Bahrain

The Dar An-Naft, or “House of Oil”, is a museum in Awali that tells the story of how the Kingdom’s discovery of oil in 1932 transformed an economy based on pearl trading to one of hydrocarbons, blazing a trail that the rest of the Gulf states subsequently followed.

The year 2012 marks 80 years since the Kingdom made its initial oil discovery near Jebel Al Dukhan, or the “Mountain of Smoke”, in Sakhir. As the first GCC country to discover hydrocarbons, the Kingdom is now moving into a new period in its history where more complex techniques are required to extract its oil and natural gas deposits. The finite...

Smiles and handshakes both abounded at Khalifa Bin Salman Port as ministers and officials celebrated the launch of the new ship Bahrain Vision at a ceremony in late November 2011.

For most of the last decade the government focus has been on building new plants to catch up with skyrocketing demand for power. Now the focus is switching to connecting up the disparate residential and industrial consumers to the national grid. In the water sector, the aim is to build up storage capacity from 1.24m to 2.37m cu metres so as to...

In regional terms, Bahrain’s history as an insurance centre is a long one. The domestic insurance sector began to form in the 1950s, when a group of taxi drivers pooled resources to form the nation’s first mutual company in order to abide by a legal requirement to obtain third-party liability insurance cover for their vehicles. That decade also saw...

The question of compulsory health cover is not a new one for Bahrain’s insurance industry. The issue first came to the fore in 2005 when a proposal was presented to the Shura Council from where, having been approved, it was redrafted in legal format and sent to a parliamentary sub-committee for discussion. The rationale behind the initiative was the...