What's in the New Saudi Companies Law?

What’s in the New Saudi Companies Law?

The new Saudi Companies Law, also called the Corporate Law, has been a work in progress for at least ten years. In November, 2015 the Council of Ministers passed the law, to take effect 180 days after publication in the Umm al-Qura, the Official Gazette. Publication was made on December 4, 2015, so the law will be effective in early May, 2016.

No Translation

At the time of passage, there was no translation into the English language. Recently the Ministry of Commerce released a translation, but the effort is of poor quality. While grammatically correct, it would appear that there were no lawyers on the translation team.

Quality of the Translation

Where you would expect to find a discussion of a company’s domicile or principal place of business, you find references to a company’s “home.” The translation team was unfamiliar with the term “merger,” there are references to the undefined “cooperative company” when “partnership” is meant, and so on.

Annotated Version

The result is a text that could be better. While we have caught a few of these errors, we have not caught all of them. Unfortunately, lawyers normally look at statutes and regulations as if they were written in stone. Lawyers are good at advising on how to operate within the framework of a statute but have difficulty doing so when that language is fluid.

Like our book on Saudi Labor Law, the Saudi Labor Law Outline, we have annotated the law to make access easier and so that relevant articles can be found.

Each article has been given a descriptive title. Each article is referenced in the table of contents as well as the index. This makes it very easy to find relevant portions of the law.

You Get

1. the full, annotated text of the law

2. each article is identified with descriptive text
3. a table of contents
4. an index

None of these features are available in the MInistry of Commerce’s English version of the law.