One of the great mysteries of life in Abu Dhabi, along with how to get a new national ID card or find a taxi on a Thursday night, is just how the government doles out surplus oil revenues to its various sovereign wealth funds. Neither the government nor the funds themselves disclose the formula by which the cash gets divvied up. Conventional wisdom holds that after ADNOC covers its own costs and finances the government's budget, it pays out the remainder as a dividend to the SWFs, with 70 per cent going to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and 30 per cent to its baby brother, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council. That division may have shifted as more funds are lavished on Mubadala.

Analysts have speculated that ADIA and the Council are receiving less new oil cash to invest abroad as oil prices fall and the government boosts spending to ease the pain of the crisis. This turns out to be true in the extreme. A copy of the prospectus for Abu Dhabi's $10bn bond programme, issued to potential investors back in April, includes one of the clearest explanations of how much Abu Dhabi has been earning from oil and how it plans to spend it. It also includes this seemingly innocuous line on page 94 of its 123 pages: "In 2009, it has been determined that the payments on account of dividend and any final dividend paid to ADIA and ADIC by ADNOC will be transferred by those entities to the government with a view to financing the projected budget deficit for 2009."

This may come as a disappointment for those expecting Abu Dhabi's SWFs to become bigger players in overseas markets. Aside from the dividends and interest on existing investments, the only way they stand to raise more funds for new investments is to sell those they already have.