This year’s Pulitzer Prize has been all about records set and met.
The prize-giving ceremony, which was due to take place on April 20, was postponed for two weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic. The winners were announced remotely on Monday, May 4, from the living room of Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy.
Canedy said the prize was being announced during a “deep and trying time”, but stressed that journalism continues to be as important as ever, as the arts “sustain, unite and inspire”.
She said the first Pulitzer Prizes – which are among the most coveted accolades for US journalists and authors – were awarded in 1917, less than a year before the Spanish flu pandemic struck.
Who took home the titles?
Colson Whitehead became the fourth author in the award’s history to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice.
The US author nabbed this year's prize for fiction again for The Nickel Boys. He first won the award in 2017 for his novel The Underground Railroad, which became a literary phenomenon and rocketed Whitehead to international fame.
The heart-rending novel is based on the real story of the Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children. The story follows Elwood Curtis, who is sent to a juvenile detention centre after travelling to university classes in a stolen vehicle.
The Nickel Boys was praised by the Pulitzer Prize committee for its "spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption".
The other writers to have won the award twice are John Updike, William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington.
The New York Times won three journalism awards this year, including the coveted investigative reporting prize for an expose on New York City's taxi trade, written by Brian Rosenthal.
There was also something new in this year's prize announcement. The Pulitzer Prize presented its first award for audio reporting, to the staff of the podcast This American Life for its episode The Out Crowd.
The winning episode was praised by the committee for its “revelatory, intimate journalism that illuminates the personal impact of the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy”.
LA Times writer Christopher Knight also became one of the few art critics to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. He earned the award for his searing columns exploring the controversial renovation of Los Angeles County Museum of Arts and the impact it would have on the museum's mission and display of its collection.
The music Pulitzer was given to Anthony Davis for his opera The Central Park Five, which is based on the wrongful 1989 convictions of five African-American and Latino teenagers for the rape and assault of a white woman. The five teenagers were absolved of the conviction in 2002 after a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime.
The Pulitzer Prize jury described Davis’s work as “a courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration that skilfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful”.
The board also declared a posthumous award to Ida B Wells, an investigative journalist, for her "outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching" in the 1890s.
The citation comes with a donation of about $50,000 (Dh183,650) in support of Wells’s mission, with recipients yet to be announced.
MATCH INFO
Euro 2020 qualifier
Fixture: Liechtenstein v Italy, Tuesday, 10.45pm (UAE)
TV: Match is shown on BeIN Sports
TOURNAMENT INFO
Fixtures
Sunday January 5 - Oman v UAE
Monday January 6 - UAE v Namibia
Wednesday January 8 - Oman v Namibia
Thursday January 9 - Oman v UAE
Saturday January 11 - UAE v Namibia
Sunday January 12 – Oman v Namibia
UAE squad
Ahmed Raza (captain), Rohan Mustafa, Mohammed Usman, CP Rizwan, Waheed Ahmed, Zawar Farid, Darius D’Silva, Karthik Meiyappan, Jonathan Figy, Vriitya Aravind, Zahoor Khan, Junaid Siddique, Basil Hameed, Chirag Suri
Ten tax points to be aware of in 2026
1. Domestic VAT refund amendments: request your refund within five years
If a business does not apply for the refund on time, they lose their credit.
2. E-invoicing in the UAE
Businesses should continue preparing for the implementation of e-invoicing in the UAE, with 2026 a preparation and transition period ahead of phased mandatory adoption.
3. More tax audits
Tax authorities are increasingly using data already available across multiple filings to identify audit risks.
4. More beneficial VAT and excise tax penalty regime
Tax disputes are expected to become more frequent and more structured, with clearer administrative objection and appeal processes. The UAE has adopted a new penalty regime for VAT and excise disputes, which now mirrors the penalty regime for corporate tax.
5. Greater emphasis on statutory audit
There is a greater need for the accuracy of financial statements. The International Financial Reporting Standards standards need to be strictly adhered to and, as a result, the quality of the audits will need to increase.
6. Further transfer pricing enforcement
Transfer pricing enforcement, which refers to the practice of establishing prices for internal transactions between related entities, is expected to broaden in scope. The UAE will shortly open the possibility to negotiate advance pricing agreements, or essentially rulings for transfer pricing purposes.
7. Limited time periods for audits
Recent amendments also introduce a default five-year limitation period for tax audits and assessments, subject to specific statutory exceptions. While the standard audit and assessment period is five years, this may be extended to up to 15 years in cases involving fraud or tax evasion.
8. Pillar 2 implementation
Many multinational groups will begin to feel the practical effect of the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax (DMTT), the UAE's implementation of the OECD’s global minimum tax under Pillar 2. While the rules apply for financial years starting on or after January 1, 2025, it is 2026 that marks the transition to an operational phase.
9. Reduced compliance obligations for imported goods and services
Businesses that apply the reverse-charge mechanism for VAT purposes in the UAE may benefit from reduced compliance obligations.
10. Substance and CbC reporting focus
Tax authorities are expected to continue strengthening the enforcement of economic substance and Country-by-Country (CbC) reporting frameworks. In the UAE, these regimes are increasingly being used as risk-assessment tools, providing tax authorities with a comprehensive view of multinational groups’ global footprints and enabling them to assess whether profits are aligned with real economic activity.
Contributed by Thomas Vanhee and Hend Rashwan, Aurifer
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Zayed Sustainability Prize
Look north
BBC business reporters, like a new raft of government officials, are being removed from the national and international hub of London and surely the quality of their work must suffer.
The specs
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Power: 268hp at 5,600rpm
Torque: 380Nm at 4,800rpm
Transmission: CVT auto
Fuel consumption: 9.5L/100km
On sale: now
Price: from Dh195,000
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
Most sought after workplace benefits in the UAE
- Flexible work arrangements
- Pension support
- Mental well-being assistance
- Insurance coverage for optical, dental, alternative medicine, cancer screening
- Financial well-being incentives
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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