By Dan McCue

With the Jebel Ali Free Zone in the emirate of Dubai, the principals involved in Jafza International created an epic logistics and distribution center on 35,000 barren desert acres.

That center of trade and commerce has since spun off nearly a dozen mini-cities on the vast empty land around it, cities dedicated to specific industries ranging from aeronautics to high tech, from textiles to maritime.

Now, according to Chuck Heath, the company's managing director, Jafza International hopes to do something just as transformative to 1,300 acres in Orangeburg County.

"My philosophy isn't to try to entice a Wal-Mart distribution center to move from its current location to my park. That does nothing for the regional economy," said Heath in his first on-the-record interview about Jafza International's planned $600 million investment in South Carolina.

"What we want to do is facilitate the increase of foreign investments and opportunities in the state, and Orangeburg specifically," he said. "Developing and creating a new economy, that's what we are about."

Heath, breaking his silence about the company's activities in order, he said, "to provide context" about its intentions, said currently about 6,500 international companies are operating in the Jebel Ali Free Zone in Dubai.

"My job, as I see it here in South Carolina, is to bring new direct foreign investment to this region," Heath said. "We will make sure all 6,500 of the companies that have embraced Jebel Ali are aware that Jafza is applying the same vision and same principles here in Orangeburg."

Jafza International's decision to embrace Orangeburg came after seven months of analysis of several sites in the Southeast, he said.

"I didn't just wake up in the middle of the night and say, 'Let's go to Orangeburg,'" he said. "We had people on the ground, unbeknownst to anybody, canvassing the Southeast as a whole, and individual states specifically, looking at everything from demographic trends to the available work force to how business-friendly a state was to the number of multinational companies who were relocating or making new investments in the area.

"In the end, we came to equate South Carolina and Orangeburg with the conditions we had in Dubai when Jebel Ali was under development. The state has reliable power, sufficient labor and quality infrastructure. In fact, you're already pretty close to the model we developed in Dubai.”