Abu Dhabi

For years, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s scrappy image was best summed up by an insult that founder Jerry Sanders lobbed against rivals: "Real men have fabs." Sanders' point was that, although many chip companies designed semiconductors and outsourced the manufacturing, AMD enjoyed the advantage of owning its factories, known as fabrication plants, or fabs.

No, no, no, he assured one of the businessmen buying the ailing Manchester City soccer club. The price tag for the British team wasn't $4 billion, but a mere $400 million. Anil Bhoyrul, editorial director of Arabian Business magazine and a confidant to some of the Persian Gulf's super-rich and powerful, thought the Abu Dhabi investor would be pleasantly surprised. He was wrong.

Abu Dhabi Media Co.'s new movie company subsidiary Imagenation Abu Dhabi has signed a deal with Jeff Skoll's Participant Media as part of its recently announced commitment to fund more than $1 billion in movie productions. The agreement between the government-controlled Abu Dhabi company and Participant -- the first of three deals Imagenation intends to make with producers -- allows for a five-year revolving fund of as much as $250 million to cover production and marketing costs for 15 to 18 features.

Furthering the links between the United Arab Emirates and Hollywood, a venture controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi is launching a production company with a $1-billion-plus fund to make movies and digital content in partnership with three as-yet-unnamed Los Angeles producers and other international filmmakers. Abu Dhabi Media Co., through a newly formed subsidiary called Imagenation Abu Dhabi, plans to make eight films a year over the next five years, primarily for the English-speaking market.

The city's economic development director has been placed on administrative leave, officials said Wednesday. Stanley Smalewitz was removed from his post Aug. 7 by interim City Administrator Paul Emery and is under personnel review by the city human resources department, said city spokeswoman Laurie Payne. Payne would not elaborate on the nature of the confidential review, which she said is in its early stages. Smalewitz began work as Huntington Beach's economic development head in October 2005.

General Electric Co. has agreed to a joint venture with an Abu Dhabi government investment company that will pump $4 billion of outside capital into its weakened commercial finance business, part of a new global partnership to expand on GE's fast-growing sales in the Middle East. The deal with Mubadala Development Co. will also launch or broaden several other ventures with the Persian Gulf investment vehicle, which expects to become one of the top 10 institutional investors in GE.

They wear hard hats and rags over their faces; they hammer in the dust and, at night, they are silhouettes in the blowtorch light. They are the migrant workers turning Abu Dhabi and Dubai into metropolises of skyscrapers that uncoil from the desert sands like exotic plants of steel and glass. These futuristic cities along the Persian Gulf in the United Arab Emirates have been criticized by human rights groups and threatened with labor strikes over the low pay and poor living conditions faced by Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and other workers from across Asia.

A unique Picasso retrospective has gone on display in Abu Dhabi, bringing some of the Spanish artist's favorite works to this Persian Gulf city-state that aspires to become the region's cultural capital. The show was put together by Madrid's Reina Sofia art museum, but many of the pieces come from the Picasso Museum in Paris. The Abu Dhabi collection includes 186 paintings, sculptures and drawings by one of the 20th century's defining artists.

MGM Mirage, the Las Vegas casino company majority-owned by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, may be broken up to boost the value of its hotel-development and gambling units. MGM Mirage's stock rose the most in more than eight months after Chief Executive Terry Lanni said in response to a question that the company might be split. Shares gained $3.23, or 6.6%, to $51.85. The casino company is developing hotels for a fee in Beijing and Abu Dhabi, and has licensed its MGM Grand name to Connecticut's Foxwoods Resorts Casino.