The corridor · The distance
The position, run from the Gulf.
An Indian development position owned from Abu Dhabi or Dubai fails in one specific way: not through distance, but through reporting nobody independently verified, discovered at the price of a crisis. This page is the governance that prevents it: why the instrument most families reach for does not work, which instruments do, and exactly what lands on your desk, on which date, signed by whom.
01 · The problem
Named exactly
Distance is not the problem. Unverified reporting is the problem.
Every failed cross-border position we have studied failed the same way. The reporting was optimistic, then late, then silent, and each stage was survivable if discovered and expensive because it was not. Distance did not cause any of it. Distance only raised the price of discovery, because nobody within reach of the site owed their duty to the capital.
The cure is not more trust, a relative on the ground, or a louder phone call. It is the same architecture every institutional lender demands without embarrassment: a party retained by the capital, independent of the delivery chain, verifying on a fixed cycle, with a defined clock for bad news. Families deserve the same machinery institutions get, and this practice exists to give it to them at family scale.
02 · The attorney
Reached for first, holds least
A power of attorney is a signature at distance. It is not governance.
The instrument most Gulf families reach for is a local power of attorney: a trusted relative or fixer, empowered to sign. Two things are wrong with it, and the first is written into the banking rules themselves: a resident attorney on the external account is expressly barred from repatriating funds to anyone but the account holder, from gifting, and from moving money between such accounts. The instrument stops precisely where families assume it reaches.
The second problem is older than the rules. An attorney signs; nobody has made them verify. The signature travels while the truth stays local, and a position can be signed into difficulty by a perfectly loyal attorney who was simply told what everyone on site had agreed to say. Authority without verification is how distance failures are manufactured, which is why we sell the verification and leave the authority with you.
03 · The instruments that do
Statutory, then contractual
India already built the levers. Someone has to pull them for you.
Indian statute requires that every withdrawal from a registered project's escrow account be certified by an engineer, an architect and a chartered accountant as proportionate to completion. The delivery regulators publish registers of projects, filings, lapses and complaints. The certification happens and the registers exist whether or not anyone is reading them for you. The governance question is who signs, what they verified, and whether the principal ever sees it. Retained by you, we see it, we test it against the site, and we report it.
On top of the statutory floor sits the practice's own machinery, unchanged from what institutions buy: the initial report before commitment, the monthly cycle on funded work, the quarterly discipline on held assets, independent verification of cost to complete, and the exception clock, so a material event reaches your principal within two working days of us knowing. None of it was invented for families. All of it works for them.
04 · Your desk
Dates, not intentions
Governance is a calendar before it is anything else.
The reporting year, from the Gulf
- 01Monthly, during constructionthe progress report and drawdown certificate: site verified, cost to complete stated, escrow certification read and tested
- 02Quarterly, on held assetsincome verified to the lease deeds, costs to the service-charge account, the compliance calendar with expiry dates twelve months forward
- 03Half-yearlyindependent valuation on the listed cadence, its input file kept live for the exit that will one day want it overnight
- 04Within two working daysthe exception note, whenever a material event occurs: the fact, the exposure, the options, our recommendationThe clock
- 05Annuallythe position reviewed whole: structure, filings, locks and exit conditions against the entry memorandum's promises
Every date is diarised at appointment, holidays counted, and the diary is itself a deliverable. A family office slots these into its own committee calendar once, and the position reports like an institution's from then on.
05 · The seats we do not take
Authority, bounded
A family table has many seats. We take exactly one.
Your tax advisers own the positions taken on your facts, and we keep the transaction record consistent with them. Where a structure must satisfy Shariah requirements, certification belongs to your scholars, and we build delivery and reporting around whatever they approve. Succession to Indian property runs on Indian law, which applies differently by community and does not care where the family lives: it is planned early with your counsel or litigated late by your heirs, and our contribution is the clean file their planning depends on.
On discretion, the honest position is the strong one. We work under non-disclosure, we publish no client's name, and we comply in full with the beneficial-ownership and anti-money-laundering disclosure Indian law requires. Those two commitments are compatible, and anyone who tells you otherwise is offering you a liability dressed as a courtesy. We take the delivery-governance seat, we hold it completely, and we defer visibly at its edges, which is how you can tell the seat is real.
06 · The first meeting
How it starts
Bring the position as it is. We will tell you what it needs.
First meetings in this corridor usually happen in the Gulf, and the practice's principal takes them personally. Bring whatever exists: the deed nobody has read since the purchase, the reporting that stopped feeling reliable, the project a relative is watching, the entry your committee is weighing. The engagement protocol is unchanged from everything else this practice does: staged disclosure, mutual confidentiality, and verification we invite you to run on us before we ask anything of you.
What you will not meet is a pitch. We do not advise you to deploy, we take no success fees, and we hold no position in anything you hold. The first meeting establishes only two things: whether the position can be governed to our standard, and whether you want it governed at all. Both answers are allowed to be no, which is precisely why the yes means something.
Enquiries
The practice answers.
128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX
The development practice is led by Tanishq Chauhan. Correspondence reaches the principal directly.
Tanishq Chauhan on LinkedIn, opens in a new tab
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