Company registration in Oman

Registering is not the hard decision in Oman. The hard decision is the pair of answers you give before filing: which activity the company will run, and who will be allowed to do the work once it does.

What else we do in the Sultanate is listed on the Oman page; registrations elsewhere are gathered on the service page.

The nine particulars the document carries

• The company name and the principal place of its business.
• The share capital, with cash and in-kind shares stated separately and valued.
• Every shareholder by name, nationality, address and number of shares.
• The objectives, the date of establishment and the duration.
• The manager, his personal data and his authorities.
• The financial year, the body that resolves shareholder disputes, and the majority each general meeting decides by.

The capital, and the rules around it

Two clocks start before the entry does

Thirty days to file

Once the establishment procedures are complete, the shareholders or the appointed manager have thirty days to put the registration application in front of the Registrar. Later amendments run on the same clock.

A hundred and eighty days to unwind

If the entry has not happened within 180 days of the first contribution being deposited, any shareholder who paid may write to the others and the bank, treat the constitutive document as cancelled and take his money back.

The mainland is not the only address

Under the Ministry

A company on the mainland is licensed through the Investment Services Centre and lives by the Companies Law and the foreign investment law together.

Under a zone of its own

The foreign investment law expressly leaves the Duqm special economic zone, the public establishment for industrial estates and the free zones to their own decrees. We look at those regimes separately. Those regimes carry their own entry conditions and their own approvals.

Hiring, before the first offer letter

• The employer is obliged to employ Omanis; the percentage comes from a ministerial decision for the sector, not from the statute.
• Professions in which Omanis replace non-Omanis are named by the same route.
• Missing the quota is a fine of 500 to 1,000 Omani rials for each Omani who should have been appointed, doubled if repeated.
• The employer then has six months from the discovery to reach the percentage.
• An employer of forty workers or more also appoints qualified Omanis with disabilities, within a percentage the Minister sets.

Sources: shareholders, capital, the escrow and the two deadlines — articles 234, 238–243 and 246 of the Commercial Companies Law; ownership, the closed list and silence as consent — articles 2, 5, 6 and 14 of the Foreign Capital Investment Law; quotas and the fine — articles 23, 24 and 144 of the Labour Law.