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From Benedicte Gravrand, Geneva: In an article titled ‘Gamble or risk control? Islamic hedging row rages’, Reuters reported last week on the Islamic Finance Conference in Bahrain and described some of the difficulties faced by the industry to produce sharia compliant hedge funds. The article also quoted Antoine Massad, of Man Investments Middle East (part of Man Group), who said that such funds did not exist. To quote: “There are some who claim to have Islamic hedge funds in the market. Yes there are three or four, but no one has invested in them, so to me they don’t exist… Hedge funds use leverage, derivatives etc. – all of that is haram (forbidden by Islamic law). It is not only not halal (acceptable by Islamic Law); it’s haram”. Opalesque checked with industry experts to find out more – are sharia hedge funds dead or alive?

Charles Bathurst is the Director of International Sales at Old Mutual Asset Managers (www.oldmutualfunds.co.uk). Old Mutual is the third of five hedge funds that use the Ratings/FIMAT platform and to date the first three have raised around US$100m from the Gulf since October last year and are only now actively marketing with huge interest and potential.

Ill-informed “These comments were very ill-informed. There is a transactional model that has been approved by some very serious scholars who themselves sit ......................

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