IslamicFinance.de

The Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) will hold a Sharia Capital Market Exhibition at the IDX building in Jakarta from March 30 to April 2, as part of an effort to attract more investors to sharia products in the capital market. IDX development director Nicky Horgan said the exhibition was aimed at increasing people's knowledge about capital market products, especially sharia-compliant stocks. The IDX aims for 5,000 new sharia investors this year, a 100 percent increase from 2014. The four-day festival supported by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) will feature 44 companies, including sharia and sukuk issuers, investment managers and securities companies, and is expected to attract 6,000 visitors.

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President of the Islamic Development Bank Group Dr. Mohamed Ali Al-Madani arrived in Lebanon today at the start of a joint visit to rally global support for the shared responsibility of promoting peace and development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The three organizations are jointly supporting an initiative to raise additional financing needed to help countries in the region cope with the immediate consequences of conflict, while laying the foundations for recovery and reconstruction. Following the Lebanon visit, World Bank President Kim and Secretary General Ban will travel together to Jordan and Tunisia.

“Financing Development Through Islamic Capital Market – a viable Alternative" was the theme of the a recent 2ND regional roundtable on Islamic finance which held on March 14, 2016. This was towards advancing effort by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at expanding the depth of the Nigerian Capital Market and promoting financial inclusiveness through the Capital Market. This was in line with the SEC’s strategic Ten year Master Plan on Non-Interest Capital Market. The workshop aimed at encouraging states to explore the alternative model for financing infrastructure projects through Islamic Capital Market Products such as Sukuk.

Kuwait Finance House (KFH) has received an offer from investors to buy its stake in affiliate Aref Investment Group, the country's biggest Islamic lender said in a bourse statement on Monday. Aref is a diversified investment firm which is 53 percent owned by KFH and has share capital of $400 million, according to information on the companies' websites. This offer is currently under study and no decision has been taken as yet, the statement said. KFH will disclose this offer in the event that they have reached and signed a preliminary agreement, and cannot currently determine any financial impact on its statements in the absence of an agreement as yet.

A group of several prominent entrants in the crowdfunding sector will announce the formation of a new Islamic Crowdfunding Alliance or ICF Alliance on April 1st. Umar Munshi, founder of eThis Crowd (Singapore), M. Raafi Hossain founder of Narwi (Qatar), Erly Witoyo, founder of Kapital Boost (Singapore), Matthew Martin founder of Blossom Finance (Indonesia) and Rachid Ouaich partner of EasiUp (France) will participate in the launch event and press conference being held in Malaysia. The founding platforms number nine in total. The event will discuss upcoming plans of the ICF Alliance to address the needs of the growing industry of crowdfunding platforms that cater to Muslim needs.

So much money was pouring so rapidly into the Malaysian Prime Minister's personal bank accounts that it rang internal money-laundering alarms inside AmBank. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being wired into Najib Razak's accounts from the Saudi Arabian Government, a mysterious Saudi prince and two shadowy British Virgin Island companies, while the head of a Malaysian state-owned company topped up the Prime Minister's credit card accounts with millions of Malaysian ringgit in cash. Inside the bank, the Malaysian Prime Minister's account was held under the codename "Mr X". The startling new banking records have been obtained as part of a Four Corners program that aired last night, and which resulted in the arrest of two members of its team.

One of the main challenges for the first GNU social Camp was to develop an alternative to the centralization of the collaborative economy using GNU social, a free standard for the development of distributed web applications. Sharings—a plugin for GNU social— creates the possibility of adding objects and services to GNU social to share them with the users on your node or, if they’re on other nodes, connected to you through federation. Sharings is still in alpha, but it already allows you to share objects, and other users can show interest in the object that you’ve shared and get in contact with you to agree on the details of the exchange.

QInvest L.L.C. has announced the acquisition of ERGO Portfoy, one of the largest and fastest growing asset management companies in Turkey. Following the completion of this acquisition, QInvest Asset Management will have assets under management close to $1 billion. ERGO Portfoy has been rebranded as QInvest Portfoy and is a subsidiary of Qatar’s QInvest. The senior management of QInvest Portfoy will remain with the firm and will be led by Mr. Murat Vanli, the General Manager of ERGO Portfoy, and will continue to operate from Istanbul. The company has been granted its license to operate by The Capital Markets Board of Turkey (CMB) and is licenced to offer portfolio management to both individual and institutional investors.

The Islamic Research and Training Institute (IRTI) of the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) Group has signed an agreement with Al-Manhal, a provider of electronic scholarly publications, to host IRTI's Islamic finance publications in Al-Manhal electronic databases. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) provides for electronic versions of IRTI's publications--including books, reports, training manuals, and conference proceedings--to be made available to Al-Manhal subscribers that include universities, government agencies, corporations, and public libraries. IRTI Director General, Prof. Mohamed Azmi Omar, and Al-Manhal representative, Mr. Rany Al Baghdadi, jointly signed the MoU at the IDB Headquarters in Jeddah.

The Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) and Mardi Holdings of Malaysia are interested in investing in the agriculture sector of Suriname, according to the CEO of Mardi, Anas Nasrudin, who met with farmers in Suriname this week. The Islamic Bank and Mardi Holdings are seeking joint ventures in agriculture and food production. Besides rice, they have shown an interest in herbal products, coconut, pineapple, and the palm oil industries of Suriname. Mardi Holdings and the Islamic Bank will assist Suriname to tap the Hallal market globally, assisting in standardisation, accreditation, certification and adoption of the Hallal industry.

