Ilyas & Mustafa Galadari Group

Ilyas & Mustafa Galadari Group

Brothers Ilyas and Mustafa Galadari started the group in 1999 to serve what they call the 'new Dubai,' initially as a trading business that rode the emirate's early-aughts construction wave. The family compound sits inside the City of Arabia master-planned district in Dubailand, a 20-million-square-foot mixed-use parcel that includes the firm's flagship leisure asset and several residential holdings. The Galadari family network also includes the prominent UAE law firm Galadari Advocates & Legal Consultants, founded by Ziad Galadari. The group's deployment concentrates on five operating verticals: leisure, entertainment, trading, services, and manufacturing. Its marquee investment is IMG Worlds of Adventure, a 1.5-million-square-foot indoor theme park on Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road, wholly owned and operated by the group. Alongside the park, the City of Arabia development holds Wadi Walk residences, Elite Towers, and the Wadi Al Safa 4 villa community. Away from real estate, the group runs Ilyas & Mustafa Galadari Cold Stores, a temperature-controlled warehousing business founded in 1999, and GMDC, a government-certified driving institute with over 200 instructors. The family's known passion-asset holdings include a Gemballa MIG-U1 and both flags in a broader automobile collection. Headquartered in the City of Arabia with no disclosed satellite offices, the organization operates under the dual leadership of Chairman Ilyas Galadari and Vice Chairman Mustafa Galadari. The next generation appears through Abdulwahab Ilyas Galadari, who sits on the group's board and runs his own investment vehicle, AWGAL Investments. The IMG Group carries a mission statement centered on supporting government-led visions, and it marries a profit motive with the philanthropic foundation Caring & Giving. The firm's architecture is structurally uncommon: a commercial holding company that retains family-office economics and a single-family governance DNA. Rather than allocating to external managers, IMG builds and operates its principal assets on its own balance sheet, using the City of Arabia land bank and the theme-park operating business as the ballast of a portfolio that has no disclosed institutional LPs or co-investment partners.