The Daily Telegraph's former editor has announced he will launch a national newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, creating 200 jobs around the world.

Martin Newland is working on setting up the newsroom and planning the design and title of the paper, which will be based in Abu Dhabi. Currently, there is no launch date, but Newland has said it will be “months, not years away,” and that the paper's future is “assured” by significant investment from the investment wing of the Abu Dhabi government, according to Press Gazette.

Newland left the Telegraph in 2005 after serving as editor for two years. He also played a major role in setting up the National Post in Canada in 1998.

“You might expect to do this once in a lifetime on a fully national newspaper, but the chance to do it twice was too good to turn down,” Newland is quoted as saying by Press Gazette. “This area is absolutely exploding with potential – in many ways running too fast with infrastructure having to catch up.”

The broadsheet newspaper will be marketed to readers “at the high end,” English speakers earning more than £100,000. “In this place, that's the Indian middle classes, the Anglosphere ex-pats and Emiratis, who speak (English) fluently,” Newland said. The paper will be published by ITP, chaired by Spectator publisher Andrew Neil, which publishes more than 40 English-language titles in the Middle East, according to Press Gazette.

The newspaper is initially planned as a national to the UAE, but Newland said there are plans to expand circulation farther into the Middle East and abroad, with the aim of putting Abu Dhabi “at the head of a nation within a region, and from the launch editions will be sent to London and Washington D.C.

“You've got to understand that, economically, newspapers here are about where (British newspapers) were at the height of the dotcom era, where you were beating off advertisers with sticks. We have a lot of newspapers that run at 100 percent profitability – as soon as you can grow a section, it fills (with advertising),” Newland told Press Gazette. “For those of us who have become slightly jaded with the Fleet Street scene, where circulation is sinking and everyone's being made redundant, this is like turning the clock back. It's booming.”