500 Rials

The Central Bank of Yemen issued this note during a period of relative monetary stability following the painful 1995–96 currency reforms, when the rial had lost roughly two-thirds of its value against the dollar in under five years. The 500 rial denomination was a practical response to that inflation — it had been reintroduced in higher-value form precisely because smaller denominations had been rendered inadequate for daily transactions.

Thomas De La Rue's involvement here is unremarkable for the region; they held printing contracts across the Arabian Peninsula throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The security thread specification for this series is a plain windowed type, not a more advanced demetallized variant.