Article 44 dismissal: what it lets you do, and the two clocks that stop you

The opening sentence is a three-part procedure

Most summaries of Article 44 jump straight to the list of ten grounds. The grounds are the easy part. The obligations sit in the sentence before them:

"The Employer may dismiss the Worker without warning, after conducting a written investigation with him, and the decision to dismiss shall be in writing and reasoned, and the Employer or his representative shall hand it to the Worker in any of the following cases…"

Three separate requirements, all mandatory, all before you rely on any ground:

1. A written investigation conducted with the worker — with him, not about him. An internal file note is not an investigation.
2. A decision that is in writing and reasoned — the reason has to be stated, not merely held.
3. Delivery to the worker by the employer or a representative.

Miss any one and the ground you were relying on becomes an argument you have to win in court rather than a right you exercised. A dismissal that is substantively justified and procedurally defective is the most expensive kind, because you gave up the notice period for nothing.

The two clocks — Article 24 of the Executive Regulation

This is the provision that decides most disputes and almost never appears in employer-facing summaries. Article 24(4) of Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022 sets two hard limits:

30 days	The worker "shall not be accused of a disciplinary violation that has been discovered for more than 30 days". The clock runs from discovery, not from the act.
60 days	A disciplinary penalty may not be imposed if more than 60 days have lapsed from the date of completing the investigation and establishing the violation.

Read them together and the shape of a lawful dismissal is fixed: discover, raise the accusation within 30 days, investigate, and impose within 60 days of the investigation closing. The common failure is not malice — it is a company that discovers something in March, decides to "keep an eye on it", gathers evidence through May and dismisses in June, believing the delay makes the case stronger. It makes the case unavailable.

The second limit catches a different habit: the completed investigation that sits on a director's desk awaiting a board meeting, a quarter-end, or the return of someone from leave. The violation is established; the clock is already running.

Article 24(3): what the investigation has to contain

The Executive Regulation is specific about the record, and the specification is a checklist:

• The worker must be notified in writing of what is attributed to him;
• his statements must be heard and his defence realised;
• both must be documented in a report deposited in his personal file;
• the penalty is appended at the end of that report;
• the worker is notified in writing of the type and value of the penalty, the reasons for it, and the penalty he will bear if he repeats the conduct.

That last item is easy to skip and is written as a requirement, not a courtesy. Article 24(2) adds a standing obligation that predates any individual case: the employer shall set a list of sanctions identifying each of the penalties in Article 39. If you have never produced one, you are improvising your disciplinary authority at the moment you most need it documented — and Article 29(1)(c) of the same regulation only permits deductions from end-of-service pay for violations under a sanctions list approved by the Ministry.

Article 24(1) also requires proportionality, and lists the factors: breach of the privacy of work data, impact on health and safety, financial impact, damage to the establishment's reputation, abuse of entrusted powers, the proportion of violations the worker has committed, and whether the violation has a criminal or moral aspect.

Gratuity survives an Article 44 dismissal

Under the old Federal Law No. 8 of 1980, summary dismissal stripped end-of-service benefits. That is the source of the belief, and it did not survive the 2022 law.

Article 39(1)(g) of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 lists the disciplinary sanctions an employer may impose, and the heaviest one reads: "Dismissal from service while preserving the Worker's right to end-of-service gratuity." Article 44 itself contains no forfeiture clause. Article 51, which sets the gratuity entitlement, contains no forfeiture clause either — the only deduction it permits, in clause 7, is of amounts due by law or by judgment, under conditions the Executive Regulation sets out.

Practically: an Article 44 dismissal removes the notice period and the wages attached to it. It does not remove the gratuity, and treating gratuity as leverage in an exit negotiation on the strength of a dismissal ground is a position with nothing under it. Provision for the payout as normal — the gratuity calculator and the employer's gratuity guide give the arithmetic.

What you can deduct is set by Article 29 of the Executive Regulation: loans and overpayments, pension and insurance contributions, amounts deducted for violations under the Ministry-approved sanctions list, judgment debts, and the cost of repairing damage caused by the worker's mistake or breach of instructions. For that last category the regulation adds a limit that is easy to miss — the employer must act within three months of the amounts becoming due, unless otherwise agreed.

The ten grounds, and the conditions attached to them

Six of the ten carry conditions inside the clause. Those conditions are where cases are won and lost.

1	Impersonating another person, or submitting false certificates or documents.
2	A mistake causing grave material loss to the employer, or deliberate damage to the employer's property which the worker acknowledges — provided the employer informs the Ministry within seven business days of learning of the incident.
3	Violating internal safety instructions — provided they are written, displayed in a visible place, and the worker has been informed of them.
4	Failing to perform basic contractual duties and continuing to breach them despite a written investigation and two warnings of dismissal.
5	Disclosing work secrets relating to industrial or intellectual property, resulting in losses, a missed opportunity, or personal benefit to the worker.
6	Being drunk or under the influence of a narcotic or psychotropic substance during working hours, or committing an act contrary to public morals in the workplace.
7	Verbal or physical assault, in the course of his work, on the employer, the manager, a superior or a colleague, punishable under the laws in force.
8	Absence without legitimate reason or acceptable excuse for more than 20 non-consecutive days, or more than 7 consecutive days.
9	Illegally exploiting his job position for personal results and gains.
10	Working for another establishment without complying with the applicable controls and procedures.

