United Arab Emirates RAKEZ Free Zone Establishment/Company Registration

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-07

The document was derived from a directly-read primary source: the Ras Al Khaimah Economic Zone Authority's (RAKEZ) own official "Application for Registration and Licence of a Free Zone Establishment or Company" PDF, retrieved directly from rakez.com, a genuine fillable AcroForm with ~100 named field widgets. It remains draft, not verified, pending an independent second reviewer's field-by-field pass.

Why this document exists

This is a standing GovSchema Standard Research cycle (GOV-1540). CATALOG.md's own "By Jurisdiction" table showed the United Arab Emirates as the only jurisdiction in the registry with no Business Formation schema — the last vertical gap standing at less than full coverage (Business Formation was 16/17). A prior research cycle (GOV-1289) had rated UAE Business Formation WEAK: the mainland Ministry of Economy / Department of Economic Development channels, and RAKEZ's own live eportal.rakez.com client portal, are all authenticated-account-gated. That rating was never revisited. This cycle re-screened it from scratch (rather than trusting the stale rating) and found a genuinely strong, directly-sourced candidate: a UAE free zone's own downloadable, paper-fillable registration application form — a source shape this registry had not yet tried for the UAE, having previously only checked the federal/mainland and single-portal angle.

Source examined

• Document (id, version): ae/rakez/free-zone-establishment-registration / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: Ras Al Khaimah Economic Zone Authority (RAKEZ), formerly "Ras Al Khaimah Free Trade Zone Authority" (RAK FTZ) — the form itself still carries the pre-merger legal name in its own text ("...as a Free Zone Company (FZC) or Free Zone Establishment (FZE)... with Ras Al Khaimah Free Trade Zone Authority"), consistent with RAKEZ being the 2017 merger of RAK Investment Authority (RAKIA) and RAK Free Trade Zone (RAK FTZ); RAKEZ is the current legal successor and the name used throughout this schema's authority block and site-wide branding today.
• Primary source URL: https://www.rakez.com/portals/30/download/form-docs/company-setup/form-applicatio-for-registration-and-licence-of-a-free-zone-establishment.pdf
• Official document title: "Application for Registration and Licence of a Free Zone Establishment or Company", Issue No. 03, Issued by QEMR, Issue Date Feb 18, 2016, Ref: LCN-019(A)
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-07
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

Access constraint and how it was worked around

None found — this is the strongest access shape this registry can find: a genuine AcroForm PDF hosted directly on the authority's own domain (rakez.com), served over a plain HTTPS GET with no login, CAPTCHA, or WAF challenge (confirmed via direct curl, HTTP 200, 671,847 bytes). Every field is a real, named PDF form-field widget (/Subtype /Widget, /FT /Tx or /FT /Btn), extracted with pdfjs-dist's page.getAnnotations() — no OCR or PDF-vision rendering was needed for the field inventory itself, since the widgets carry their own field names and rectangles.

Currency check

The PDF's own footer date (Feb 18, 2016) predates the 2017 RAKIA/RAK FTZ merger into RAKEZ, so its currency was checked directly rather than assumed current from a stale timestamp alone:

• The exact same file, at the exact same first-party path under rakez.com/portals/30/download/form-docs/company-setup/, is still linked today from live web search results returning current RAKEZ pages, including a still-current company-setup checklist.
• RAKEZ's own "Checklist – New Registration FZE or FZ LLC – Corporate Entity" (Issue No. 01, Ref: R&L-010, dated Mar 1, 2017 — i.e. already post-merger, RAKEZ-branded), also hosted directly on rakez.com, explicitly lists "filling the Application Form" as one of two valid ways to submit an application (the other being the Client Portal Account), confirming this specific document is still a live, currently-accepted submission channel, not a superseded artifact.
• No newer-dated application form (a "v04" or later Issue No.) was found on rakez.com despite a targeted search; this is noted as a residual risk in "Path to a verified claim" below.

