For most expats Dubai is fine as long as you understand exactly where the lines are drawn and are willing to live within them (it's orders of magnitude more relaxed than KSA; far more restrictive than, say, Singapore; and a world away from Europe), but even then you can find yourself in trouble; doing business with powerful political clans -- and it's hard to avoid doing that at a certain level -- is a fraught scenario. I had one friend whose company went into bankruptcy because of two clients (a senior UAE shaykh and an Indian billionaire) who refused to pay tens of millions in outstanding uncontested invoices.

About that same time another UAE (Nahyan) shaykh demonstrated his displeasure to a business partner by having him driven into the desert, buried up to the neck, and (nonfatally) run over with a Range Rover while being videotaped. When that business partner (an American) attempted to press charges, the Shaykh was acquitted and the businessman convicted in absentia for blackmail.

I've had more issues and fewer legal recourses with Gulf clients and partners than anywhere else in the world (including the Bilad al-Sham/Levantine region of the Mideast), while doing less work with them than almost anywhere else, so I'll admit to being biased, but it really is a region where the rule of law is, depending on the context, highly personalized or outsourced to religious authorities, and presented without any of the procedural due processes you're used to.