TELEGRAPH BLOGS: What could be more middle England than Waitrose? So it was intriguing to learn that the delivery company most closely associated with it - Ocado - has accepted a £10 million investment from the Bank of London and the Middle East (BLME), which advertises itself as "sharia'a compliant".
At first glance this is perplexing. Will the wide-aisled bastion of high quality deli and fine wines for the upper middle classes have to forgo the delivery of alcohol and pork products in order to receive its cash? "No," Ben Lovett, a spokesman for Ocado, tells me. "No change there."
So how does the Islamic financing house justify this arrangement? Surely the whole point of Islamic financing is that it has no truck with that which is haraam, or forbidden - and pork and alcohol fall squarely into this category? Otherwise what's the point of pretending it's any different from any other kind of bank?
Professor Habib Ahmed, who holds the Sharjar Chair in Islamic Law and Finance at Durham University, explains that matters are not, as I suspected, quite so straightforward. "There are different opinions about financing this kind of company. There are two possibilities. One is that because alcohol and pork are not their main business an allowance has been made.
"Second, it is possible that they have structured the deal so they have only invested in a part of the business that is not involved with pork or alcohol. An example might be if an investment is made in a hotel that has a bar, it may possible to organise it so that the two elements are separated financially.
"But unless the sale of alcohol and pork is a very small part of the business it would be difficult for sharia to allow this transaction. It would hang on a technicality - the contracts would be screened by a sharia board. A permissable percentage would typically be three to five per cent." Continue reading and comment here >>> Emma Hartley | Monday, February 2, 2009
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