The boss of the P&O Ferries owner, DP World, has left the company after revelations over his ties with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein forced the ports and logistics company to take action.
Dubai-based DP World, which is ultimately owned by the emirate’s royal family, announced the immediate resignation of Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem as the group’s chair and chief executive on Friday.
Sulayem – the brother of Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the head of the FIA, which governs the world’s motor sport championships including Formula One – has been under intense pressure after the publication of messages with Epstein.
Documents disclosed by the US Department of Justice revealed that Sulayem emailed Epstein in 2015 that he met a girl “two years ago” who went to an American university in Dubai was “the best sex I ever had amazing body”.
He said: “She got engaged but now she back with me.”
Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, who has inspected unredacted Epstein files, said on Tuesday that the justice department also appeared to confirm that Sulayem was the recipient of an email from Epstein in which he said: “I loved the torture video.”
The Dubai government’s statement on Friday did not mention Sulayem but announced that Essa Kazim had been named as the chair and Yuvraj Narayan as the chief executive.
This week, two of DP World’s largest international partners, including Canada’s La Caisse pension fund and British International Investment (BII), said they would halt future deals with the group.
On Friday, BII said that it would resume investment projects with DP World.
“We welcome today’s decision by DP World and look forward to continuing our partnership to advance the development of key African trading ports to unlock the continent’s global trading potential,” a spokesperson said.
Sulayem had helped transform DP World from an operator of Dubai’s Jebel Ali port into one of the world’s largest logistics company.
It owns six ports in Canada, the London Gateway container port, as well as the ports and ferries operator P&O, which it acquired for £3.3bn in 2006.
However, being port experts DP World sold the ferries business to a separate state-owned entity, Dubai World, around the time of the financial crisis.
DP World subsequently bought the business back for £322 ($421m at the time) in 2019.
DP World came in for criticism in 2022 when the P&O Ferries business fired 800 staff and replaced them with cheaper agency workers.
In 2024, a diplomatic row broke out over DP World’s attendance at the government’s international investment summit after Louise Haigh, then the transport secretary, called for a boycott of P&O Ferries.
Announcing new worker protections, Haigh said she had boycotted the ferry company and told the Department for Transport not to have any dealings with it or its parent company.
DP World held back the announcement of a reported £1bn investment to expand its London Gateway port, a key element of the investment summit.
However, the company subsequently attended the summit and made the investment announcement.
On Thursday, Kathy Ruemmler, the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs and a former White House counsel to Barack Obama, announced her resignation after emails showing a close relationship between her and Epstein.
Ruemmler, who had referred to the sex offender as “Uncle Jeffrey”, had repeatedly tried to distance herself from the emails and other correspondence that has been released and had said she would not resign.
