kiwan’s business partner and the son of then-defence minister (and now prime minister) Jaber al Mubarak al Hamad al Sabah (Sabah was unreachable for comment). After dinner, the delegates reportedly received laptops and watches as gifts.

The Comoro islands is one of the poorest nations in the world. Photograph: Richard Bouhet/AFP/Getty Images

But there was one more thing left to do: meeting the Bidoon. The Comorians had never met one of their future compatriots. Who were these people without a nation? How could one be at once native and without a land?

In a conference room, the delegates were introduced to several stateless men and women from Kuwait. Through an interpreter, the Bidoon gave a full account of their situation: why they were stateless, what they did, how much money they had, and how the Comoros Islands could help them. “I don’t know where he found these Bidoon. It could well have been Kiwan’s driver, for all I knew,” a former senior manager who worked for CGH in the Comoros said.

After three days in Kuwait, and satisfied with the information they had gathered, the Comorians packed their bags full of gifts and headed home.

Back in the Comoros that November, the men gathered in the national assembly to debate and vote on the economic citizenship bill. The text spoke simply of granting citizenship papers to “partners” of the Comoro Islands from all countries, so long as these partners did not have criminal records, belong to terrorist organisations, or threaten the social and cultural cohesion of the country.

The discussion grew so heated that the president of the parliament stormed out in frustration. He was soon joined by 15 others. But those in favour carried the day. On November 27, 2008, amidst continuing public discontent, the bill was signed into law by President Sambi.

On December 31, 2008, Comoro Gulf Holding rang in the new year with an open house party at the newly renovated Itsandra Beach hotel. In theory at least, all the pieces were in place to begin turning the Comoros into the new Dubai.

“Whatever their ambitions, CGH has established a substantial, permanent presence in the Comoros, including ties to Comorian public and private elites,” noted a US diplomatic cable dated 5 January 2009. “While there is little tangible aside from the Itsandra hotel, there is a lot of activity – CGH’s top officials around town and on the front pages, accompanying would-be investors or signing deals. On a given day, a dozen cars with CGH logos may be spotted around Moroni.”

By this point, Kiwan’s company had obtained the rights to build residential and commercial buildings on large stretches of land just outside the capital. CGH had also been granted a licence to open a telecommunications company and a bank. Along the road to the airport, the company erected large panels that advertised a development named Corniche Grande Comore. The billboards showed what seemed more like the set of a science fiction movie than feasible plans for what were essentially miles of volcanic rock. CGH wanted to create 16,800 square metres of offices, 14,200 square metres of retail space, 7,400 square metres of apartments and a luxury hotel with a business centre and a marina.

“The projects were grandiose,” said former minister of foreign affairs Mohamed Sagaf. “[The Arabs] showed us videos of the Corniche, the port … it was paradise in the Comoros. And that was unimaginable, to us. But for the Arabs, it was possible. We saw what they’d achieved in Dubai, in the sea.”

The former senior CGH manager told me: “Bashar made the Comorians dream. Even I was convinced that he’d have something there someday.”

Impressed by Kiwan’s confidence, many ordinary Comorians believed that he would be financing everything. However, Kiwan wanted to attract investors by presenting the islands at a pair of conferences in Kuwait City and Doha in early 2010.

The projects were a hard sell. “The majority of [investors] liked the Comoros, they liked the nature, but less than 1% wanted to invest because they saw that the environment was not conducive to business,” estimates the former senior CGH manager, referring to the lack of infrastructure on the islands and widely held frustrations with doing business Comorian-style: a day late, a buck short. “They came, they told us it was pretty, but they didn’t want to pay.”

The ailing global economy also threw a spanner into Kiwan’s works. Just as his Comorian projects were coming together, the financial crisis had hit the Gulf. Investors in the region were growing increasingly cautious, so it was harder to find capital for such a risky plan.

