Bahrain's Elaf eyes Malaysian sharia banking licence

Bahrain’s Elaf eyes Malaysian sharia banking licence

El Jaroudi said $1.2 billion of the deals Elaf had been mandated for were in Malaysia.

October 27, 2010 1:29 by Reuters

Bahrain’s Elaf Bank has applied for a Malaysian Islamic banking licence after securing six financing deals worth about $1.4 billion in the country and Indonesia, its chief executive said on Wednesday.

The licence would enable Elaf to execute the deals and conduct other dollar-denominated Islamic banking business and the bank hopes to hear from the authorities on its application in the next two weeks, Jamil El Jaroudi said.

“It’ll be finding our steps into this country here,” El Jaroudi said on the sidelines of an Islamic banking forum in the Malaysian capital.

“We have a couple of mandates here in Malaysia and in Indonesia which convinced us more and more that we would like to be in Southeast Asia.”

El Jaroudi said $1.2 billion of the deals Elaf had been mandated for were in Malaysia and $200 million in Indonesia.

“Indonesia is a huge market which is not very much tapped yet from the Islamic point of view and we believe the potential is fantastic there,” he said. “However we would be doing that most probably through Malaysia.”

Elaf is as an Islamic investment bank with a paid-up capital of $200 million.

(Reporting by Liau Y-Sing; editing by Kazunori Takada)