Qatar Financial Centre Broadens The Interpretation Of 'Professional Services'

When the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) was first set up, only firms that provided services to the financial service industries were permitted to be established.

That is no longer the case, and QFC licensed entities now serve a wide array of businesses.

The permitted activities that can be undertaken in or from the QFC are prescribed by Qatari Law No. 7 of 2005, as amended (the QFC Law) and are termed "Permitted Activities", which include regulated and non-regulated activities.

The QFC Law provides six permitted non-regulated activities, the first being "The business of providing professional services, including but not limited to provision of audit, accounting, legal, tax or consultancy services".

In order to help promote the non-regulated side of businesses and following a review of professional services in 2014, the Board of the QFC Authority approved 17 additional activities which it considered could fall within the realm of professional services, namely:

information technology consultancy activities advertising agencies architectural activities engineering design activities for industrial process and production engineering related scientific and technical consulting activities media representation services translation and interpretation activities urban planning and landscape architectural activities accreditation logistics planning and consulting project management marketing and brand management specialised design activities event management services estate planning and will writing activities of patent and copyright agents other legal activities (not elsewhere classified). Accordingly, professional services as a permitted activity are not limited to audit, accounting, legal, tax or consultancy services but can extend much wider. This means that any business which provides "qualified business-to-business services" can fall within this category and is therefore permissible. By way of example, services such as advisory/consulting, human resources consultancy, corporate secretariat, compliance and risk management, public relations, third party administration, and other business-to-business services could potentially be permissible professional activities.

This list of approved additional professional services is not intended, in any way, to be limiting or exhaustive, but rather to serve as examples of the types of the professional services that the QFC will consider to fall within its interpretation of the professional services category...