Recently, a friend of mine who’s a Thai national has asked me to become partner in a service based company yet to be established. He already has a business registered owned by his family yet to be used for years and he has offered to use it for our company with both our names registered. I have a permanent residency in Thailand and I was wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation and about the process of starting up a business with a Thai partner as a foreigner in Thailand. Also, do the same rules apply for a permanent resident and a foreigner with a non-immigrant visa to obtain a work permit for your own company?

For starters I'd be checking real hard as to whether the exhisting business has current or outstanding obligations / liabilities / debts / accounting fees / tax owing etc. If you don't you could be signing on to a whole lot of debt.....

Soundman.

I think if you already have permanent residency in Thailand you should probably advise us, not vice versa

Recommend to set up new entity. Far too many risks and costs involved in taking equity in an existing company unless you are willing to spend a ton of money on lawyers / accountants et al.

depending on who u use, due diligence might take 1 million or more baht for a smaller company - setting up a new company is fast and cheap.

Only caveat, if the company has special license / privileges, it might be worth it

1 advice : DONT !!

Too much to write about the reasons.

I wouldn't advise any partnership with a Thai OR a farang. I have had both. Partnerships for me simply didn't work out. This advice is free, my experiences with partnerships were NOT free.

like one of the above posters stated....you shoud check liabiities that the company has already acquired, you will also need to specify what your contribution to the partnership will be, as this is the deciding factor of your future liability and how many percent you will need to pay up if problems arise.