Chairman of Dubai's financial free zone DIFC said Wednesday that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) lenders would be hardly affected by job cuts at their Western counterparts.

At the sidelines of the DIFC Forum, Chairman Al Ghurair addressed the media at a roundtable, saying the UAE banking sector 's direction is "to grow, not to shrink". Contrary to most Western banks, UAE banks were hiring as they cleaned up their balance sheets and implemented a conservative lending policy in the wake of the financial crisis, said Al Ghurair, who is also chairman of Dubai-based Mashreq Bank, the only UAE lender in which the state has no stake.

In the first nine months of this year, 17 UAE banks listed at either the Dubai bourse DMF or the Abu Dhabi market ADX reported a combined increase of 2.2 percent in net income year on year, amounting to 17.97 billion Dirham (4.9 billion U.S. dollars).

Al-Ghurair's comment comply with those of Shailesh Dash, CEO of DIFC-based investment firm Al Masah Capital, who said in an interview with Xinhua that the UAE will not be affected by recent job cuts announcements abroad. Global banks like Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC and Switzerland's UBS and Credit Suisse said in recent months they would slash tens of thousands of jobs, most of them in their investment banking units.

Earlier in the day, Deutsche Bank CEO Anshu Jain said in his keynote speech at the DIFC Forum that only a few big universal banks will survive in the next ten years as a gigantic consolidation has just kicked off. Endi