FINANCIAL TIMES: A new Islamic bank will be launched in London on Tuesday, reaffirming the City’s status as the leading western financial centre for this fast-growing sector.
Gatehouse Bank is the fifth Islamic bank to be awarded a licence in Britain, demonstrating the resilience of Sharia-compliant finance in spite of the credit crisis that has wiped billions off the balance sheets of conventional banks.
David Testa, chief executive at Gatehouse, said: “Islamic finance is a healthy and growing industry, stimulated primarily from the Gulf, but also from growing interest in south-east Asia, including new centres such as Indonesia.
“Investors in the Middle East are increasingly looking to diversify out of their region and they see London as a key marketplace to help them in this. One of the main reasons why London has become such an important centre for this kind of finance is due to the legislative changes pushed through by the government over the last five years.
“It has brought in new laws to level the playing field with conventional finance and make the City an attractive place to invest in a Sharia-compliant way. For London, what with the problems of Northern Rock and the crackdown on non-doms [non-domiciled foreigners], this really is one area where the City has got it right.”
Britain is the only country in the European Union to have licensed Islamic banks as the government has realised the potential of this market for the City as a financial centre. It has also seen the development of Islamic finance as a way of building bridges with the 2m Muslims who live in the UK.
The UK has also stolen a march on New York, the world’s other leading financial centre, as a hub for Islamic finance, partly because of its timezone and partly because of the antipathy towards this sector in the US following the September 2001 attacks. UK’s Fifth Islamic Bank to Tap Demand Growth >>> By David Oakley, Capital Markets Correspondent | April 21, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback - UK)
