Remember Aston Martin's much ballyhooed Sharia compliant LBO back in April 2007?
Crash and burn! And guess who's getting screwed? The creditors. (The next time someone tells you that Sharia finance is safer and more ethical? Laugh in their face.)
Default by Aston Martin owner tests Islamic finance.
Kuwait’s Investment Dar, the Islamic finance holding company which owns a
majority stake in British luxury carmaker Aston Martin, has suspended
payments on its KD1bn ($3.5bn) debt. Its strategy of relying on short-term
financing was crippled by the credit crunch. Sharia law provides no
precedent for what happens next.
Islamic finance is a recent phenomenon. The aim was to create products that
work exactly like Western debt instruments, but without actually making
“interest payments”, which is prohibited under some interpretations of
sharia law. So, broadly speaking, the lender is called an investor and
interest payments are renamed profits. The new terminology hasn’t had any
practical effect up to now, as there haven’t been any major Islamic finance
defaults.
Continue reading "Sharia finance: It ain't all that." »
From Kuwait News - who hopes the attack was just 'a bad joke by bored teens.' Don't count on it, fools.
Two female students were attacked by two youths this past week in
Hawally, reportedly for not wearing the hijab. The girls were standing
outside their school when two bearded young men jumped from an SUV,
whacked them with a stick and then jumped back into their truck and
took off. The incident sparked outrage and triggered discussions across
Kuwait about the self-proclaimed morality police encouraged by a
radical Islamist cleric Mubarak Al-Bathali.
In late December, Al-Bathali announced that he had established a
voluntary committee for the "Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of
Vice" along the lines of the dreaded Saudi mutaween. The mutaween are a
sort of religious police that patrol the streets in the villages and
cities of Saudi Arabia, ensuring that women are covered from head to
toe, that men go to the mosque to pray and that unmarried men and women
do not mix in public. They also enforce other important moral
strictures, like no mixed danci
ng or playing rock and roll music.
Al-Bathali said that his 'vice' squad will patrol the Sulaibikhat area
first and then slowly spread out to other areas. It's not clear who was
behind the attacks in Hawally. Some have argued that it might have been
just a couple of youths having fun and playing a trick on the girls by
whacking them like the mutaween in Saudi do.
Let's hope it was a bad joke by bored teens. God help us if random
groups of men suddenly start forming 'morality' patrols and beating
women on the streets of Kuwait. A Kuwaiti mutaween would create a host
of problems...
Continue reading "Kuwait's illegal morality police." »
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