Inveniam–MEASA and Abu Dhabi’s Private-Market Infrastructure Buildout

On January 30 2026, Abu Dhabi’s Supreme Council for Financial and Economic Affairs approved a resolution consolidating the assets and investments of L'imad Holding Company and Abu Dhabi Developmental Holding Group, known as ADQ, under the umbrella of L'imad, as described in an official announcement on the economy portal of the Abu Dhabi Media Office.

The resolution describes the goal of creating a sovereign investment powerhouse with a diversified asset base. It places a wide range of operating companies and investment platforms, previously overseen by ADQ and L'imad separately, into a single structure chaired by Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

This restructuring coincides with a broader pickup in Abu Dhabi-linked merger and acquisition activity. This includes L'imad’s earlier acquisition of a controlling stake in Modon Holding, large industrial and resources transactions, and the announced merger between Inveniam and MEASA Partners that targets real-world asset infrastructure in Abu Dhabi’s financial ecosystem.

Abu Dhabi's Two-Track M&A Strategy

A Supreme Council resolution has consolidated ADQ’s assets under L'imad Holding, centralizing a broad sovereign portfolio.
L'imad’s earlier 84.76% stake in Modon and other domestic moves show a longer-running consolidation playbook.
EY reports 884 MENA M&A deals worth $106.1 billion in 2025, with Abu Dhabi-linked entities behind many of the largest transactions.
Industrial deals such as the ADNOC-OMV polyolefins combination and IRH’s Alphamin stake expand Abu Dhabi’s footprint in chemicals and critical minerals.
The Inveniam-MEASA merger aligns private-market infrastructure with Abu Dhabi’s effort to attract institutional capital into real-world assets.
Together, sovereign restructuring and sector deals point to a coordinated strategy to build national champions and deepen global reach.

L'imad, ADQ and Abu Dhabi's new sovereign structure

The Supreme Council for Financial and Economic Affairs oversees Abu Dhabi’s main sovereign investment funds and the national oil company ADNOC. In its economy-portal announcement, the Abu Dhabi Media Office framed the January decision as a structural move rather than a commercial takeover, saying the consolidation would "create a sovereign investment powerhouse with a diversified asset base" that supports the government’s sustainable investment policy.

In that statement, officials outlined a portfolio that will include more than 25 investment companies and platforms and over 250 subsidiaries. These span sectors such as energy, real estate development and infrastructure, healthcare including pharmaceuticals, food, aviation, ports, financial services, and a range of industrial and technology activities.

Coverage from regional outlets like The National notes that the combined structure brings under one roof key holdings. These include TAQA in power and water, Modon Properties in real estate, Etihad Airways in aviation, PureHealth in healthcare, Etihad Rail in transport, Wio Bank in digital finance, Abu Dhabi Ports in logistics, McLaren in high-performance engineering and Louis Dreyfus in agricultural commodities.

Before the consolidation, ADQ was managing more than 263 billion dollars in assets across these sectors. Estimates cited by market analysts put the combined platform’s assets at roughly 300 billion dollars or more after the transfer. These figures appear in Reuters-based reporting carried by Gulf Business and in specialist wealth-fund commentary.

Governance is central to the change. L'imad is chaired by Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled, while ADQ had been chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and chair of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. The merger of ADQ into L'imad shifts hundreds of billions of dollars in state assets, including Etihad and utilities and ports, under the crown prince’s direct oversight.

Diego Lopez, managing director of consultancy Global SWF, told Reuters that Sheikh Khaled will now be managing a "significant portfolio alongside his uncles." This characterization underlines how the restructuring tightens the hierarchy across Abu Dhabi’s sovereign investors while keeping ADIA and Mubadala as separate pillars in the system.

The Abu Dhabi Media Office statement also links L'imad’s mandate explicitly to building national champions in those strategic sectors. It describes differentiated operational, industrial and technological capabilities and an investment approach that spans both private and public markets, with direct and indirect investments into funds and listed securities.

