Board portals for Omani government entities and SOEs

Start with the right instrument

Government-linked boards in Oman sit under different rules depending on what the entity is. A company in which the Government owns shares, and which is not a listed public joint stock company, falls under Decision 132/2021 on the governance principles for such companies, issued under Article 20 of the Commercial Companies Law. Ministerial Decision 5/2025, which covers closed joint stock companies, expressly excludes companies in which the Government holds stakes, so a state-owned closed company should not use it as its reference. A listed company with government shareholders follows the Code for listed companies. A ministry or a public authority that is not a company is governed by its own founding decree, and none of these instruments may apply.

Companies held by Oman Investment Authority have a further layer. The Authority states that, under Royal Decree 57/2021, it "has created a governance manual for its entities", and that the manual defines the roles of the board and executive management and requires annual reports to show compliance levels. The manual itself is not linked as a document from that page, so check the version your company received.

What Decision 132/2021 asks of the board record

Article 36 sets at least four board meetings a year, no more than 120 days between any two, the regular-meeting agenda to all members at least seven working days ahead, and urgent agendas at least three working days ahead unless the chair decides to hold the meeting within twenty-four hours. Article 37 allows meetings, or a member's participation, through modern means of communication, on condition that the secretary can see and hear all members, and asks the board to set rules for it. Article 38 allows resolutions by circulation, except approval of the audited financial statements, on condition they are listed for ratification at the meeting that directly follows.

Article 35 makes the secretary responsible for documenting deliberations and decisions and for keeping the official documents and "the original signed copies of the board minutes". Article 58 requires directors to disclose personal interests in the company's contracts and to abstain from debate and voting on the conflicted matter. It also gives directors a right that a portal can support or undermine: information must reach them in sufficient time to decide, "وإلا كان لهم الامتناع عن التصويت، وقيد الامتناع وأسبابه في محضر الاجتماع", otherwise they may abstain and have the abstention and its reasons recorded in the minutes. A portal that shows when each paper reached each director gives the secretary the evidence for that line.

Hosting and residency come before features

For a government-linked board, the first procurement question is rarely a feature. It is where the board papers live, who can reach them, and under which jurisdiction. Settle three things before a demonstration: whether the system can run on your own servers or a national data centre rather than a vendor's cloud abroad; who holds the encryption keys and the administrator accounts; and how many years of records you must keep and in what form you can export them when the contract ends.

We looked for an official Omani statement about taking board papers paperless and did not find one. The nearest instrument, Ministerial Decision 108/2025 of the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology, is about digitising public services: its Article 12 tells government bodies to obtain data and documents for digital services from their main source through the national government integration platform. It says nothing about board packs, so do not cite it as a mandate for a board portal.

Language and AI

Arabic is the official language of the state, and filings with the regulator are made in Arabic. A board that deliberates in Arabic needs Arabic minutes as the primary text, not a translation made afterwards, and an interface its members can use right to left. On AI, the useful question is not "does it have AI" but "where does board text go when someone presses the button, and can we switch it off". Ask for that answer feature by feature.

How Mithaq fits a government board

Mithaq is built in Muscat and priced in Omani rials. It runs in the cloud or as a single-tenant on-premise installation on your servers, and its text AI can point at a model on your own network or be switched off per board. The record the instruments ask for is captured as the board works: pack issue and acknowledgement per member, attendance, votes by name with abstain and recuse, resolutions by circulation listed separately for ratification, conflict declarations enforced at the vote, versioned minutes that lock at sign-off, and a hash-chained audit log. Mithaq does not certify compliance with Decision 132/2021 or the OIA manual; it keeps the evidence your secretary will be asked for.