Insights

The UAE MoF issued new templates for the economic substance notification and report

Overview

On October 22, 2020, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ministry of Finance (MoF), via its Economic Substance (ES) Regulations webpage, released the much anticipated ES report and revised ES notification templates. We noted that the MoF has removed the templates from its website as the initial versions comprised some errors. However, these templates of the ES notification and report are helpful to understand the level of information that will be required from the UAE licensees.

According to the updated ES guidance (Ministerial Decision No. 100 of 2020), both ES filings, i.e. the resubmission of notifications and report filings will be done through a centralized MoF portal which is yet to go live.

The revised ES notification template does not bring many changes on the information to be provided compared to the ES notification form adopted by the Regulatory Authorities for the first notification filings earlier this year. The current version of the ES notification incorporates aspects introduced by the amended ES Regulations, including the requirement to disclose the following additional information, when applicable:

  • Disclosure of Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) - previously this was only a requirement for licensees that undertook High Risk Intellectual Property (IP) business relevant activity;
  • Branch details – if a relevant activity is performed by a branch; and
  • Self-certification for exempted licensees – based on the ES regulations, exempted licensees would be required to provide supporting documentation for the exempt status. However, it seems that the notification template does not provide any option to attach the files. Therefore, such information may have to be provided upon request. This should be further confirmed once the MoF portal is made available.

The deadline for the filing of the notification should be within 6 months after the financial year end. However, the MoF has not provided any deadline date for the resubmission of the notification for fiscal year (FY)19. Therefore, we recommend to file the notification as soon as the MoF portal is live unless further guidance on the filing deadline is provided.

The ES report template has been provided for the first time by the MoF. The information related to financial position, number of personal and details on outsourcing will be disclosed by the licensees. The filing deadline for licensees should be 12 months after the FY19 year end.

Please find attached the templates for the ES notification and report available on the MoF website.

For further information and analysis on the revised ES Regulations released in August 2020, please refer to our previous alert.

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