Modon and the consolidation playbook

The January 2026 decision followed a series of 2025 moves that had already positioned L'imad as a central holder of strategic domestic assets. Most visibly, this occurred through its acquisition of a majority stake in Modon Holding, an Abu Dhabi real estate and urban development company.

On October 30 2025, Modon disclosed that L'imad, described as wholly owned by the Abu Dhabi government, had completed the acquisition of shares owned by International Holding Company and ADQ, resulting in L'imad owning 84.76 percent of Modon’s shares.

The Modon release framed the deal as reinforcing investment in real estate and infrastructure development in the emirate. It was also seen as securing more coordinated deployment of resources into urban development projects, which aligns with the Supreme Council’s description of L'imad’s role in building nationally important platforms.

In its 2025 MENA M&A analysis, EY highlighted the Modon stake purchase as one of the region’s largest transactions that year. It valued the deal at about 13.8 billion dollars and ranked it among the three biggest deals in the region, alongside a large OMV transaction and Multiply Group’s stake in 2PointZero, as detailed in the firm’s regional mergers report EY.

Treating internal transfers between Abu Dhabi state entities as M&A transactions may blur the line between commercial deals and governance decisions. However, sizing and recording them as deals clarifies how much capital is being reallocated into vehicles such as L'imad and how centralization of ownership fits the broader aim of building large, integrated national champions.

A supportive regional M&A climate

The consolidation of ADQ under L'imad is taking place against a backdrop of elevated M&A activity across the Middle East and North Africa, with Abu Dhabi-based investors featuring heavily in the largest transactions.

EY’s MENA mergers and acquisitions report for 2025 records 884 deals worth 106.1 billion dollars, an increase of 26 percent in volume and 15 percent in value compared with 2024. The report identifies sovereign wealth funds such as ADIA and Mubadala as key catalysts and says the Gulf Cooperation Council accounted for the majority of activity.

Brad Watson, EY-Parthenon’s MENA leader, said in that report that the region’s M&A market "remained resilient in 2025." He noted that cross-border transactions were the main driver of the upward curve in both volume and value. Anil Menon, who heads MENA M&A for EY-Parthenon, described 2025 as a remarkable demonstration of regional resilience in dealmaking.

The same analysis points out that the three largest disclosed transactions of 2025 were all in the United Arab Emirates and involved Abu Dhabi-linked entities. These were OMV’s acquisition of a 64 percent stake in Borouge, L'imad’s 84.76 percent stake in Modon, and Multiply Group’s 42.2 percent stake in 2PointZero. Collectively, they made the UAE the focal point for headline regional deals.

A separate EY snapshot of first-quarter 2025 activity shows that the MENA region recorded 225 deals worth 46 billion dollars in that three-month period alone. The UAE was ranked as the top target country by both deal count and value, reinforcing the picture of the country, and Abu Dhabi in particular, as a preferred venue for transactions as described in EY’s quarterly review EY.

Set against this landscape, the L'imad-ADQ consolidation can be read as an attempt to organize one of the main sources of regional deal flow under a tighter governance framework. The goal is that future acquisitions, divestments and restructurings across the portfolio can be coordinated through a single investment platform rather than multiple parallel sovereign funds.

Industrial scale and outbound acquisitions

Abu Dhabi’s recent M&A activity is not limited to sovereign portfolio reshuffling; it also includes large industrial combinations designed to create scale in sectors seen as strategically important, particularly in energy and chemicals.

In March 2025, ADNOC and Austria’s OMV announced that they would merge their shareholdings in polyolefin producers Borouge and Borealis to form Borouge Group International. GulfBase summarized the transaction as creating a chemicals company valued at about 60 billion dollars, with an Abu Dhabi listing, that would rank among the world’s largest polyolefins producers.

Under that structure, Borouge Group International is expected to acquire 100 percent of Nova Chemicals from Mubadala for about 13.4 billion dollars including debt. Closing is targeted for 2026, with ADNOC and OMV each holding nearly equal stakes in the new company, which will have significant production capacity across Europe, the Middle East and North America.

