Mirwais Azizi is the founder and chairman of the Azizi Group, a Dubai-based holding whose interests run from banking in Afghanistan to property development in the United Arab Emirates.
Born in 1962 in Laghman province, he graduated in law from Kabul University and left Afghanistan in 1988. He founded the Azizi Group the following year.
In 2006 he established Azizi Bank in Kabul with $7.5 million in initial capital. It grew into one of the country’s largest private banks, and the group later acquired Bakhtar Bank, now the Islamic Bank of Afghanistan. He remains chairman of both the group and the bank.
Azizi Developments, the group’s UAE arm, followed in 2007 and has become one of Dubai’s more active private developers. Its pipeline spans residential, commercial and mixed-use projects, and in July 2026 the company said it was recruiting 6,500 specialist construction workers to deliver it. The business is run from API World Tower on Sheikh Zayed Road.
The combination is unusual. Most developers of comparable scale in Dubai are either state-linked or backed by long-established local family holdings, and few also hold a regulated banking business in a second and considerably harder market.
He has served on the board of trustees of the American University of Afghanistan.
Disclosure: INUBIZ Marketing, the agency owned by Pashtun Global’s founder, has provided marketing support for Azizi Developments’ Florence community in Sharjah. The relationship had no bearing on this profile or on its verification records.
