Governance in Oman stopped being a paper exercise some time ago. Public joint stock companies answer to the Financial Services Authority for an annual corporate governance report, boards are expected to assess their own performance, and since Ministerial Decision 5/2025 much of the same discipline now reaches closed joint stock companies as well.
Most boards still run all of this on e-mail, a shared drive and the company secretary’s memory. That holds up until a regulator, an external auditor or a newly appointed director asks when a decision was actually taken, who was in the room, whether the notice period was met, and what the register of interests said on the day.
Our governance suite keeps the whole cycle in one place — the board calendar, the papers, the attendance, the minutes, the resolutions, the evaluation and the disclosure record — with an audit trail behind every entry and a permission model that reflects who is entitled to see what.
The Code of Corporate Governance for Public Listed Companies was issued under CMA Circular E/4/2015 and took effect on 21 July 2016, replacing the 2002 code and setting out fourteen principles of good governance with detailed implementation requirements. It is mandatory for companies listed on the exchange under Article 50(8) of the Capital Market Law, and it is now administered by the Financial Services Authority, the successor to the Capital Market Authority, which expects an annual corporate governance report against it. Board performance assessment is part of that expectation, whether carried out as a self-assessment or with an independent external consultant, and the findings and resulting actions have to be documented rather than merely discussed.
On the ESG side, Administration Decision 77/2025 took effect on 1 June 2025 and made disclosure mandatory for companies listed on the Muscat Stock Exchange, built on the set of thirty ESG metrics introduced in the earlier guidance. Disclosure goes to both the MSX platform and the company’s own website, requires board approval before publication, must treat negative information to the same standard as positive, and is due within thirty days of the financial year end — forty-five where the company has subsidiaries. The module is built around that calendar.
Closed joint stock companies are no longer outside the perimeter. Ministerial Decision 5/2025, effective 14 January 2025, brought governance principles to most SAOCs in which the government holds no shares: an odd-numbered board of three to eleven, a chairman separate from the chief executive, at least one third non-executive members, an audit and risk committee of at least three with a finance expert among them and an independent chair, a minimum of four board meetings a year with no more than 120 days between them, and a periodic assessment of board performance.
The templates, checklists and disclosure formats in the suite are reviewed by legal advisers licensed by the Financial Services Authority and by governance and ESG practitioners, so what the system asks a board to record is what the regulator actually expects to see — not a generic international framework bent to fit Oman.
Everything ships bilingual in Arabic and English, and the templates are maintained as the rules change. Regulatory references on this page are current as at September 2026 and are not a substitute for legal advice.
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