Hotels, luxury resorts, restaurants, marinas, and parks line Marina Beach, the coastline abutting Chennai city.
The organisation, which operates from three marinas – Bandar al-Rowdha, Wave-Muscat and Mussanah – is now supervising the construction of a fourth centre at Sur.
Earlier this month, concerned citizens of Antigua Island reported illegal clearing of mangroves by a Chinese firm hell-bent on delivering one more mega-tourism development replete with golf courses, marinas, casinos and hotels, almost mirroring a similar Chinese development disaster on Bimini Island in the Bahamas.
Cleared forests and ruined wetlands are turned into shrimp ponds, oil ports, tourist hotels, golf courses and marinas.
That is a substantial sum for a country whose GNP barely reaches $80 billion at purchasing-power parity.The sprouting of fancy shopping centres, yacht marinas and housing developments along Tunisia's breezy coast provided a shiny veneer of prosperity.
The difference between the local conventions and those of my employer mean that after I have finished writing an article I must check I have caught all the familiar "Dilmas" and "Marinas" and replaced them by those strangers, "Ms Rousseff" and "Ms Silva".Sometimes our rules make us sound entertainingly fusty.
In recent weeks the tax campaign has hit marinas along Italy's 8,000 km coast, with the Guardia di Finanza operating in plain clothes or uniform onshore.The summer's blitz has brought a sharp fall in business in Italian marinas.
But the most attractive aspect of the investment, according to Marcus Sperber of BlackRock, is the finite supply of coastline and building permits: only two marinas have been built on Britain's south coast over the past 15 years.BlackRock, which manages $23 billion of property around the world, is better known for buying offices in New York than marinas in Hampshire.
Raúl Castro has long headed the army, which runs many tourist businesses.The government says it will spend $185m over the next three years to improve the island's few marinas and golf courses.
Beardies tending their little wooden ships up mud creeks have given way to ranks of floating luxury caravans in plush-appointed marinas.
Even Libya is piling in: it plans a new resort with 150 boat slips.The world's marinas are booming, driven by a surge in yacht sales.
