I restructured to save tax — can the FTA still reject it even if it's legal?

Short answer: yes, and that's exactly the power Article 50 of Law 47 — the General Anti-Abuse Rule — gives the Federal Tax Authority. The test isn't whether an arrangement breaks the letter of the law; it can be perfectly compliant on paper. What matters is whether it lacks a valid commercial purpose and whether one of its main aims is obtaining a corporate tax advantage inconsistent with what the law intends. Where both apply, the FTA can disregard the arrangement and reassess it based on economic substance rather than legal form — disallowing a deduction, recharacterizing a payment, or adjusting the tax outcome entirely.

In practice that means any restructuring — splitting an activity across entities, moving asset ownership, or financing arrangements between related parties — needs a genuine commercial rationale beyond the tax saving, documented up front rather than justified after the fact. The Authority looks at the whole picture: timing, sequencing, and who actually benefits. RASEEKH reviews restructuring plans before execution to make sure they hold up against the commercial-substance test, not just the wording of the law.