Sector
Banking and financial services
Banks, development finance institutions, payments networks, microfinance and fintech entering the Somali financial sector.
The firm in this sector
The firm advises the institutions that finance the market and the networks that move money through it. That includes development finance institutions on corporate-law modernisation and regulatory reform, microfinance providers on Shari’ah-compliant lending platforms, and global payments and technology companies on payment-systems regulation, anti-money-laundering compliance and electronic transactions.
Its regulatory work reaches the Central Bank of Somalia, whose licensing and financial-market-infrastructure framework the firm advises on, and its Islamic-finance capability lets it structure facilities that satisfy both secular banking law and Shari’ah.
Work in this sector is described by anonymized descriptor. 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 sector.
Selected matters in this sector
An international foundation
The firm reviewed and drafted Somali-law Murabaha, Wakala and joint-venture agreements for a housing-finance programme, structured so as to satisfy Somali banking legislation and Islamic Shari’ah principles at the same time. It settled the common-terms agreement, confirmed the regulatory position against the framework the Central Bank of Somalia applies, and documented the Shari’ah compliance in a way that a court and a scholar would both accept, so that the facilities could be enforced without reopening the question of whether they were compliant.
A global payments network
The firm advised on the regulatory treatment of digital financial services as the network connected to Somalia, covering payment-systems regulation, anti-money-laundering compliance, electronic transactions and consumer protection. Because mobile money is central to how Somalis transact, the advice was grounded in how the Central Bank of Somalia actually applies its framework in practice, not only in how the rules are written, so that the network could integrate on a compliant footing.
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.
The Somali-law counsel for this sector
The firm acts directly for operators in this sector and as Somali counsel to the international firms that advise them. Tell us about the matter.