Four of these deserve a second look.

Clause 2 has a deadline you can miss before you have decided anything. Seven business days from the employer's knowledge of the incident, to notify the Ministry. Not seven days from the dismissal decision, from the investigation, or from the loss being quantified — from knowledge. A grave-loss dismissal where nobody told MOHRE inside a week is built on a condition the clause states as a proviso.

Clause 3 puts the burden on your noticeboard. Written, visibly displayed, and communicated to the worker. Three tests, each of which is a documentary question you either can answer on the day or cannot.

Clause 4 is a three-strike structure, not a general performance ground. A written investigation and two prior warnings of dismissal, then continued breach. It is the slowest route in the article, and it is the one most often invoked in the fastest way.

Clause 8 says "more than". More than seven consecutive days means the eighth day, and more than twenty non-consecutive days means the twenty-first. Counting to seven and dismissing is counting to one short. Separately, Article 28 of the Executive Regulation requires you to notify the Ministry of absence exceeding seven consecutive days where you do not know the worker's whereabouts or how to reach him — and an unjustified absence bars the worker from a new work permit for a year, with exceptions for those sponsored by parents, those reapplying to the same establishment, holders of needed skill or professional levels, golden residency holders, and categories the Minister designates.

Where Article 44 is not the right instrument

Three neighbouring provisions do work that employers regularly try to force through Article 44:

• Article 42(6): a final judgment of imprisonment of not less than three months terminates the contract by operation of law. No Article 44 analysis required.
• Article 40: where you need time, you may suspend the worker for up to 30 days at half wage for a disciplinary investigation. If it ends with no violation, with the matter reserved, or with only a warning, the withheld wage must be paid. For an accusation of assault, theft, abuse of honesty or breach of trust, suspension may run until the judicial authority decides — but on release from trial, acquittal for a non-felony, or closure for insufficient evidence, the worker returns to work with full payment of the suspended wage.
• Article 46: you may not terminate for lack of health fitness before the worker has taken the leave he is legally entitled to. Any agreement to the contrary is void, expressly including one concluded before the law came into force. See sick leave for the 15 / 30 / 45-day structure.

And one more limit that applies to everything above: Article 41 permits only one disciplinary sanction per violation, and bars sanctions for conduct outside the workplace unless it relates to work. If you have already deducted wages or suspended the worker for an act, dismissing him for the same act is a second sanction for one violation.

What it costs when it goes wrong

Article 47 defines unlawful termination narrowly: termination because the worker filed a serious complaint with the Ministry, or brought a case against the employer that has been proven true. Where that is established, the court sets fair compensation with regard to the kind of work, the damage suffered and the length of service, capped at three months' wage on the last wage received.

Read clause 3 before treating that cap as the whole exposure: the compensation is "without prejudice to the right of the Worker to the warning allowance and the end-of-service gratuity". So the realistic downside of a failed summary dismissal is the notice allowance you tried to avoid — Article 43(3) fixes it at the worker's wage for the whole notice period, payable "even if the failure to warn does not result in harm" — plus gratuity, plus up to three months' wage if the Article 47 ground is made out. The notice period itself must be between 30 and 90 days under Article 43(1).

Set against that, the value of a correct Article 44 dismissal is precisely one thing: you do not pay the notice period. Everything else you were going to pay anyway.

The sequence, in order

1. Date the discovery. Write it down on the day. It starts the 30-day clock and it is the first thing you will be asked for.
2. Check the ground against its own proviso before anything else — the seven-business-day Ministry notification for clause 2, the noticeboard evidence for clause 3, the two prior warnings for clause 4, the day count for clause 8.
3. Notify the worker in writing of what is alleged, then hear him and record his defence in a report placed in his personal file.
4. Suspend under Article 40 if you need room — 30 days, half wage, repayable if it comes to nothing.
5. Decide inside 60 days of establishing the violation, in a written and reasoned decision, and hand it to the worker.
6. Pay the gratuity. It was never in play. Deduct only what Article 29 permits, within its three-month limit for damage.
7. Tell the worker how to grieve it. Article 24(5) gives him a right to complain to management without being harmed for it, and you must notify him of the outcome. If you employ 50 or more workers, Article 24(6) requires the complaints and grievance rules to be publicised visibly and accessibly.

One boundary: this is the federal onshore regime under MOHRE. DIFC and ADGM employers have their own termination rules — see DIFC and DEWS. Domestic workers sit under Federal Decree-Law No. 9 of 2022 instead, covered in the domestic workers guide.

What has not been published. Neither the Decree-Law nor the Executive Regulation defines "grave material loss" in clause 2 by any threshold, and no ministerial resolution setting one is published. It is a question of fact, decided case by case. Anything quoting a specific dirham figure for it is quoting something the record does not contain.