These transactions are framed by the companies as part of a long-term shift from fuels into higher-value chemicals. They illustrate how Abu Dhabi deploys M&A to construct globally competitive industrial platforms rather than only financial portfolios, in line with the Supreme Council’s emphasis on national champions.

In the resources sector, Abu Dhabi-linked capital has also been active in acquiring stakes in critical minerals, which are seen as important inputs for electronics, renewable energy and advanced manufacturing.

In June 2025, the International Tin Association said United Arab Emirates-based International Resources Holding agreed to acquire Tremont Master Holdings’ majority stake in tin miner Alphamin Resources, giving IRH a 56 percent interest in the Bisie tin mine operator for about 367 million dollars.

The International Tin Association describes Bisie as one of the world’s largest tin mines and notes the deal took place amid increased interest in critical minerals. IRH chief executive Ali Alrashdi said Alphamin’s production profile "aligns with our strategy of securing interests in high-quality mining assets with long-term growth potential," underscoring the deliberate expansion into metals supply chains.

Taken together, the ADNOC-OMV combination and the IRH-Alphamin deal show Abu Dhabi-backed entities using mergers and acquisitions to build scale and secure inputs in core industrial and resource sectors. This pattern sits alongside, and is partly guided by, the sovereign portfolio restructuring under L'imad.

Private-markets infrastructure and the Inveniam-MEASA merger

A different strand of recent Abu Dhabi-related deal activity is less about operating assets and more about the infrastructure that supports private-market investment, data and trading, which is where the merger between Inveniam and MEASA Partners fits.

On February 12 2026, Inveniam Capital Partners announced that it had entered into a merger agreement with MEASA Partners. The transaction combines Inveniam’s decentralized data architecture for real-world assets with MEASA’s investment and advisory platform to address the market for income-producing assets such as real estate, infrastructure and private credit.

According to the companies’ description, the combined business will operate Inveniam Capital as a unit focused on sourcing, structuring and managing institutional-grade private real-world asset strategies. MEASA’s team will lead that unit, drawing on its track record in asset management and its positioning within the Abu Dhabi Global Market regulatory framework.

The merger materials also emphasize that MEASA is backed by Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners, a joint venture between Mubadala Capital and Alpha Wave Global. Additionally, G42 has invested in and partnered with Inveniam. This positions the combined group within a network of Abu Dhabi-linked sovereign and technology investors that are building data and trading tools around private assets.

While the Inveniam-MEASA transaction is small compared with the sovereign and industrial deals, it reflects the same logic of platform-building. Instead of only placing capital into existing funds, Abu Dhabi is supporting market infrastructure that aims to improve data quality, pricing transparency and liquidity conditions in private assets. This in turn can help large investors deploy capital at scale.

A two-track strategy with open questions

Viewed together, these developments suggest that recent Abu Dhabi M&A headlines reflect two interlocking strategies rather than an isolated spike in deal volume.

The first is reorganizing sovereign portfolios into fewer, more powerful platforms such as L'imad and consolidating assets like Modon under their control. The second is using domestic and outbound mergers and acquisitions to assemble industrial, resource and financial infrastructure that aligns with the emirate’s long-term economic priorities.

The sovereign consolidation clarifies lines of authority over major state assets and may allow faster, more coordinated capital deployment. Meanwhile, sector deals in chemicals, logistics, mining and financial technology extend Abu Dhabi’s reach into supply chains and markets that it considers strategic.

How long this tempo of large transactions can continue will depend not only on Abu Dhabi’s balance sheet strength and domestic ambitions but also on external factors. Global investment-screening rules, foreign-subsidy reviews and financing conditions can shape the speed and structure of cross-border deals even for very well-capitalized buyers.

For now, however, the combination of L'imad’s emergence as a central sovereign platform and ongoing industrial and resource acquisitions suggests that Abu Dhabi intends to be an active shaper of regional and global M&A flows rather than a passive recipient of capital trends decided elsewhere.