IslamicFinance.de

Ernst & Young prepared a statement in response to a query by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany regarding he tax assessment of selected Islamic finance contractual models. The attached report covers the main findings including an English summary.

IslamicFinance.de has created a fanpage on Facebook - for all the users wishing to follow the news abstracts on the Facebook platform. Please join and enjoy!

Dear User,

as salamu alaikum,

In these days I am testing the new function of IslamicFinance.de: The Islamic Finance WIKI.

For long time I felt a need to have a proper encyclopaedia on Islamic finance, which is up to date and easily accessible for all industry members.

Now I started, initially with a small glossary, which I want to add up. Also from the start other experts are invited to contribute: Just in the same way as the famous online Wikipedia was created. We do not need 1.000.000 entries, but just about 1000 good entries would help spreading knowledge and improving best practice. With far more than 5,000 visitors to IslamicFinance.de each month pretty realistic, dont you think?

So, please visit:

http://wiki.islamicfinance.de

and share some comments.

Editing rights for the time (till I have got a team of volunteers) on manual request to avoid spamming (yes, IslamicFinance.de was already spammed with comments about non Sharia compliant activities...). Please indicate your background, it will not be stored on the website itself, just for me to avoid unpleasant vandalization of the site itself.

Ninth Harvard University Forum on Islamic Finance, Building Bridges Across Financial Communities,

March 27-28, 2010, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA., USA

The Ninth Harvard University Forum on Islamic Finance, hosted by Harvard Law School’s Islamic Finance Project, will be held at Austin Hall, Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts on March 27th- 28th, 2010. The theme of the conference will be “Building Bridges across Financial Communities” as it relates to the field of Islamic Finance.

The Central Council of Muslims in Germany presented on the BAFIN Islamic Finance conference how mortgages for the Muslim community could look like, how large the market is and challenged the perception that there would be a need to change laws to avoid double real estate transfer tax; it shall rather work tax efficient with proper structuring and without changes. Hence, financial institutions are asked to provide equity and debt based mortgages for the Muslim market.

The German banking regulator, BAFIN, held today a conference about Islamic finance with strong international participation and about 200 guests.

BAFIN president, Mr Sanio, says that Germany makes it easy to obtain a licence to sell the products, which are also compatible with the country's financial rules. He expressively welcomed "the first interested party that wants to start offering these products".

Tariq Al Rifai joined Dow Jones Indexes as Director for Islamic Indexes. He previously worked for Unicorn, a Bahraini investment bank. The former global director, Rushdi Siddiqui, moved on to ThomsonReuters as previously reported, spearheading the Islamic finance efforts.

IslamicFinance.de installed on 18 April a new service to keep you updated with Islamic finance news by sending its content to a Twitter account allowing to follow news even by mobile phone, Wikipedia the online encyclopedia explains Twitter as follows:

"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). [...] Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees." Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

Please feel free to use just another free service related to IslamicFinance.de by following the news via Twitter:

Go to: http://twitter.com/IslamFinance