Business
A 2015 Companies Act and 2021 Investment Act, both overtaken by the war economy
The Companies Act 2015 and Investment Encouragement Act 2021 provide the formal framework, and the 1984 Civil Transactions Act supplies the law of obligations. Banking sector removal from the US state-sponsor list in 2020 briefly reopened correspondent relationships.
Key rules
- Jurisdiction — National registration through the Commercial Registrar; the Ministry of Investment administers incentives.
Governing law
- Companies Act 2015
- Investment Encouragement Act 2021
- Civil Transactions Act 1984
- Banking Business (Organisation) Act 2004
In practice
The formal law is a recognisable Anglo-Egyptian hybrid: company forms derive from English models via the colonial period, while the general law of obligations sits in the 1984 Civil Transactions Act, an Islamically-framed codification that replaced the earlier reception of English common law. Sudan operated a fully Islamic banking system from 1984, so conventional interest-based lending has no domestic legal basis and finance is structured through murabaha, musharaka and similar instruments. The 2020 delisting from the US state sponsors of terrorism list, and the associated settlement, was expected to restore correspondent banking and foreign investment, and some of that had begun before April 2023. The war has since destroyed much of the industrial base around Khartoum, and the practical availability of company registration, courts and banking cannot be verified, so this is recorded as the law on the books.