Who We Are: Three Businesses, One Intake, Separate Engagements

Who We Are: Three Businesses, One Intake, Separate Engagements

Most consultancy group pages exist to make three businesses look like one. This one exists to do the opposite, because the distinction has consequences you will meet at exactly the wrong moment if nobody draws it for you.

Three businesses operate from the same office in Business Bay, Dubai. They share a switchboard, an intake process and a reception. They do not share licences, supervisors or liability. When you engage us, you engage one of them for a defined piece of work, and the others become referrals rather than parties. What the formation business itself is and how it works is set out on about ConsultZone; this page is about the boundaries between the three.

That sounds like a technicality until the day a tax position is challenged, a brokerage transaction is queried, or you need to know whose professional standing is behind a piece of advice. Then it is the only thing that matters.

The three, and what each one is for

In prose, and in the same order: ConsultZone forms and licenses companies and carries visas, attestation and closure, but signs no audit opinion, files no tax return as your appointed agent and appears in no courtroom; Consulthome buys, sells, lets and manages property, but neither advises on the tax treatment of a purchase nor forms the company that holds the asset; Finvisors takes corporate tax, VAT and financial advisory, and forms nothing, handles no immigration and acts as nobody's broker.

The division is not marketing. It follows what each type of work legally requires. Forming a company requires a commercial licence and a relationship with the licensing authority. Acting on a tax matter as your appointed representative requires standing with the Federal Tax Authority, which is a matter of public record and which you should check rather than assume. Brokering property in Dubai requires a permission from the Dubai Land Department attached to a named individual, not to a group brand.

So "the group can handle it" is not an answer to "who is doing this work". If anyone here tells you it is, ask again.

Which one you are contracting with, by the work you need

This is the practical version of the table above. Find the thing you are trying to do; the right-hand column is the business whose engagement letter you should expect to receive.

In prose: choosing between mainland, a free zone and offshore, obtaining or renewing a trade licence, changing a licensed activity, applying for residence permits, attesting documents and closing a company are all ConsultZone; working out whether you fall inside corporate tax, preparing a corporate tax or VAT filing and deciding on a tax grouping are all Finvisors; buying, selling or letting UAE property is Consulthome; a holiday-home unit needs Consulthome and ConsultZone together, because the operating permit is a licensing matter; and holding property inside a company needs all three, in an order that matters.

The last row is the one that goes wrong most often, and it is worth its own explanation.

Where a file crosses from one business to another

A single commercial objective frequently needs two or three of these businesses in sequence. The sequence is not interchangeable, and getting it backwards is expensive rather than merely untidy.

Holding property through a company is the clearest example. The property decision, the structure decision and the tax decision are three decisions, and they constrain each other:

1. What you may buy, and where. Freehold eligibility depends on the area and on who is buying — an individual, a UAE company, or a foreign company. That is a property question.
2. What structure may hold it. Not every vehicle can be entered as the owner of every property, and not every free zone company can hold UAE real estate at all. That is a formation question.
3. What the holding costs you annually. A company that owns an asset has filing obligations whether or not it trades. That is a tax question.

Each of those three questions belongs to a different one of the three businesses — the property question to Consulthome, the structure question to ConsultZone, the annual cost question to Finvisors — which is why a single commercial objective produces two or three engagements rather than one.

Answer them in the order 1, 2, 3 and each answer narrows the next. Answer them in the order 2, 1, 3 — form the company first because somebody sold you a company — and you may hold a vehicle that cannot be entered as owner of the asset you want, in which case the formation fee bought you nothing and the restructuring costs more than doing it once.

The first of those three questions is the property one, and it is not answered on this page: real estate and property investment covers what may be bought, where, and by whom.

The same pattern applies to a business that will owe tax. The structure you form determines the tax position you are then stuck with for at least a financial year. If the structure decision is taken without the tax question being asked, the tax work becomes damage control rather than planning. We would rather hand the file across before the licence is issued than after, and what sits on the far side of that hand-over is described under tax and financial advisory.

