Legal updates, practical guidance, and thought leadership from our team, covering the developments that matter to businesses operating in Thailand.
The Department of Business Development (DBD) has issued Order of the Central Partnership and Company Registrar No. 2/2569, effective 1 August 2026, imposing additional documentary requirements on company and partnership registrations involving foreign participation. The Order targets the arrangement Thai law has prohibited for decades but which enforcement long tolerated: Thai nationals holding shares as nominees so that a business under foreign control appears Thai-majority.
The Thai Cabinet met on Tuesday 11 August B.E. 2569 (2026), chaired by Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. One decision asks you to act this quarter: a government push on multi-factor authentication that now reaches the private sector. The rest are directions and drafts to track, not obligations that bite today, and the most consequential of them, a roadmap to reform 26 Thai laws including the Foreign Business Act, will play out over years.
Thailand's Board of Investment (BOI) offers technology businesses its most valuable package: 100% foreign ownership, corporate income tax exemption of up to eight years, and streamlined visas and work permits for founders and specialists. Since the BOI restructured its digital category under Announcement No. Sor. 2/2567 (2024), however, approval turns on a substance test that many applicants discover too late. Eligibility is not written into the application; it is built into the business.
Three of the Thai Cabinet's decisions on 5 August 2026 matter for business. The government approved a draft regulation to create a dedicated data-centre policy body, approved a revised but still-unsigned framework for hiring Myanmar workers, and moved a cluster of corporate, transport, and water measures affecting registration costs, the provincial rail pipeline, and Eastern Economic Corridor water supply.
For clinic operators, wellness investors and the doctors whose names appear in the ads: the rules tightened again in July 2026, and enforcement is measured in thousands of posts.
What the 27 July Cabinet Means for Taxpayers, Digital-Economy Investors, and Exporters in Thailand Standfirst: This week's Cabinet session set the tax and technology baseline for the year ahead. It approved in principle another year of the reduced 7 percent VAT rate to 30 September 2027, cleared income-tax relief for fishing-boat buy-back compensation, and noted, in draft, a national Big Data and artificial-intelligence strategy that signals where public money and procurement will flow.
Hire-purchase looks simple until the hirer stops paying. Then the paperwork and the procedure decide everything, and an owner who moves on instinct rather than on the rules can turn a recoverable debt into a losing case.
When a sale goes wrong, the client wants to talk about who broke the deal. The first question a litigator asks is narrower and more decisive: what kind of contract was this? In Thai law, the answer sets the remedy, the evidence, and often the outcome.
When a client comes to us about a piece of land, the instinct is to start with the argument. We start with the paper. In a Thai land dispute the title document is not background, it is the case. It tells you what right the client actually holds, what they have to prove, and how long they have to act.