Our colleagues at Westlaw Business recently put together a roundtable discussion of some of the leading legal experts in Islamic finance to discuss its key trends and challenges. The result, is a post titled “Westlaw Business Talks: Islamic Finance Legal Leaders Turn to Dubai World” on Westlaw Business Currents.
The panel included a regulator, two Shariah scholars and four Islamic finance attorneys. A Reuters journalist, Shaheen Pasha, and Jack Bunker of Westlaw Business, moderated the discussion.
As Bunker writes in his recap, the discussion’s starting point was the Dubai World restructuring and its implications. The roundtable also searched for some of the lessons learned from the Dubai World and other high-profile defaults.
Muddassir Siddiqui, who heads the Islamic Finance Middle East practice for the law firm of Denton, Wilde & Sapte, said there’s a “mismatch” of factors in the situation:
…People who bought these sukuk, they were really not, most of them, interested in the asset.” Some of them did not even know “what the assets are, and in the Nakheel case, they were an asset in the form of a lease, which was the asset which was subleased from one entity to another, but not the land on the ground.”
While Michael J.T. McMillen of Fulbright & Jaworski said the lessons of the situation are being taken to heart:
The Dubai World/Nakheel publicity “is demystifying” Islamic finance instruments. “It’s getting people to look at the essence of that instrument. So in a way, I think this was good – we knew it was going to happen at some point.” In “any market you’re going to have bankruptcies; you’re going to have problems, and it was just a matter of time.”
You can read the full post on Westlaw Business Currents.
Posted by Kevin Hunt in:
In Practice | Practice trends |
