Relocating to the UAE - Our personal experience, Part 1: Be Aware of Cowboys!

The intention of this article is to give practical advice and information to entrepreneurs wanting to relocate in the UAE region. Besides the initial excitement of relocating to a business friendly jurisdiction which is also vibrant and packed with expats, there are some key matters an entrepreneur must consider prior to their decision.

Lets dive in! What better way to start talking about this amazing jurisdiction than from our experience during our UAE office set up in Abu Dhabi, in the ADGM region.

Be aware of cowboys!

The UAE is a region where money and money oriented people are attracted to. All expats who moved to the UAE region have the same goal. Making money. Amongst that crowd there are many cowboys and scammers trying to make use of you luck of local knowledge.

This is a very important aspect of your relocation. Be intelligent in your decision making about the service providers, collaborators and people you will be hanging out in the region. Try to educate yourself about how things work there as many people will cross your way wanting to take advantage of you in a good (business) and bad (scam) way.

Our experience:

In order to get our company, banking and audit license we needed a local to help us with the process. Being the owners of 3 different audit and assurance firms in Cyprus with existing clientele from all over the word, we diced to out source this function as we needed some one to also coordinate our efforts and off course to have the local expertise.

To our surprise we have found immediately many established businessmen who were eager to assist us and even become partners with us in our ventures. This is something that I call the “Dubai  Bling” which I will analyse in other articles.  They were eager to meet with us in Cyprus and in Dubai, help us with our application, and off course comfort us that the whole process would be fast and efficient due to the contacts they had in the region. Over and above they were promising us easy licensing process and effortless banking assistance. Their fees, reasonable and competitive with other more established service providers in the region.

The issue? Too good to be true (Dubai Bling). One of them even suggested that in Dubai the people do not make agreements but rather a handshake does the job. Same service provider also suggested that you need just an invoice for banking purposes and that would be it.

In other worlds, they were suggesting to us that we would engage with them verbally for a service worth app. US$100,000 including prepayments and disbursement payments without drafting engagement letters / contracts and so on!

Caught yourself in this situation? Leave immediately.

What did we do to escape this situation

We started the detail questions and of course we have been receiving general answers that again were too good to be true. In fact in one of our meetings we all stare each other wondering if this service provider is such a big shot, what is he doing with us here in Cyprus wasting 3 hours to have lunch and committing additional 2 of his Dubai team members for lunch. We also have been in business for many years and time is of essence and so as accurate responses to specific enquiries.

That lunch was the last encounter we had with this "service provider" who kept on reaching out to us!

Alternative Solution

In the end we have found a local service provider who would engage with us in a manner that we felt comfortable; via a step payment process based on success as stipulated by the engagement letter we have commonly agreed on. Disbursements would be transferred to service providers clients account and once paid we would receive a receipt. This way we controlled the process as expected in a professional and appropriate manner.

Few months down the line, Berkley was created and our team was established in the UAE servicing local business for accounting, audit and tax.

Get in touch
E:k.tramountanellis@berkley.ae | W: www.berkley.ae | T: +971 (0)-208-3107