For a foreign manufacturer, obtaining an industrial licence in Egypt is the beginning of compliance, not the end of it. Under Law No. 15 of 2017 — the Industrial Establishment Licensing Facilitation Law — a factory that is fully licensed on day one can still be fined, sealed, or expose its managers to criminal liability [...]
Building a factory in Egypt is a major commitment — but pouring the foundations is not the same as being allowed to operate. A foreign manufacturer can install its machinery, hire its workforce, and still be running an illegal plant if it holds the wrong authorization. That is because an industrial license in Egypt is [...]
UNOFFICIAL ENGLISH TRANSLATION Decree of the Minister of Investment and Foreign Trade No. 271 of 2026 Issuing the Executive Regulations of Law No. 121 of 1982 on the Importers' Register Published on 21 July 2026 in the Egyptian Waqai (Official Gazette), Issue 157 (Supplement) Effective as of 22 July 2026 TRANSLATION DISCLAIMER This is [...]
Walk into almost any office in Egypt and you pass the same device on the way in: a small scanner on the wall that reads a fingerprint, or a face, to log who arrived and when. It is so ordinary that no one thinks of it as a legal matter at all. Under the Personal [...]
By Karim El Sayed The cleanest assumption an international company can make about Egypt is also the most expensive one to get wrong: we have no entity there, so Egyptian law does not reach us. It is not true of the Personal Data Protection Law. If your company processes the personal data of people located [...]
Most international companies operating in Egypt believe they have never transferred personal data abroad. They are wrong. And the mistake carries criminal liability. If your company stores employee or customer data on Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, AWS, Azure, or an HR platform like Workday or SAP SuccessFactors — and those servers sit outside Egypt — [...]
In most companies, tax sits with finance. The directors set strategy, the finance team handles returns and filings, and if something goes wrong with tax, it is treated as a corporate problem — a matter of assessments, fines, and adjustments paid by the company. For businesses operating in Egypt, that mental model is incomplete, and [...]
Ask most people when a business must register for VAT in Egypt, and they will name a number: half a million pounds of turnover. It feels like a comfortable runway — operate, grow, and worry about VAT once you approach the threshold. For a large category of businesses, that belief is simply wrong, and acting [...]
Ask most people when a business must register for VAT in Egypt, and they will name a number: half a million pounds of turnover. It feels like a comfortable runway — operate, grow, and worry about VAT once you approach the threshold. For a large category of businesses, that belief is simply wrong, and acting [...]
Every month, a foreign company operating in Egypt pays for services that originate abroad — management and service fees from a parent company, software and cloud subscriptions, consultants, marketing agencies, engineering support, intellectual property licenses. None of these foreign suppliers charges Egyptian VAT. So the VAT is never recorded. And quietly, transaction by transaction, a [...]
