One: a foundation chosen for its name
An adviser abroad asked us for a registered address in the DIFC for a foundation its client was setting up there. It is a reasonable request, and we quoted it: a desk in the Centre, which also lets the foundation sponsor a small number of residence visas. Then the adviser told us that cost was a concern, and the conversation became more useful.
A foundation is a holding vehicle, and before choosing where to put it the right question is what it has to do. If it needs premises and visas — a family office with staff, a principal who wants residence through it — the DIFC is a natural home and the desk is part of the price. If it needs to hold shares, a bank account and perhaps Dubai property, and to give the family a common-law court if it ever comes to that, a RAK ICC foundation does those things at a fraction of the running cost. Its charter and by-laws can choose the DIFC Courts or the ADGM Courts, and RAK ICC vehicles can hold Dubai freehold property under the centre’s arrangement with the Land Department.
That is what we told the adviser, and we have not heard back. Perhaps the client needs the visas; perhaps the name of the Centre matters to someone in the family, which is a legitimate reason as long as it is the actual reason. What I would not do is pay for premises a foundation will never use, every year for the life of the structure, because the first conversation started with a place rather than a purpose.
The same discipline applies to every holding structure. Write down, in one paragraph, what the vehicle must do: what it holds, who benefits, who controls it, which court decides disputes, and whether anyone needs a visa from it. The jurisdiction usually chooses itself.
Two: the licence is easy; the bank is the question
A trader in industrial raw materials, buying from producers in one region and selling to plants in another, asked three providers, ourselves among them, to price a company in Dubai’s premium commodities zone, with a cheaper zone as the fallback. He asked for a general trading licence, because that is what people ask for, and for a regulated precious-metals activity he did not yet need.
We priced what he asked for, and then what he needed. A general trading licence costs a good deal more in the first year and at every renewal, and the zone’s own rules say it does not cover activities that need a third party’s approval, so the regulated activity would have had to be added separately anyway. That activity in turn brings a regulator’s approval, a guarantee letter, screening of the supply chain and registration with the Financial Intelligence Unit before the first deal. Drop it, and all four fall away. The licence he actually needed was one specific trading activity, and the difference in price between the premium zone and the cheaper one was, in effect, the price of access to a bank account.
That is the point I make to every trader: the licence is the easy part. A bank decides on the business model, the counterparties, the flows and the people, not on the name of the zone, and it decides after you have paid for the licence. So we offer the bank assessment first, before any government fee is paid. If the account will not open, it is better to know before the company exists.
He then asked whether he should start with a commercial brokerage licence, on the theory that a broker would pass a bank’s compliance more easily, and add trading later. My view is that a licence should describe what the company will actually do from its first day. A bank compares the licence with the account’s turnover within months, and a broker that is visibly trading is a file that explains itself badly. A softer licence does not make a business lower-risk; it makes it look as if it is hiding something.
Three: the filing that stopped everything
A company in a Dubai free zone, regulated in its sector, did not file its audited accounts for 2025. Nothing happened at first. Then the zone placed a sanction on its portal account, and the consequences arrived in order: the licence could not be renewed; without a renewed licence the shareholder’s visa could not be processed; without the visa there was no Emirates ID; and without the Emirates ID the bank would not open the account the company was waiting for. One missing document stopped four things, each of which looked unrelated to the others.
Two further lessons came out of the same file. The first is that whoever controls the company’s portal account controls whether anything can be filed at all. We could prepare the submission and could not press the button, because the user rights sat with someone else. Every owner should know who holds the administrator rights to the company’s free-zone portal, and should hold them himself or through someone who answers to him. The second is that sector regulators now collect more than licence data: this one asked for headcount, staff costs, spending with UAE suppliers and estimated corporate tax, for last year, this year and next.
None of this is unusual, and none of it is hard. Audited accounts are due on a known date, portal rights are a setting, and the data a regulator asks for is data a company should already have. The cost of treating them as optional is not a fine; it is the company stopping.
Four: leaving well
Two long-time residents are winding up their affairs in the UAE. Both had fixed deposits and credit cards with the same bank. One had asked months ago for his deposit to be closed early; the bank accepted the request and gave a date, and the date passed. When we took the file over, the money was still in the deposit, his current account was empty, and his passport was a few weeks from expiry.
Banks are not slow out of malice. An early closure is a manual process, the request sits in a queue, and a customer who has left the country is the easiest one to forget. But the order matters. A deposit is easy to close while the customer holds a valid Emirates ID and can walk into a branch, and much harder once the residence has ended and every instruction must be verified from abroad. A credit card can be cancelled in a day, but the clearance letter that proves nothing is owed is issued only after 45 days, and landlords, employers and authorities may ask for it.
So the advice for anyone planning to leave is to start with the bank, three months before the flight: close deposits and cards, get each closure confirmed in writing, request the clearance letter as soon as the 45 days have run, and keep one current account open, with online access, until the last payment has cleared. The residence should be cancelled last, not first.
What the four have in common
A foundation placed before its purpose was defined. A licence bought before the bank had been asked. A renewal attempted before the accounts were filed. A residence ending before the bank had finished. In every file this fortnight the steps were right and the order was wrong, and in every case the remedy was to put the order back. The regulators made the same point in their own way: the Financial Intelligence Unit’s new regulation lets a bank hold a payment for three days and the FIU freeze it for thirty, and a company that has documented why its money moves before it moves it will spend those days explaining nothing. Most of what a corporate service provider does is make sure that things happen in the right order.
Mohanad Almeshal is Co-Founder and Corporate Counsel of Polaris Corporate Services, a licensed Trust and Corporate Service Provider in Ras Al Khaimah and Dubai. The cases described are real; the identifying details are not. Nothing in this article is tax or investment advice for any particular company.