Not every career anchor is its most recent chapter. For Shaher Moh’d Ali Awartani, the enterprise that has defined the arc of his professional life is also its longest-running: Silver Coast Construction & Boring LLC, co-founded in Abu Dhabi in 1997 and still operational under Awartani’s chairmanship more than 27 years later. While Awartani’s portfolio has expanded across seven sectors and three continents, Silver Coast remains the institutional foundation — the operational proof of record that precedes and substantiates everything built after it.
USD 1.35 billion in completed UAE construction projects. A workforce that reached up to 4,500 employees at scale. A presence in the Abu Dhabi construction market spanning the better part of three decades. These are not background details. They are the central facts of one of the most sustained construction careers in the emirate’s private sector.
The 1997 Co-Founding: Context and Timing
Silver Coast Construction & Boring LLC was co-founded by Awartani in Abu Dhabi in 1997. The timing placed it at the beginning of one of the most consequential infrastructure expansion periods in UAE history. The late 1990s and the decade that followed saw Abu Dhabi invest heavily in civic infrastructure, commercial real estate, institutional facilities, and public-sector development — generating sustained, large-scale demand for capable construction operators.
Entering the market at that moment, with a company structured to handle the scale and complexity of government-adjacent construction work, was a strategically significant decision. The Abu Dhabi construction sector was not, even in 1997, a low-barrier market. It required operational credibility, capital discipline, and the ability to manage large workforces across complex, long-duration projects.
Awartani, as Co-founding Partner, brought a management-trained background and a commitment to building a company structured for growth — not a single-project operation, but a durable enterprise designed to accumulate a track record over time.
Building to Scale: 4,500 Employees and USD 1.35 Billion in Output
The growth of Silver Coast from its 1997 founding to its peak operational scale is the most direct evidence available of what the company became. A workforce of up to 4,500 people represents a significant organizational undertaking — one that requires not just project management, but HR infrastructure, safety systems, payroll operations, subcontractor coordination, and sustained client relationships across a demanding market.
The USD 1.35 billion figure in completed UAE construction projects is a cumulative output metric — a sum of individual projects delivered, contracts fulfilled, and clients served across more than two decades. It is not a valuation, an AUM figure, or a projected pipeline. It is documented work, completed on the ground in the UAE.
For context: construction companies that reach that level of cumulative output in a single national market over that time period are operating in the upper tier of privately held sector participants. The figure places Silver Coast — and by extension, Awartani as its Chairman and Co-founding Partner — within the small group of operators whose construction record in the UAE is both substantial and verifiable.
The Boring Specialty: Infrastructure Beneath the Surface
The company’s full name — Silver Coast Construction & Boring LLC — reflects a technical specialization that is easy to overlook but significant in practice. Boring, in the construction context, refers to horizontal directional drilling and underground utility installation: the infrastructure work that happens beneath roads, buildings, and public spaces to enable utility networks, pipelines, and cable systems to function without surface disruption.
This is not a peripheral specialty. It is a foundational one. As the UAE’s urban development accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s, the demand for underground infrastructure installation — telecommunications, water, drainage, power — grew in direct proportion to surface-level construction activity. A company with established boring capability was positioned for sustained relevance in precisely the kind of infrastructure-intensive market that Abu Dhabi represented.
The boring specialization also speaks to a deliberate choice about what kind of construction company Silver Coast would be: one with technical depth, not just project volume.
Abaad Wood Industries: Extending the Construction Ecosystem
In 2010, Awartani co-founded Abaad Wood Industries — an industrial manufacturing company serving the UAE’s construction and interior fit-out sectors. The venture was not a departure from the construction domain. It was an extension of it.
For a chairman already operating a construction company of Silver Coast’s scale, the logic was supply-chain adjacent: interior fit-out and wood manufacturing serve the same end markets as civil construction, with a shorter project cycle and a different capital profile. Co-founding Abaad gave Awartani exposure to manufacturing operations while staying within an industry he understood at a deep operational level.
The two companies — Silver Coast and Abaad — reflect a construction ecosystem approach: build the structural work, then address the finishing and materials supply within the same portfolio. It is a model more common among large conglomerates than among individual co-founders, which makes its presence in Awartani’s portfolio a point of structural distinction.
Silver Coast as Institutional Proof of Record
The significance of Silver Coast to Awartani’s broader career cannot be overstated. When he co-founded Equalis Capital Ltd in the DIFC in 2013, when he joined the board of Global Gate Capital Partners in Geneva in 2015, when he became a substantial shareholder in Reem Hospital Abu Dhabi in 2020 alongside Mubadala, InvestCorp of Bahrain, and Wisayah Capital — in each of these contexts, Silver Coast was the foundation beneath the transaction.
Institutional co-investors and regulated financial jurisdictions do not evaluate principals in isolation. They evaluate track records. A chairman who has led a construction company to USD 1.35 billion in completed project output, maintained a workforce of up to 4,500 people, and sustained an enterprise across 27 years presents a materially different risk and governance profile than one without that history.
Silver Coast is, in this sense, more than a business. It is the primary piece of evidence in a case that Awartani has been building — about operational discipline, long-term commitment, and the capacity to execute at scale — for nearly three decades.
The Chairman’s Role: Active, Not Titular
Awartani’s designation as Chairman and Co-founding Partner of Silver Coast is not an honorific retained from a company he no longer actively stewards. It reflects a continuous involvement in the enterprise across its entire operational history. The companies and co-investments he has added to his portfolio since 2010 are additions to a career that is still anchored in Abu Dhabi’s construction sector — not replacements for it.
That continuity is itself a credential. In a market where business tenure is often measured in single projects or short-cycle ventures, 27 years of sustained involvement in a single enterprise — at its helm, not as a passive stakeholder — signals a commitment to long-horizon building that extends well beyond the financials.
About Shaher Awartani
Shaher Moh’d Ali Awartani is an AbuDhabi-based businessman and investor He is Chairman and Co-founding Partner of Silver Coast Construction & Boring LLC, Co-founder of Yasa Capital (DIFC) Limited, and a shareholder and Board member of Global Gate Capital Partners in Geneva. His career spans nearly three decades across construction, real estate, private equity, hospitality, healthcare, industrial manufacturing, and regulated investment advisory. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Management from the University of Toledo and completed his secondary education at Queen’s College Taunton in Somerset, England.