What was confirmed directly (verbatim, from the AcroForm + text layer)

Every field name, rectangle, and radio-button grouping was read directly from the PDF's own annotation dictionary (pdfjs-dist getAnnotations()), then cross-referenced against the PDF's extractable text layer (getTextContent()) using x/y coordinate adjacency, not reading order alone, since the text layer's own token order is not always left-to-right/ top-to-bottom (confirmed by testing: the crude "group tokens by line" reading order misattributed the Plot of Land subsection's fields on first pass — see "Judgment calls" below for how this was caught and corrected):

• p.1, 1. Details Concerning the Company: Legal Form (2-option radio, confirmed FZE is the left/first option and FZC the right/second, matching the visible label order "Free Zone Establishment Free Zone Company"), three Proposed Name options with the verbatim note "RAK FTZ has the right to select any of the above or propose a different name", Share Capital/ Total Number of Shares/Par Value (with the verbatim par-value-minimum note), Activity Details free text, and the 4-option License Type radio (Commercial / Consulting-Services / Industrial / Educational, in that left-to-right order) with its verbatim Industrial-activity carve-out note.
• p.1-2, 2. Shareholder(s) Details: the form provides five near-identical Shareholder blocks (the AcroForm's own field-naming is inconsistent — every block's widgets are literally named "Share holder 1: ..." regardless of which shareholder number 1-5 they visually belong to, disambiguated only by an Adobe-assigned numeric suffix). Shareholder 1's eight fields (Name, Mother Name, Address & Contact Details, Nationality, Passport Number/Reg Number, Number of Shares, % of Shares, Total value of shareholding) were confirmed by matching each widget's y-coordinate against the correct row of the Shareholder 1 sub-form specifically (not shareholders 2-5, which are visually and structurally identical but out of scope for this version — see below).
• p.2, 3. Manager Details: Name, Mother Name, Nationality, Passport Number, and the Residency-status-in-UAE Yes/No radio, plus its verbatim NOC-required note. The widget carrying the PDF's own internal field name "Address & Contact details" in fact sits at the y-coordinate of the printed "Mother Name:" label, not at any printed "Address & Contact" label — confirmed by checking every annotation's rectangle in this section against the text layer; no widget sits at the "Address & Contact Details:" printed label at all in this section (unlike the Shareholder section, which has a genuine, correctly-positioned Address & Contact Details widget). This is modelled as managerMotherName, not managerAddressContact (see "Judgment calls" below).
• p.2-3, 4. Facility Details: five mutually-exclusive subsections, each confirmed via coordinate cross-referencing between each radio widget's rectangle and the nearest label token(s) at the same y-coordinate:
  • Flexi Facilities: 4-option radio, no accompanying free-text widgets.
  • Standard Facilities: 5-option radio, each option with its own "please specify" text widget, and three of the five (Executive Office, Special Executive Office, Shell & Core Facility) additionally with their own "Size: M²" text widget — confirmed by reading each option's row independently rather than assuming a shared specify/size field.
  • Retail Facilities: 2-option radio (Industrial Park / Technology Park) for "Service block located in:", no separate free-text widget.
  • Warehouse: a Technology-Park/Industrial-Park location radio, plus a 4-row printed rate-card table (150 M² @ 10.5 KW "only warehouse space"; 205 M² @ 15-or-30 KW; 300 M² @ 10.5 KW; 416 M² @ 30-or-60 KW, the latter two "including storage space, office & complimentary services") with a per-row selection checkbox, a Unit Number text box, and (for the two variable-power rows) a Power radio choice, plus a free-text "Others:" override row.
  • Plot of Land: initially misread on the first coordinate pass (the crude line-grouped text dump put "Size: M²" and the Technology/Industrial Park radio in the wrong order relative to the "Plot of land - M²" header and an adjacent "Others:" text field left over from the Warehouse table). Re-verified with a targeted second coordinate dump restricted to the y=440-610 band, confirming: Text Field 574 (y=555-568) is the "Size: M²" value, the "Plot of land - M²"-named radio (y=542-549, at x=92.4/199.8 — the same x-coordinates as the Warehouse section's own Technology/Industrial Park radio) is the "Located in:" park choice, and Text Field 577/575/576 are, respectively, the "Where did you hear about the RAK FREE TRADE ZONE?" answer, and the licence-collector's Name and Location.
• p.3, 5. Undertaking: the verbatim attestation paragraph, Name of Authorised Signatory, Date, and a Signature widget — the latter not modelled as applicant data, consistent with this registry's convention (e.g. ae/fta/vat-registration) of not modelling wet-ink/drawn-signature widgets as schema fields.
• Supporting documents: cross-referenced against RAKEZ's own "Checklist – New Registration FZE or FZ LLC – Corporate Entity" (Issue No. 01, Ref: R&L-010, Mar 1, 2017), also fetched directly from rakez.com — Business Plan, passport/specimen-signature requirements for the Manager, and the conditional NOC-from-sponsor requirement (which the application form's own p.2 note also states verbatim).

