IslamicFinance.de

3 firms arranged for a secretive deal on the sale of Addleshaw ­Goddard’s headquarters to a Middle East investor.

The 200,000 square foot ­building was purchased from UBS Asset Management in summer 2009 for £127m by Evans Randall and AlSalam. ­Herbert Smith played a key role in the ­creation of an Islamic ­compliant ­structure.

Qatar is expected to be the largest source of real estate capital during 2010, a Jones Lang LaSalle report said. Recent investments - such as the purchase of London department store Harrods in May are likely to be followed by further investments in other markets across Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia, it said. Qatar's competitive advantage will be helped by the decline in investment from German funds.

A company part-owned by the Saudi royal family, Jadwa Investment and a European property investor, CIT, have purchased the King's Reach Tower on London's south bank worth £60m and plans to further invest £500m in the UK real estate market. King's Reach Tower is the fourth joint Jadwa-CIT acquirement in which plans are well under way for redevelopment.

Fadi Tabbara, Jadwa Investment's chief investment officer, said "The pound exchange rate is low, which makes investment in the UK inviting, and the legal structure is simple and transparent."

Both companies are targeting a return of 20 per cent or more on their King's Reach investment. Jadwa has plans to also to invest a further £300m or more in mixed-use, residential and commercial property in the UK.

Tharawat plans to invest in a Saudi Arabia real estate project in the third quarter worth $50-$60m. Director of investment Abdulaziz Saad Al Resai said a startegic investor has pledge to invest $30m in an industrial estate in Riyadh.

The company is also looking to set up 2-3 more funds investing in Saudi Arabia's property market by the end of this year. According to Al-Resais Saudi Arabia's property market was least affected by the housing glut and the financial crisis in the Middle East.

Although Dubai and the euro zone debt crises had hurt its plan to raise $100 million in 2009 for its sukuk fund, it managed to raise between $10-20m so far due to the global market volatility.

Al Resais said this due to the concern in the fixed income market in general, not particularly sukuk. He hopes to have more information being disseminated so that investors will be able to differentiate between sukuk and conventional bonds in the future.

Kuwait Financial House has teamed up with Canadian based Killam Properties Inc and Sigma Real Estate Advisors to invest in the Canadian real estate market.

Press Release

Today sees the launch of a new Journal on Islamic finance from dedicated Islamic finance media entity Yasaar Media.

The Journal, called So Far – the Journal of Strategic Thinking in Islamic Finance, is written and edited by members of an Islamic finance Think Tank and is modelled on traditional academic journals. The difference with So Far is that the members of the Think Tank are predominantly practitioners rather than academics.
Member of the Think Tank are drawn from the ranks of committed Islamic finance professionals around the world and range from the Gulf and the Far East to the USA and Europe.

Each issue of So Far is dedicated to a single topic of core importance to the Islamic finance industry – and the launch issue looks at the thorny issue of the problems facing the Sukuk market. Unlike many other journals So Far is distributed free in PDF format and is available from a variety of sources including Yasaar Media thus guaranteeing maximum readership and exposure.

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Al Rajhi Capital, the investment banking subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi Bank, and Arcapita Bank B.S.C.(c), an international investment firm headquartered in Bahrain, announced today the launch of a $500m (SR1.875bn) fund, the ARC Real Estate Income Fund.