Practice area
Corporate and commercial
Company formation, branch registration, joint ventures and the day-to-day commercial agreements that let a business operate in Somalia.
How the firm works in this area
Corporate and commercial work is the base of the practice. The firm incorporates companies, registers foreign branches, and drafts the shareholder, joint-venture and supply agreements that hold an operation together. Much of this work is done for international clients entering the market for the first time, and for the foreign counsel who instruct the firm as their Somali desk on a larger transaction.
Company law in Somalia was modernised by the Companies Act 2019, and the firm advised on the subsidiary regulations that operationalise it, including electronic registration and company-conversion rules. That involvement shows in the work: registrations are handled with an understanding of how the Registrar and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry actually apply the law, not only how it reads.
A single relationship partner keeps each matter coherent where it crosses into tax, employment, regulatory approvals or a later dispute, so a client is not handed between silos as the work develops.
Confidentiality is structural, not cosmetic. Representative work in this area is described by anonymized descriptor only. The firm never implies a named client without consent.
What the firm handles
A working list of the matters clients instruct the firm on in this area.
Selected matters
A sovereign government
The firm acted as co-counsel to a sovereign government in an international commercial arbitration seated in Europe, with roughly 157 million euros in dispute under a public infrastructure contract. Its contribution centred on Somali constitutional and administrative law: whether the contractual commitments in question were validly entered into given the approvals that state institutions are required to give, and what the consequences are when that process is not followed. The work combined close analysis of the domestic legal framework with the practical demands of an international arbitral proceeding.
A global technology company
Instructed on the licensing and regulatory framework for landing major international connectivity infrastructure, the firm advised on submarine cable landing licences, the treatment of carrier-neutral data centres, infrastructure-sharing arrangements and the law-enforcement assistance obligations that attach to the cable. Because the landing engaged both the Federal Government and a second Somali jurisdiction, each question had to be resolved twice and reconciled. The advice was structured so that it would hold as the subsidiary regulation under the National Communications Act 2017 continues to develop.
A global satellite communications operator
The firm provided market-entry and regulatory-compliance analysis for a low-earth-orbit satellite broadband service, addressing how the service is licensed under the National Communications Act 2017, how its spectrum co-exists with terrestrial networks, and whether national roaming obligations apply. Where the statutory framework did not map cleanly onto a satellite deployment, the firm identified the gap and proposed a position the regulator could accept, so that the operator could launch on a defensible reading of the licensing regime rather than a contested one.
Related reading
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Instruct the firm on a matter in Somalia
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