Crossing over to Islamic banking: Times online

Sharia-compliant finance is prospering in Britain. But how can it stay insulated from the credit crunch?

Alex Wade

As the credit crunch has mutated inexorably into a recession, with bankers having eclipsed politicians, lawyers and even journalists as public enemy number one, the growing number of Islamic finance institutions in Britain might just be sitting pretty.

The UK now has five fully Sharia-compliant banks and another 17 financial institutions have set up special branches or firms. They include the Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB), with its London-based European Finance House in Berkeley Square, and the Islamic Bank of Britain, which has headquarters in Birmingham.

Both have answered Gordon Brown’s call of two years ago for Britain to become the global centre for international Islamic banking; a report by the International Financial Services London even says that Britain’s Islamic banking sector is now bigger than that of Pakistan.

Islamic banks, says Steven Amos, the Islamic Bank of Britain’s head of marketing, are prospering. “Our core business will always be Muslims but the numbers of non-Muslims are really picking up. We’ve had massive interest — and that’s down to a number of reasons, all of which have kept us insulated from the credit crunch.”

He alludes to the nuances of Islamic banking — specifically that Islamic finance has to be Sharia, or Islamic law, compliant. Sharia is taken from the Koran, one of whose central tenets — that money has no intrinsic value — might sound alien to the denizens of the City.

One British businessman believes that adopting Sharia principles might be just what the West needs.Roger Smee, a former professional footballer and now businessman, says the West has “lost the plot. All we have as a success guide is a number of rich lists. Instead of looking down on what we are quick to reject as cumbersome legal restrictions, we should take a page out of the Middle East’s book and use the principles of Sharia to begin building real and sustainable economies.”

Smee, who divides his time between the US, Europe and the Middle East on his real estate and office interiors business, realised six years ago that a financial time bomb was ticking. I was offered a controlling stake in a new US mortgage business. The company was involved in the refinancing of huge numbers of house mortgages, lending at 125 per cent of an already overinflated property value to people who obviously did not have the funds to maintain payments. As we now know, these loans were then packaged up and sold on, earning the mortgage business a 7 per cent fee on each transaction. But the underlying finances were totally flawed.”

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