The Amana Capital group now trades under the single word amana. Under that name sits more than one licensed company, and the company that opens your account decides which regulator you can turn to later. Most marketing shows the strongest licences first. The protection you actually get depends on the legal entity named in your client agreement, not on the logo on the homepage.
One brand, several legal companies
The group began in 2010 as Amana Capital and built its base in the Middle East and North Africa. Its public materials list offices in the United Arab Emirates, Cyprus, Lebanon and Malaysia, and the company claims more than 500,000 users across the region. What those materials describe less clearly is the corporate split underneath. A retail client in Dubai, a retail client in Limassol and a retail client who downloads the app can each end up contracting with a different company, supervised in a different country, under different rules.
That structure is not unusual for an international broker, but it changes how you should read every reassuring line about regulation. A licence belongs to one company in one jurisdiction. It does not automatically wrap around the others that share the brand.
The licences, entity by entity
Amana Capital Ltd is the Cyprus entity. The CySEC register lists it under licence 155/11, granted on 21 October 2011, with company number HE 281953 and an office on Makariou Avenue in Limassol. It is authorised as a Cyprus Investment Firm and acts as a market maker. The approved domain recorded on the register is amanacapital.com.cy, and the firm's cross-border permission names a long list of non-EU countries it may serve, including the UAE, Lebanon, Malaysia and several Gulf and North African states.
Amana Financial Services UK Limited holds Financial Conduct Authority permission under firm reference number 605070, with UK company number 0858214132 and a London address on Threadneedle Street. Its permission is for matched principal trading, the STP model, not for dealing on its own book.
Amana Financial Services (Dubai) Limited is authorised by the Dubai Financial Services Authority under reference F003269, a DIFC company licensed since April 2016, also for matched principal trading.
AFS Global Ltd is licensed in Labuan, Malaysia, by the Labuan Financial Services Authority under number MB/18/0025. ACG International Ltd is licensed by the Mauritius Financial Services Commission under C118023192. Amana Capital S.A.L. in Lebanon holds Capital Markets Authority licence 26. A separate Lebanon central bank permission, number 60, has been revoked, and a UAE Securities and Commodities Authority promotional licence, 20200000255, covers introductions only and grants no trading permission.
The DFSA licence and the app you actually use
Here is the part most readers miss. The DFSA licence belongs to Amana Financial Services (Dubai) Limited. According to guidance published by third-party monitors that cite the DFSA, the amana app does not onboard its users to that Dubai entity. App users are reported to become clients of AFS Global Ltd in Labuan. The DFSA permission therefore does not extend to the app account. Same brand, different company, different regulator, different country.
This matters because protection follows the entity, not the advertising. If you chose amana because you saw DFSA regulation, the licence that reassured you sits on a different legal person from the one holding your money. The group's own licensing page confirms AFS Global is the default account-opening entity for the amana app, which is consistent with that picture.
What each licence does and does not cover
A licence is not a blanket promise. Each permission lists specific services. The Cyprus firm is authorised for reception and transmission of orders, execution on behalf of clients, dealing on its own account, and related ancillary services such as safekeeping and credit connected to transactions. The UK and Dubai firms are limited to matched principal trading. None of these permissions travel to the other entities automatically. A claim that the group is regulated by the FCA is true only for the UK company, and only for clients of that company.
Some third-party monitor sites attach a "suspicious clone" flag to the CySEC and FCA entries for this brand. The underlying licences are verifiable on the primary registers, so the flag most likely concerns whether a given web domain is the one approved for that licence holder. The practical takeaway is simple: check the approved-domain list attached to the register entry, not just the licence number.
Compensation: where it exists and where it does not
Two of the group's licences come with a statutory compensation scheme. Eligible clients of the UK entity can claim under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, capped at 85,000 pounds per person. Eligible clients of the Cyprus entity fall under the Investor Compensation Fund, capped at 20,000 euros.
The others do not offer a comparable fund. The DIFC has client-money segregation rules but no statutory investor compensation scheme like the FSCS. Labuan, Mauritius and Lebanon likewise have no retail compensation fund that matches the European tiers. A client of AFS Global in Labuan has recourse under Labuan law and the LFSA, but no compensation fund standing behind the claim. If the entity you contract with is the Labuan one, the safety net is whatever the company's own terms promise, enforced locally, with no ombudsman or fund in the background.
Leverage and who sets the ceiling
Leverage is where the entity split shows up inside the trading account. Retail clients of the Cyprus and UK entities trade under the ESMA product-intervention cap, which limits major currency pairs to 30:1 and tighter still for other asset classes. The Labuan entity is outside that framework. Broker directories list much higher limits there, sometimes up to 500:1, though we could not trace those figures to a primary disclosure from the firm, so the honest step is to read the margin shown in the terminal before funding rather than trusting a marketing number.
Higher leverage is not a feature you control through the brand. It is a function of which regulator supervises your entity, and the higher ceiling arrives with the weaker safety net described above. A 30:1 cap and a 500:1 ceiling are not two ways to say the same thing. They are two different legal environments.
Residents of the United States cannot open an account on any group entity, because the group holds no National Futures Association registration. The same pattern holds for other restricted jurisdictions that the group's own legal pages name.
The entities most clients never read
Group websites tend to surface the strongest licences on the homepage and place the contracting entity in the client agreement. Many clients never open that document. The practical result is that a trader who believes they are with a DIFC or FCA firm may in fact hold an account with the Labuan company, where the conduct rules and recourse are lighter.
None of this is necessarily improper. Multi-entity structures are common among international brokers. The risk is informational: the protection level implied by the marketing may not match the protection level attached to your account. Reading the brand as a single regulated firm hides that gap.
How to check Amana yourself
- Search the FCA register for firm reference 605070 and confirm the company name matches the one on your client agreement.
- Open the CySEC register page for Amana Capital Ltd, licence 155/11, and read the approved-domain list attached to it.
- Check the DFSA register for F003269 and note it is a Dubai entity, not the amana app.
- Look up AFS Global Ltd on the Labuan FSA register under MB/18/0025 before assuming DIFC protection.
- Read the client agreement PDF, not the homepage, and save the line that names your contracting entity.
Each check takes a few minutes and needs no account.
Bottom line
Amana Capital is a long-established, genuinely multi-licensed group with real registrations in Cyprus, the UK, Dubai, Labuan, Mauritius and Lebanon. The licences are not fake. The trap is assuming the top-tier licence you saw is the one covering you, because the app and most international onboarding route through the Labuan entity.
Find the entity named in your client agreement before you deposit. Confirm which compensation scheme, if any, applies to it. Then weigh the trading terms against the protection you will actually have, not the one on the logo wall.