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), arrangements between government agencies and private sector companies or investors to provide and maintain public assets and services are increasingly becoming popular, particularly in developing countries, to create infrastructure, utilities and healthcare facilities. In most cases, governments rely on the provision of private funding in exchange for fiscal benefits for the sponsor in the absence of sufficient sources of debt and equity financing on their own. Islamic Finance has evolved as an untapped source of funding for cash-strapped governments seeking alternative sources to invest in critical infrastructure and services.

Kuwaiti financial firm Investment Dar has begun talks with creditors about a new 813 million dinar ($2.7 billion) debt restructuring plan after a court threw out an earlier attempt. Investment Dar, whose main assets are in finance and property, has made several efforts to pay off creditors after getting heavily indebted during the financial crisis. Its most recent plan, dubbed Dasman, failed last month when Kuwait's Court of Appeal rejected an application under the country's financial stability law to impose it on all creditors. This resulted in a company-organised creditor meeting on Tuesday, attended by around half of its roughly 80 creditors. It was reported that both sides agreed to discuss a fresh restructuring deal, which could be proposed to creditors in the coming weeks.

As the mutual fund industry has developed, in more recent years it has witnessed the growth of sharia-compliant funds (SCFs) and socially responsible funds (SRFs). Although both classes of funds employ certain screening criteria, there exists a distinction between them. The International Centre for Education in Islamic Finance examined the performance of socially responsible funds against shariah-compliant peers. The results suggest significant underperformance of both types of funds against the market, suggesting that the screening has a negative impact on them. However, SCFs managed to do slightly better than SRFs.

Perak’s Sultan Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah told Islamic financial scholars and ulama to “think futuristically” in order to be current with contemporary developments. He said they can act as “institutional game-changers” in helping Islamic finance grow, but must leave their “ivory towers” and become more involved in the industry. Sultan Nazrin added that no industry was immune to “social evolution”, making it necessary for these scholars to make the effort to produce relevant financial products. He also said that it was important to inform the public more on the role of Shariah advisors in finance as their endorsement of an institution meant that it complied with the Islamic beliefs.

There is a strong correlation between education and positive health and socioeconomic outcomes for women and girls, yet education is often one of the first things to be disrupted when conflicts break out. In areas where traditional educational models become unavailable or unfeasible, civic education courses that nurture cultures of peace, promote dialogue and non-violent conflict resolution, and build the cognitive and participatory skills of participants can help fill a critical gap. Education, in concentrating on helping students realize their self-actualization, has been shown to make it more likely that there will be a democratic outcome to these conflict situations.

The World Bank’s new poverty line of $1.90 a day is the most drastic adjustment yet in the global poverty threshold—raising the measure by 50% from $1.25. The new line seems high at first glance, but the reality is that it is not higher and rather understates the true extent of global poverty. The reason is that the poverty line has not been raised by 50%, but simply rebased on 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP). The PPP is used to account for changes in the poor’s living costs. The result: the new poverty line is roughly equivalent to the old one in real terms. In 2011, the percentage of people estimated to be living in extreme poverty around the world was 14.5% based on the old poverty line of $1.25 compared to 14.2% using the new line of $1.90 in 2011 PPP.

The Church of Scotland has joined forces with Islamic finance experts to draw up a “practical ethical financial solution” to help the poor while sticking to the principles of both faiths. The agreement, which was announced on Tuesday, marks an unusual attempt to promote cross-religious financial innovation. Backers say it is too early to say what “solution” the initiative could yield, but possibilities include the creation of a new financial institution with cross-faith legal articles. The Scottish initiative is supported by international Muslim clerics and experts including Lamido Sanusi, a former Nigerian central bank governor famed for cleaning up the banking sector and now one of the country’s highest Islamic authorities.

Shares in GFH Financial Group rose on Tuesday after the Islamic investment bank said it had agreed to sell a 10 percent stake in Bahraini cement producer Falcon Cement Co. GFH's Dubai-listed shares rose 2.3 percent. It has yet to trade in Bahrain. Other Dubai stocks made little headway. Rival developers Union Properties and Deyaar rose 1.2 and 1.6 percent respectively, but these are relative minnows compared with market bellwether Emaar Properties, which dropped 1.1 percent. Air Arabia fell 6.6 percent after the budget carrier went ex-dividend, helping drag Dubai's index 0.5 percent lower to 3,362 points. That trimmed the benchmark's gains since mid-January's two-year low to 28.2 percent.

In order to promote the SBP initiative for SME sector and for Agri Financing, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Al Baraka Bank (Pakistan) Limited & Al-Ghazi Tractors Limited, for the facilitation of ‘Tractor Financing’ at Al Baraka House, Karachi. This MoU will allow the farmers and agriculturists to avail Shariah compliant financing options for rural financing including financing of tractors and other credit facilities, with quicker processing and flexible payment options. Al Baraka Bank (Pakistan) Limited (ABPL) is a part of Al Baraka Banking Group, Bahrain, and has a network of 150 branches spread over 94 cities & Towns across Pakistan.

The FBI has agreed to help Bangladesh investigate an audacious $81 million theft from the nation's foreign reserves, authorities said Sunday, days after the finance minister accused central bank officials of complicity in the heist. A FBI official in Dhaka met with representatives from Bangladesh's Criminal Investigation Department and offered to assist with the investigation into the spectacular cross-country theft. Hackers stole the money from the Bangladesh Bank's account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 5 and managed to transfer it electronically to accounts in the Philippines. Investigators say local hackers were likely involved in the theft.