Succession, Family Governance & Private Awqaf
Wealth & Family Business
Where ownership meets kinship and management meets inheritance, held in order by structures that survive the second generation.
/ The Practice
Family companies carry the non-government economy of the Kingdom, and carry with it a difficulty of their own. Where ownership meets kinship and management meets inheritance, questions legal in appearance reach the substance of the family relationship. The first generation constitutes the enterprise, the second administers it, and the third arrives in many instances at a difficult election between the relationship and the enterprise. The practice subsists to remove that election before it is put.
Contact the Firm/ Practice Details
Scope: Conducted by its own specialists, in coordination with Corporate & Transactions
Serves: Multi-generational family groups, founders providing for succession, heirs to complex estates, and families constituting private awqaf or family funds
Focus: Succession and generational transfer, family governance, separation of ownership from management, private awqaf, family charters and the administration of estates
Engagement: Hearing, mapping, structuring, transfer
Enquiries: Submit the Matter
/ The Reading
Governance in the family company operates by separating ownership, kinship and management before the entanglement passes into dispute. Its instruments are the family charter that settles the values and the governing rules, the family council that divides decisions of ownership from decisions of management, transfer mechanisms that settle how ownership and office pass, and awqaf structures that hold strategic assets against dispersal. Each family carries a composition and a financial history of its own, and a solution that operates in one may fail in another.
/ Scope of Services
Succession & Generational Transfer
Provision for succession and the generational transfer of wealth, constituted so that ownership and office pass upon terms the family settled in advance rather than terms a dispute imposes afterwards.
Family Governance
Governance of the family company and the separation of ownership from management, including the family council and the boundary between the decisions each body is entitled to take.
Private Awqaf & Family Funds
Private awqaf and family fund structures that hold strategic assets against dispersal, alongside the holding companies and special-purpose entities made available under the present Companies Law.
Family Charters & Complex Estates
Drafting of family charters, administration of complex estates, and settlement of family disputes where the legal question and the family question have become one question.
/ Method
Work in this practice is commenced by hearing, across more than one generation and more than one interest, before any structure is proposed. It requires patience, and an apprehension of what stands behind the figures and the instruments.
/ Standards of Engagement
Without Ready Precedent
Each family is construed upon its own composition and its own financial history, since a structure that holds one family together may be the very thing that divides another.
Constituted for the Transfer
Structures are constituted for the day upon which ownership passes, so that the transfer proceeds upon terms the family settled while still able to settle them in composure.
Confidential by Practice
Family matters are held to the highest standard of professional confidence, at the level observed by the leading international firms.
/ The Firm's Commitment
Work of this order is a matter of relations as much as a matter of law, and the Firm treats it accordingly from the first session. Its measure is a holding that reached its second generation intact, and a family that remains in communication.
Dr. Bisher Abdulilah
Founder, Hoquqi
