Drake & Scull wrote off 90% of its debt, settled 600 creditors, and relisted in 2024

Drake & Scull International was one of Dubai's best-known contractors: it worked on Louvre Abu Dhabi and listed 55% of its shares on the Dubai Financial Market in 2008 in an offering 101 times oversubscribed. The 2014 oil-price slide then drained work across the Gulf. Losses of Dh826.6m in 2015 and Dh732.9m in 2016 pushed chief executive Khaldoun Tabari out, and a 2017 rescue — a 75% capital cut that extinguished Dh1.7bn of accumulated losses plus Dh500m from private equity firm Tabarak — proved too small.

In 2018 the company lost Dh4.5bn on revenue of Dh798m and ended the year with Dh4.75bn of negative equity; trading was suspended that November. A new board under chairman Shafiq Abdelhamid chose consensual restructuring under the UAE's bankruptcy law over liquidation: write off 90% of the debt and convert the remaining 10% into mandatory convertible sukuk. The plan needed the backing of creditors holding two-thirds of claims by value; more than 600 creditors voted, the threshold was cleared in February 2022, and the plan was declared complete that March.

The operating business stayed alive through the years of negotiation: continuing operations earned Dh262m in 2019 against the Dh4.9bn prior-year loss, and the company reported net profit of Dh94.8m in 2020, Dh23m in 2021 and Dh115m in the first quarter of 2021. Shareholders approved a Dh300m capital increase and the resumption of trading in March 2024.

90% of debt written off, the rest converted into mandatory convertible sukuk, and trading resumed on 29 May 2024

Three years of falling oil prices from 2014 cut new orders across Gulf construction and left receivables that could not be collected.

The 2017 rescue cleaned the equity line but not the obligations underneath; the deeper hole surfaced only when a new board audited the books in 2018.

Management chose settlement over liquidation. A consensual plan kept the contractor's licences, workforce and Dh625m backlog intact through four years of negotiation.

The UAE's bankruptcy law gave the process a fixed voting threshold — two-thirds of claims by value — which turned a thousand private negotiations into one enforceable agreement.

A consensual deal under the UAE's bankruptcy law let a contractor keep its licences and backlog while writing off most of its debt; liquidation would have destroyed both.

Trading resumed on the Dubai Financial Market on 29 May 2024 at a reference price of AED 0.25, with the exchange flagging the stock for accumulated losses. The court gave the company twelve months in late 2023 to implement the plan, and a Dh300m capital increase accompanied the relisting. Criminal complaints against former managers over conduct dating to the 2008 IPO remain part of the record; Tabari denies all charges. DSI re-entered the market as a smaller MEP contractor betting that Gulf construction spending, not leverage, would carry it.