The feasibility studies CGH commissioned around that time insisted, pleadingly, that the Comoros was a safe bet; one claimed that because the Comoros produces “feel-good” commodities such as vanilla, it would “benefit overall” from the economic crisis – presumably because people might eat more ice cream during a downturn. But repeating the great Dubai experiment in a country that could barely keep the lights on and the water running was the last thing anyone wanted to put money on in an economic recession. All of a sudden, Kiwan’s boundless optimism started to raise eyebrows. An economic turnaround in the Comoros, led by CGH, no longer seemed likely. It seemed crazy.

In addition to the financial problems, Kiwan’s project was also running into political obstacles. As a result of their lobbying, CGH had come to be seen by more sceptical Comorians as neo-colonialists. The citizenship law, which granted Comorian documentation to outsiders in exchange for money, attracted particular criticism. “It’s been 33 years since we stopped being a French colony,” said Houmed Msaidié, a member of the opposition party, in a debate published in the local paper. “Now we’re being colonised by Comoro Gulf Holding.”

Even in the absence of private investors, the citizenship exchange with the United Arab Emirates was supposed to generate enough money to do the country some good. In the spring of 2009, President Sambi announced that the UAE was due to send over $200m in exchange for the Comoros documenting 4,000 Bidoon families of six to eight people each. About $25m would go to the state’s overall budget, and the remaining $175m would be invested in roads, sanitation, and power.

“This will put an end to our water problems, our road problems, our energy problems,” Sambi told the Comorian people in his 2009 Eid address. “It will serve to build our ports, our airports, real schools to last a hundred years and the construction of a security infrastructure. My brothers, this is one of the paths I’ve gone down to generate wealth for our country. That’s what we’re missing in this country: money. And here is money, which, by the grace of God, will in the coming days be transferred into the central bank.”

Sambi might have had God on his side, but what he really needed was someone to read him the fine print. He appeared to have thought that the money would make its way into the Comorian treasury’s coffers in one piece; in fact, according to Kiwan’s initial contract, it was due to pass through CGH’s accounts piecemeal. It is hard to say for sure, because the details of the deal were kept under lock and key.

Since 2009, international organisations have been given some clues – few of them consistent with one another – about how much money ended up in state hands. In 2012, at the apparent peak of the programme, the African Development Bank puts revenues for the Comoro Islands from the citizenship programme at $33.6m. The IMF estimates the money came closer to $45.6m “The overall fiscal balance including grants improved from a deficit of 1.9% of GDP in 2011 to a surplus of 2.9% of GDP in 2012,” the World Bank wrote in an annual report, which attributed this change largely to the economic citizenship programme.

The following year, revenues dropped, but continued to trickle in until as recently as last year, according to the IMF. But record keeping in the Comoros is haphazard; when I visited the Interior Ministry last year, I found its archives in a tiny room stacked floor to ceiling with seemingly unsorted paper. Even if the authorities were willing to divulge how much money they received and what they spent it on, there would likely be dozens of versions of the truth.

It is undeniable that CGH generated hundreds of jobs in the Comoros. But what is also clear just from looking around Moroni is that the massive infrastructure projects never saw the light of day. Some roads were built; members of the diplomatic community say that some of the money went to help the government pay arrears on salaries. Besides that, very few Comorians are seeing any long-term benefit from the sale of their nationality.

The dream of Dubai-level development in the Indian Ocean turned out to be a bust; the Comoros gained little from the initiative. But what about the Bidoon?

In the Emirates, the Bidoon were told that taking Comorian citizenship was the first step to becoming Emirati. Kiwan told me that a two-step naturalisation process for the Bidoon, beginning with Comorian papers and culminating in full Emirati citizenship, was the plan all along. Some hopeful Bidoon families willingly signed up for foreign citizenship; others had less choice. One man I spoke to said he couldn’t renew the licenc e plates on his car until he was “naturalised”. It is unclear how many, if any, eventually received Emirati passports as a result.

