Shahab Hashemi’s global business starts with showing up

In June 2013, Shahab Hashemi was considering two rather different places to spend a summer: Lloyds and Boeing. One moved money; the other made aircraft. At the University of Southampton, where he was studying Business Analytics and Management Sciences, the immediate challenge was getting a company interested in him. Students were meeting employers about three-month projects. Hashemi welcomed the opportunity to practise his interview technique. Before the regional chief executive came the student making his case across a table.

It is an agreeable starting point for a career in financial services. There is a practical problem, someone who needs it solved, and a conversation before anything happens. The Southampton programme brought analytical students into contact with organisations that had work to do. Hashemi singled out a bank and an aircraft manufacturer. His options were still open, and his account of the morning was refreshingly concerned with getting better at the next interview.

“It’s also a good chance for us to practise our interview technique.”

Shahab Hashemi · Southampton, 2013

A name on the register

Eight years later, the setting was Dubai. On 3 August 2021, Hashemi became an authorised individual at the firm now called Marex MENA Limited, with the functions of licensed director and senior executive officer. The date is a useful anchor in a career whose later public chapters concern expansion. It fixes the point at which responsibility for a regulated regional business became part of his professional record.

Chief executive is the title generally attached to him in coverage of Marex’s Middle East and North Africa operations. Senior executive officer is the designation on the Dubai register. The two descriptions put different parts of the same working life in view: the commercial business of developing a franchise, and the named responsibility that comes with running a financial firm. In an industry fond of expansive language, a register is pleasingly economical.

Another entry followed in Abu Dhabi. His licensed directorship at Marex Capital (AD) Limited took effect on 20 August 2025. Put the two appointments beside each other and the geography of his responsibilities becomes clearer. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are separate entries, with separate dates. A regional business takes shape through particular entities and particular appointments, even when its customers think in terms of markets that stretch far beyond either city.

The business behind the office door

By late 2024, Hashemi was explaining why Marex wanted a larger presence in the Middle East. He called its new Dubai office a “statement of intent”. His emphasis was on spending time with clients across the region and adding people locally. That makes the office an unusually useful detail in his story. It gives a physical form to a proposition that otherwise risks disappearing into a list of financial products.

His argument concerned breadth, too. Marex’s regional ambitions extended from its commodities background into capital markets. The executive’s task was to explain how those capabilities belonged together for customers. A larger local team made that proposition easier to deliver in person. The telling detail is his attention to time spent with clients: a business with global reach still needs people nearby who can discuss what a customer actually requires.

The addition of prime services in Dubai made that approach more specific. In October 2024, Marex established a dedicated local presence for the business and hired Mazen Najjar, previously at IG Prime, into institutional sales. Hashemi described the move in terms of serving hedge funds, family offices and other institutional clients with more localised solutions. A broad ambition had acquired a colleague, a function and a place to work.

Najjar’s assignment included developing the regional sales strategy and building partnerships. Hashemi’s comments placed the appointment inside the existing business rather than treating it as an isolated launch. That is a recurring feature of this period: additional services are attached to an operation already on the ground. The client relationship becomes the point where the firm’s different capabilities have to make sense together.

A second city changes the map

On 2 October 2024, Marex announced an agreement to acquire Aarna Capital in Abu Dhabi. Aarna offered clearing, execution and customised risk management across commodity and financial markets. The proposed acquisition brought access to around 180 local clients, including institutional investors, family offices and corporates. For the regional organisation, the significance was concrete: another team, another city and relationships that had already been built.

The deal also joined two kinds of scale. Marex could offer its wider platform; Aarna brought a local client base and an established operation. That was the company’s stated commercial rationale. Hashemi’s subsequent Abu Dhabi directorship places him within the resulting regional structure. It would be misleading to turn a group acquisition into a solo achievement. His story here is the regional leadership work surrounding a larger corporate expansion.

The acquisition completed on 27 March 2025. The distinction between announcement and completion matters: the plan described in the autumn had become an operating reality by the following spring. A later appointment in Abu Dhabi added another dated step. Expansion is often told as a single moment. Here it is easier to understand as a sequence of agreement, completion and responsibility.

There is an invitation in the strategy

Some of Hashemi’s work is visible through invitations. On 6 May 2025, he was listed alongside Bhaskar Dasgupta and the Middle East Investment Management Association as a host of a private hedge fund networking evening in DIFC. The gathering was intended for committee members and selected guests, with conversation and collaboration on the agenda. Its format was modest: an evening, a venue shared with confirmed attendees, and people with overlapping professional interests.

It is a useful counterweight to the acquisition announcements. A deal can bring a business into a new city. A gathering creates an opportunity for people to get acquainted within it. The two activities operate at different scales, but both belong in a regional executive’s public record. Here Hashemi appears as a host helping convene the community his firm wants to serve.

He also announced plans to attend the HFM Middle East Summit with Marex colleagues Mazen Najjar and Thomas Margerison. Margerison was due to lead a roundtable about what allocators want from hedge funds. Hashemi’s invitation made the division of labour visible: regional leadership, prime services and capital introduction meeting the same audience. The subject was the practical difficulty of raising money, rather than a vague celebration of the region’s potential.

By October 2025, Marex’s wider prime services expansion included another Dubai hire. The company described a regional offering spanning execution through fundraising. That development helps explain the mix of colleagues around Hashemi at industry events. Different parts of a fund’s working life require different expertise. Regional growth depends partly on getting those people into the same conversation at the right time.

A trophy with several names behind it

When Marex won Broker of the Year at the 2025 FOW MENA Awards, Hashemi thanked its teams across Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The photograph shows the familiar ceremony: handshake, award, blue backdrop. His accompanying message distributed the credit more widely than the frame could accommodate. The recognition belonged to the firm, and he described it as the work of people in both cities.

By spring 2026, he had another regional milestone to discuss. Reflecting on Marex’s 2025 annual report, he said the Middle East workforce had more than doubled during the year. He also pointed to additional products and services and the completed Aarna acquisition. These were his measures of the region’s contribution to the group: people, capabilities and a second location. Together they give substance to the earlier talk of commitment.

The conversation moves to the court

Then there is padel. Hashemi promoted a weekly Marex Padel Series in DIFC, followed by invitations to a UAE championship. In a later post he shared a court photograph as the tournament got underway. The image is wonderfully literal: the Marex name above the enclosure, a racket in the foreground, the city beyond the fence. Finance has found a meeting place with a net.

His promotion of the series adds a lighter register to the same public story. There are formal appointments, institutional gatherings and invitations to play. Each involves assembling people in a place. The court photograph supplies a welcome change of scenery, and a reminder that a professional community has a social life alongside the business it conducts.

Hashemi’s trajectory runs from a student considering summer projects to an executive whose responsibilities span Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The scale has changed considerably. The recurring action is still recognisable: meet people, understand the work, put the relevant capabilities within reach. In 2013, the next conversation might have been with Lloyds or Boeing. In DIFC, it might begin with a fund manager, a prospective colleague or someone holding a racket.