Workplace air quality in Egypt is a legal compliance issue when operations expose workers to gases, vapours or dust. A site's environmental approval does not establish whether its controls adequately protect workers. That protection matters during normal production, maintenance and equipment faults. An international group may already have a detailed health and safety system. However, [...]
A factory has an environmental approval and a folder labelled environmental register. Yet the production process has changed, monitoring results sit with a contractor and the register still describes last year's operation. Egypt environmental register requirements concern that gap between the document and the site as much as the existence of the document itself. For [...]
An international group approves a new production line in Egypt. Procurement orders the equipment, the local team starts planning installation, and legal receives the environmental file shortly before commissioning. The environmental impact assessment in Egypt may already be late: the relevant duty attaches before project implementation, rather than simply before the first commercial sale. For [...]
Egypt withholding tax is a question to resolve before your company pays an overseas service provider, licensor or lender. Must the company withhold Egyptian income tax from the payment? Article 56 of Egypt’s Income Tax Law No 91 of 2005 places that obligation on specified payers. It covers interest, royalties, service fees and payments for [...]
A foreign company can incorporate in Egypt, fund its capital in full, and still find its tax incentives stalled and its investors' residence permits on hold — because the General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI) has not yet confirmed that the project is genuinely operating. Two separate committee procedures at GAFI's Investor Service [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
