JohnLocke said:
Personal tax residency, as far as I understand, you still don't pay any personal tax in Dubai ?
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Passive income and salaries only. There is a major risk of any sort of gainful activity being subject to corporate income tax.
For example, a transparent US LLC would be subject to CIT if is deemed to have a PE in the UAE.
The same would apply if you receive a salary from some other foreign company.
Unless you have purely passive income, there's no way to escape the corporate tax.
Yes, there is no corporate tax up to 375k Dh, and there is small business relief for a couple of years, but I wouldn't want to even get involved with the authorities in the UAE.
There is no rule of law - who knows, maybe they will change their mind and remove the small business relief after a year instead of three.
Oh, you didn't know you have to file this form? 25k USD fine for you. It really doesn't make sense.
If you have to pay tax anyway, it's better to go for Malta or some other country with well-established rules and a decent court system.
If you want to go with the UAE (because it arguably has the highes quality of life of the GCC states), then the only viable option I see is using an offshore entity with some sort of nominee director. That should probably hold up at least for the next couple of years since they will be busy with brick&mortar companies serving local clients.
But it's still a risk, so I'm not sure if that actually makes sense.
Last edited: Jul 11, 2023