What the handover actually looks like

We are describing a process here rather than making a promise about speed, because the honest answer to "how fast" depends on your documents rather than on us.

The file starts with you and comes back to you before it moves: one intake, given once; one named person accountable per engagement; one scope and its own fees per business; and no document crossing from one of the three to another until you say so.

• One intake. You explain the objective once. You should not have to repeat it to three sets of people.
• A named owner per piece of work. Each engagement has one person accountable for it. If you cannot name that person, the engagement is not properly set up and you should say so.
• A separate engagement per business. You will receive scope and fees for each. Two pieces of work from two businesses means two scopes, and they should not be bundled into a single number that hides which is which.
• Your documents move with your consent, not automatically. Identity documents, bank statements and ownership evidence are the most sensitive material you will give anyone in this process. Crossing them from one business to another is a decision you make, not an internal convenience.

Why we are required to ask intrusive questions

Corporate services providers in the UAE sit inside the anti-money-laundering framework as designated non-financial businesses and professions. That status carries obligations that are not negotiable and not ours to waive: identifying the ultimate beneficial owner, understanding the source of funds, screening against sanctions lists, keeping records, and reporting suspicion through the Financial Intelligence Unit's platform.

Two consequences worth stating plainly:

The questions get more intrusive as the structure gets more complex. A single-shareholder consultancy is a short conversation. A layered holding structure with an overseas parent and a nominee somewhere in the chain is a long one, and the length is not obstruction.

A provider who does not ask is not being efficient. They are either not supervised or not complying, and both are your problem eventually rather than theirs, because the file with your name on it is the one that gets examined.

The work none of the three of us can sign

This is the section most group pages omit. There is a category of work that adjoins everything above and that none of these businesses is permitted to complete for you.

We coordinate all of these and we are useful at it, because knowing the order and the evidence standard is most of the work. But coordination is not the same as authorisation, and a firm that blurs the two is telling you something about how it will behave later.

How to check any of this, including us

Everything asserted on this page is checkable, and you should check it rather than take it from a website.

• Ask which entity your engagement is with, and read the name on the document you are asked to sign.
• Ask for the trade licence of that entity, and confirm the licensed activity covers the work you are buying.
• Check agent standing directly with the authority where a filing will be made in your name. The Federal Tax Authority publishes accredited agents; a claim of standing is verifiable in a minute.
• Check a brokerage permission against the Dubai Land Department rather than against a business card.
• Ask who is accountable for your file, by name, and what happens to it if that person leaves.

If any of those questions produces friction rather than an answer, you have learned something more useful than the answer would have told you.

Where this group is the wrong choice

Stated because a page like this is worthless if it only describes the cases where we fit.

• You need one adviser who does everything under one liability. You would be better served by a single integrated professional services firm that carries audit, tax and legal in one partnership. Three specialist businesses with clean boundaries is a different model, and if you want one throat to choke, say so and choose accordingly.
• Your matter is primarily a dispute. If the live question is a contract breach, a shareholder fight or an enforcement action, your first call is a law firm, not us. We can be useful afterwards.
• You want the cheapest possible licence and nothing else. There are providers who will sell you exactly that, faster than we will, because we are going to ask what you intend to do and whether the licence supports it. That conversation has value only if you want it.
• You need a regulated financial services licence and want certainty of outcome. Nobody can give you that. A regulator's decision is a regulator's decision, and any firm implying otherwise is misrepresenting its own influence.
• Your business has no UAE nexus at all. If nothing about the activity, the customers or the assets touches the UAE, forming here adds obligations without adding anything. We will tell you that, and it is the advice that costs us the engagement.

What to do next

If you know which business you need, say so and we will put you with it. If you do not — which is the common and reasonable case — describe the objective rather than the structure, and let the sequence be derived rather than assumed.

The one thing worth arriving with is the honest version of what you intend to do commercially. Every question after that follows from it, and every wrong answer on this site traces back to a plan that was described optimistically at the start.

Frequently asked questions