mission

i work in Jebel Ali Freezone and everyone is on a 3 year visa, regardless of status. In addition all the wives in my company get fully sponsored by my company and so no hassle for the employee.

Surely your company will be paying and sorting out your wife's visa?

Ditzy

It is quite rare for a company to pay for family visas unless you are on a pretty good package - most companies also wouldn't get too involved in the processing of family visas - they would do the employees and provide the salary certificate to the employee and then send them off on their merry way.

OP, in answer to your questions:

Obtain for your wife a pre arranged paper tourist visa - this can be organised either through Emirates (if you are flying EK) or by one of the millions of visa agencies here, this will be the visa your wife enters on.

Later, once you have your visa sorted, she will convert her tourist visa to a residence visa.

For working here, yes she can, you will provide her with an NOC once she has her visa and she will obtain a labour card from her company. Her company will pay for this labour card, while you will pay for her residence visa.

HTH.

FaisyJ

My husband is getting started with my residence visa now. His company do not organise family visas so we are doing this ourselves.

Our problem is that we got married 5 days before we left the UK and didn't know to get it notarised. Now we need to do it from here, which is do-able, however I am getting conflicting advice from official websites and I'm confused.

Do we need to send our marriage certificate to a notary public, then the Legalisation Office then to UAE Embassy in London? Or do we skip the notarised bit?

The Government website describes how to tell but without an example shown I can't tell whether our certificate fits their description enough for their liking. Should we just get it done just in case or are we wasting time and money that way?