Wills in the UAE: Why Timing Is the Whole Point

What happens to your UAE assets if you never got round to it

Most people who invest in the UAE think carefully about how they get in.

Far fewer think about what happens to it all afterwards.

If there is no registered will, the UAE civil default rules apply. Assets can be frozen while the heirs are identified and the court issues a succession certificate. The default split is 50% to the surviving spouse and 50% divided equally among the children, regardless of gender.

That is a fair rule. It is also a formula, and a formula doesn't know which of the children has been running the business for the last ten years.

The bigger problem is usually the waiting.

Say the founder was the only authorized signatory on the company account. Salaries are due at the end of the month. A supplier contract needs signing, a license needs renewing, and every one of those needs a decision that, right now, nobody has the authority to make. The business hasn't failed. It just can't move.

Two things that catch people out: joint ownership of property here doesn't come with an automatic right of survivorship, so the deceased owner's share goes into the estate like everything else. And a will made back home usually has to be notarised, legalised, attested and translated before anyone can act on it, which is a lot of offices to visit in the worst week of your life.

A will registered here, with DIFC or the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department, deals with most of that. It's not a big project. It is just one that only works if it's done beforehand.

What it doesn't do is remove the process. It decides where things go; it doesn't stop them from having to get there. If there's a business that has to keep running in the meantime, that's a different conversation, and one I'll come back to.