Judgment calls made in this version

• Repeating shareholder blocks (2-5) not modelled: the form supports up to five shareholders with visually identical sub-forms; only Shareholder 1 is modelled, per this registry's established convention for repeating groups (GovSchema v0.3 has no array/repeating-field type — spec/v0.3/SPEC.md §6.1), the same precedent used by ae/fta/vat-registration's owner/ relationship blocks.
• Manager's PDF-internal "Address & Contact details" field name is a mislabeled Mother Name widget: unlike the Shareholder section (where the widget named "Address & Contact Details" genuinely sits at the printed "Address & Contact Details:" label), the Manager section's widget carrying that same internal PDF field name is positioned at the y-coordinate of the printed "Mother Name:" label instead — RAKEZ's own PDF authoring mislabeled it, not the printed form layout. There is no widget anywhere in the Manager section at the printed "Address & Contact Details:" label's position. Modelled as managerMotherName (optional, pii), mirroring shareholderMotherName, in place of the managerAddressContact field this document originally (incorrectly) modelled — corrected during independent review (GOV-1543).
• No single "facility category" selector field: the source form has five independent radio-button groups (one per facility subsection), not one combined selector; this schema mirrors that shape exactly (five independent optional fields) rather than inventing a synthetic top-level enum the source does not literally have. The mutual-exclusivity of the five subsections (an applicant fills in only one) is documented in each field's own description, not machine-enforced via crossFieldValidation (the spec's comparison operators are pairwise field-vs-field/constant, with no native "exactly one of these five groups is non-null" primitive; a future version could model this via exclusivityGroups, GSP-0013 §3, once warranted).
• Warehouse rate-card table collapsed to a representative selection, not modelled row-by-row: the four catalog rows' own static area/power/ description text is descriptive content, not applicant input; only the applicant-facing choices (which row, which power option where the row offers one, unit number, or a free-text "Others:" override) are modelled.
• standardFacilitySpecification is not requiredWhen-gated on standardFacilityType: an earlier draft of this schema attempted requiredWhen: { field: "standardFacilityType", notEquals: null }, then caught and removed this before commit — standardFacilityType is itself optional, so when it is genuinely unanswered (the applicant chose a different facility category entirely) it is absent, not null, and the Condition grammar's leaf-compare has no field-presence operator (GSP-0013 §1); undefined !== null evaluates true, which would have misfired the gate as required for every applicant regardless of which facility type they actually chose. This is the same bug class documented in this registry's own prior incident on notEquals against sentinel defaults for optional fields (empty string / 0); the trigger condition is stated only in the field's own description text instead, per that precedent.
• Par value's "multiple of AED 1,000" rule only partly machine-validated: parValueAed's minimum: 1000 is enforced; the "or multiples thereof" clause is not, since GovSchema v0.3's validation vocabulary has no multipleOf keyword (spec/v0.3/govschema.schema.json nonFileValidation). Stated in the field's description instead.
• Industrial-activity detailed application form out of scope: the source form itself states "In case of Industrial Activities, please fill in the detailed application form" — a separate document not sourced or modelled in this version.
• Post-approval execution steps out of scope: the Memorandum of Association signing, RAKEZ Lease Agreement, and Personnel Secondment Agreement (all "to be signed before the Authority", per the corporate- entity checklist's items 10-12) are post-submission in-person steps, not data collected on this application form itself.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance this document to status: verified, a reviewer needs to:

1. Independently re-fetch the source PDF fresh (not reusing the authoring session's download) and re-run the AcroForm annotation + text-coordinate extraction, confirming every field name, rectangle, and radio-button grouping cited above, with particular attention to the Facility Details section (the most coordinate-dependent part of this document).
2. Confirm RAKEZ has not since published a newer Issue-number revision of this form (none was found this cycle beyond the current Issue No. 03, Feb 18, 2016) — check both the company-setup forms index and any updated checklist referencing it.
3. If feasible, obtain or construct an individual-shareholder (as opposed to corporate-entity) new-registration checklist to cross-check the Shareholder 1 document requirements independently of the corporate-entity checklist used in this version.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (~6 months). Re-check the source, and confirm no newer form revision has been published, on or before that date and on any source.url change.