Delloite sets up Islamic finance centre in KL

By T Vignesh
Delloite has set up its third Islamic Finance Centre of Excellence for the Asia Pacific region in Kuala Lumpur to help its International clients replicate the Malaysian success in Islamic Finance.
CEO Chaly Chee Keong said Malaysia is a good location because of its unique position as a major global player in the world of Islamic Finance and its geographical location offered opportunities to promote Islamic Finance to other countries in the region.
Chaly said the company has started to build a team between eight and ten professionals comprising auditors, financial advisors and those with banking background to be based in the Kuala Lumpur centre to continue recruiting more.
"The centre of excellence will be the core for people to understand more about Islamic Finance and all complexities around this product," Chaly told reporters in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
He said many non-muslim countries such as Singapore, the UK, Japan and Hong Kong have also expressed their interest of becoming major players in the Islamic Finance Industry.
Islamic Leader of Deloitte South-East Asia, Eugene Wong, said there are so many factors such as the significant petrodollar running through the Middle East which has helped draw attention to the concept of interest free banking and finance to the centre stage.
He also said the recent subprime issue which brought the financial world to a crisis, has revealed that the guidelines of Shariah to insists on real assets seemed to be the shield of protection for the Islamic Institutions from going the way of their conventional counterparts.
Islamic Finance Specialist Daud Vicary Abdullah said the average growth rate of the global Shariah compliant assets over the past ten years is estimated to be 10-15% which is double the rate of the conventional market.

(This story appeared in The Malaysian Reserve on Feb 23, 2009. The Malaysian Reserve is a daily business/finance newspaper published out of Kuala Lumpur, with a sectoral page on Islamic finance on Mondays, edited by Habhajan Singh)