ABU DHABI: The United Arab Emirates government has told some of its biggest business families that it plans to remove their monopolies on the sale of imported goods, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

The Gulf state has proposed legislation that would end the automatic renewal of existing commercial agency agreements, according to the report, giving foreign firms the opportunity to distribute their own goods or change their local agents.

“It no longer makes sense for individual families to have such power and preferential access to easy wealth,” the report quoted an Emirati official as saying. “We have to modernise our economy.”