It also seems like the bet Kiwan had made on the Gulf states providing documentation for their stateless went beyond economic citizenship and papers for a few thousand Bidoon families in the Emirates. The success of CGH’s Comorian enterprise, some of Kiwan’s colleagues and friends told me, depended heavily on the relocation of the Bidoon from multiple Gulf countries to the Comoros. Company documents, versions of which Kiwan showed me himself, suggest CGH was considering the mass relocation of the Bidoon for the company’s – and the Comoro Islands’ – gain. Consultants hired to study the financial viability of a CGH beach resort went as far as to survey what sort of market there was for economic citizenship among stateless individuals. “Our recent survey in Kuwait and the UAE indicates that 50% of Bidoons have been seeking a citizenship,” reads one of the studies delivered in early 2010. “And when linked to real estate, 85% of the ones seeking a foreign citizenship would be interested in this value proposition.”

A Comoran walks past campaign posters on his way to vote during the presidential elections on December 26, 2010 in the capital Moroni. Photograph: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images

The presence of the Bidoon would help native Comorians, who would benefit from increased investment in their country. It would bring in outside business to cater to the Bidoon’s needs. The government would get the one thing it needed the most: money. What is more, the newly Comorian Bidoon would finally have a place to call home – albeit one they had probably never heard of.

Elie Wakim, a friend and associate of Kiwan’s who says he helped pitch the Comoros proposal to Emirati officials in an early closed-door meeting, came to embrace the initiative. “I understand very well that people might be shocked by this principle,” he told me over Skype earlier this year. “But these are people who have no country, who are spread out over the Arab world, who can’t travel or have an identity or hold certain jobs without facing discrimination.”

The optimism with which CGH had entered the Comoros did not last. By the spring of 2010, Kiwan’s luck in Moroni was beginning to run dry. It turned out that there were pitfalls of doing business in the Comoros: everything, at some point, gets personal on a tiny, secluded island. After securing a telecom licence, Comoro Gulf Holding had been expected to build a small port as collateral. But the company never completed the plans, which grew into a serious point of contention with government officials and the population at large. Kiwan had even fallen out with his longtime ally President Sambi in the final months before he left office.

After the May 2011 election, a politician named Ikililou Dhoinine was sworn into office as the new president. His term signalled the beginning of the end for the Arabs. The new administration began to pressure CGH to pay millions of dollars it claimed the company still owed from the economic citizenship funds, and revoked the privileged status that Sambi had afforded Kiwan.

Kiwan acknowledges that his company lost money and failed to realise its ambitions in the Comoros. But he says it was due to executive intransigence, and a lack of long-term planning on the part of the Comorian government. “We came to understand that we had to wait for the current government’s term to end in the hopes that the next one would be more neutral,” he told me. “We thought we had good relations with the country, but in reality it depends on the president, who has final say.”

Kiwan was all but driven out of the Comoros; his last trip there was in early 2013. In 2014, CGH lost its lease on the Itsandra hotel and concessions outside Moroni for tourism developments. And that July, the Corniche placards were torn down. “The destruction of this long barrier of panels, which at one point, captured the popular imagination … marks the end of an era that led people to believe, as Bashar Kiwan had promised them, that a paradise village would bloom from this site,” a local blogger wrote.

In April 2015, a Moroni court ruled that Comoro Gulf Holding owed the state USD $16m from the economic citizenship programme. General Mohamed Dossar, who represented the state in the agreement signed between Kiwan and the Comorian and Emirati parties, told me four months earlier that it was “obvious that CGH did not transfer the whole amount that was owed to us”.

In May, the state ordered the seizure of company assets on the islands – 184 pieces of machinery, a stockroom, and three large piles of sand at the company’s cement facility, according to the local newspaper Al Watwan. “What preoccupies me are the socioeconomic implications of this affair,” Elie Yazbeck, the CGH representative on the ground, told the paper. “I’m defending a humanitarian cause; I’m on the side of the employees who will soon be out of work.”

Kiwan’s newspaper, Al Balad, was long gone, too, after serving as a Kiwan mouthpiece for two years. Last December, piles of back issues lay strewn among long-abandoned printing equipment in a large shed adjacent to the newspaper’s old offices on a quiet side street near Moroni.

In one of the final issues, a regular sidebar about “French wisdom” explained the meaning of an idiom.

“Il ne faut pas croire qui promet la lune,” it reads. “One should not believe he who promises the moon and stars.”

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s new book, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen, from which this piece is adapted, is published by Columbia Global Reports

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