Law
No. (16) of 2016
Amending
Law No. (23) of 2009
Concerning
the Mohammed bin Rashid Establishment for
Small
and Medium-sized Enterprises Development[1]
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
We,
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai,
After perusal of:
Law No. (25) of
2008 Concerning the Department of Economic Development; and
Law No. (23) of
2009 Concerning the Mohammed bin Rashid Establishment for Small and
Medium-sized Enterprises Development and its amendments (the “Original Law”),
Do hereby issue
this Law.
Articles (7), (10), and (12) of the
Original Law are hereby superseded by the following:
For the purpose of achieving its
objectives, the MBRSME will have the duties and powers to:
1.
develop
the policies and strategic plans related to entrepreneurship and to the
establishment of SMEs; and provide the programmes and initiatives related to
the support, implementation, and regular
development of
SMEs;
2.
determine
the standards required for the classification of SMEs;
3.
determine
the main support areas of SMEs, as well as develop and implement relevant
initiatives;
4.
create
a favourable environment conducive to the creation of investment opportunities
for SMEs in the public and private sectors;
5.
launch and develop projects and initiatives,
including business incubators, that contribute to the achievement of the
strategic objectives of the MBRSME;
6.
review
the status of existing SMEs, identify the main obstacles
to their growth, and develop appropriate solutions for these obstacles;
7.
develop
and implement awareness programmes to encourage setting up and developing SMEs;
8.
coordinate
with banks and financial institutions to enable Members to avail themselves of
suitable financing solutions, and coordinate with external suppliers to provide
consultancy and support services to Members;
9.
establish
the requirements and standards for licensing business incubators in accordance
with the needs of entrepreneurs and as required for supporting the creative and
innovative efforts of the Emirate;
10. provide UAE national or other
entrepreneurs with consultancy, development, and training
services and with business incubators in accordance with the relevant
conditions and criteria adopted by the DED;
11. establish or hold shares in
companies, and own and take lease of real property and movables; and
12. perform any other duties
required for the achievement of the objectives of the MBRSME .
a.
The
MBRSME will be responsible for licensing Members as per the conditions and
requirements approved by it in this regard, taking the
following into consideration:
1.
For
the first three (3) years after the date on
which the
licence is issued to the Member,
he will pay an
annual fee of one thousand Dirhams (AED 1,000.00). For the fourth and fifth
years, he will pay an annual fee of two thousand Dirhams (AED 2,000.00).
2.
During
the first five (5) years of the licence period, no fees will be charged except those stated in
sub-paragraph (a)(1)
of this Article.
b.
Entrepreneurs who are
nationals of the Gulf
Cooperation Council States will be treated as UAE nationals and
will be licensed as Members in accordance with the relevant conditions and
requirements approved by the MBRSME.
All Government entities and the
corporations and companies owned by the Government of Dubai or in which the
Government of Dubai holds more than twenty-five percent (25%) of the share
capital must:
1.
exempt
UAE national Members from the fees prescribed for registration
in the registers of suppliers they maintain;
2.
obtain at least ten percent (10%) of their
purchases from UAE national Members;
3.
allocate
to Members five percent (5%) of the leasable area at the commercial centres owned
by them, in accordance with the relevant selection
and pre-qualification
standards prescribed by the MBRSME;
4.
give
priority to tender and auction bids submitted by Members,
where the difference between these bids and the best
submitted bids
does not exceed five percent (5%);
5.
discount the rent payable by Members by no less than twenty percent
(20%) for the first three (3) years of the lease
agreement period;
and
6.
notify
the MBRSME of any support provided to Members.
Any provision in any other legislation
will be repealed to the extent that it contradicts the provisions of this Law.
This Law will be published in the
Official Gazette and will come into force on the day on which it is published.
Mohammed bin
Rashid Al Maktoum
Ruler of Dubai
Issued in Dubai on 1 November 2016
Corresponding to 1 Safar 1438 A.H.
©2020 The Supreme Legislation Committee in the
Emirate of Dubai
[1]Every effort has been made to produce an
accurate and complete English version of this legislation. However, for the
purpose of its interpretation and application, reference must be made to the
original Arabic text. In case of conflict, the Arabic text will prevail.