On 31 October 2023, Federal Law No. 51 of 2023 Promulgating the Financial and Bankruptcy Law (the Bankruptcy Law) was published in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Official Gazette, repealing the prior federal law on bankruptcy (Federal Law No. 9 of 2016, the Prior Law) and significantly developing the bankruptcy regime in the UAE.

In the previous four articles in this series (see here) we looked at the key role of professional investors at startups, though also at the setbacks of the exclusive dependence of these types of companies on equity and the advantages debt would have for them. The environment, as we saw, is also a favorable one for borrowing. We described the difficulty to provide general recipes for getting debt and a few not very promising routes.