We Are RBA

Impossible? We make it happen.

Our client is a leading commodities trading company — the exclusive GCC agent and distributor for a wooden pallets factory in UAE, running an operation with yearly revenues exceeding US$ 17.5 million and 28 employees depending on it. One foreign shareholder, one L.L.C., and then one regulatory curveball: a new rule in UAE mandating a 45% minimum local shareholding for any company wishing to hold an exclusive agency. Overnight, everything our client built was under threat!

Every advisor our client consulted before coming to us delivered the same verdict: hand over 45% of your company to a local partner, or hand over your exclusive agency. Pick your poison!

At RBA we don't offer poison. We create antidotes.

Today, our client still owns 100% of their company. They still hold 100% of the exclusive agency. And the structure we built for them is 100% compliant — new regulation included.

Still sounds impossible? Then let's talk about it.

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Aborting is the most successful deal, if you catch it in time.

Eighteen months, two acquisitions, zero regrets. First: a Lebanese holding company that had its eye on a mid-size Saudi construction firm — 53 employees, US$11.3 million in annual revenue, deal closed cleanly. Second: a GCC powerhouse moving into the MEP contracting space, snapping up a Saudi operator running 108 people and north of US$30 million a year. Both buy-side. Both successful. Both on time.

Word travels fast in good circles, and RBA was recommended to a third client — an eminent European company this time, targeting a local IT firm with a 200-strong workforce and a turnover eclipsing US$47 million annually. The preliminary reports were unanimous: green light across the board. Full speed ahead.

Then we walked in.

On day one, we sat down with the target company's board, on their own turf, and were handed the folder meant to contain the company's entire paper trail.

First impression: the office didn't quite match the salaries listed in those documents — particularly that board member who was, let's say, suspiciously enthusiastic in the meeting.

So we dug. And buried beneath the folder's surface, the red flags started surfacing. We handed our client a list of additional documents to request, with one clear recommendation: if these don't show up, walk away.

They didn't show up. The target company admitted they didn't have them. The deal was aborted, and our client walked away from what would have been a very expensive mistake.

Need someone who can spot the red flags before they become the headline?

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Labyrinth: not a problem when it's designed to lead somewhere.

Our client is a lean but sharp transactions brokerage firm — six people, one base of operations in the Kingdom of Bahrain, and US$1.6M in annual revenue that punches well above its headcount. Small team, big ambitions: they set out to introduce a Ghanaian mining company into the Saudi market, opening doors to new ventures in mineral extraction and exploitation. Their fee? No retainer, no hourly clock — just a clean profit share on every successful transaction. Skin in the game, the way it should be.

Now, getting from point A to point B should have been simple. It wasn't.

Path one: register a local company in KSA and partner up with the Ghanaian firm. Clean, conventional, yet firmly rejected — too costly to set up, too heavy to run.

Path two: hold shares in the entity the Ghanaian company would create in KSA. Also rejected — and this time it wasn't even our client's call. The other party had zero interest in sharing the management or control of their new venture with anyone.

Path three: structure the arrangement as a commission agreement with full transparency rights. Reasonable in theory, illegal in practice — our lawyers told us brokerage is classified as a trading activity in KSA, which triggers a substantial minimum capital licensing requirement that made this route a non-starter before it even started.

Three paths. Three dead ends. One deal that still needed to happen.

Not a problem for RBA. We designed a structure that looks complex on paper but runs smoothly once you've got the map — and the map worked. The company is actively closing transactions, our client is collecting every penny they're owed, and everyone's walking forward satisfied, and — most importantly — fully compliant with every regulatory requirement in the room.

Stuck finding the path between two points in your own journey? Maybe it's time for us to talk.

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Complex structures are our favorite kind of challenge.

Our client is a contracting company on the rise — 91 employees, US$27M in annual revenue, and a very clear appetite for the next level. That appetite led them into months of negotiations on a four-party JV project involving both local and international players. And as anyone who has sat at that kind of table knows, these deals follow a painfully familiar script: every party barricades themselves behind their own interests, guards their leverage like it's a state secret, and fights for control over every clause — until the whole thing quietly collapses under the weight of everyone's defensiveness.

That's usually when someone calls RBA.

It was a Monday morning when our team pulled up a chair alongside our client. We spent the day doing something most people underestimate: listening. Every concern, every friction point, every buried grievance — we took it all in. Then we stepped aside with our client and sketched the outline of a structure designed to give everyone a reason to say yes.

Tuesday morning, we laid it out for all parties — deliberately leaving a few gaps for their input, because the best structures are the ones people feel they helped build. After lunch, the room broke into private huddles. Calculators came out. Lawyers leaned in.

By Wednesday afternoon, after a round of final fine-tuning, every party had signed off. That's the thing about well-structured JVs: they let a 27M company sit comfortably at a 200M table — as long as the structure holds. Ours did.

Need someone to call when a complex deal is one bad meeting away from falling apart?

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Exclusivity is not exclusive … if you find the gap.

A major broadcaster had locked down the exclusive rights to one of the most popular sporting events — the kind of rights that come with lawyers, letters, and a very confident sense of ownership. Our client, a governmental TV company in a small country of the region, went through the proper channels first: they approached the broadcaster, sought a rebroadcasting agreement, and were turned away. The price of entry was simply out of reach.

So they came to us looking for a way around the wall.

Bingo. That's exactly our kind of problem.

We engineered an out-of-the-box formula that let our client broadcast the event without any agreement with the "exclusive" broadcaster whatsoever. Did the broadcaster sue? Naturally — and they brought in a consortium of three eminent IP rights firms to do it. The outcome? Our formula held up without a crack. The lawsuit went nowhere, and the court ruling allowed our client to broadcast the entire event.

Looking for the loophole in something that looks bulletproof?

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