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Advisers: Standard Chartered, CIMB, Maybank, Norton Rose, Baker & McKenzie, Wong & Leow
UK real estate has long been a proving ground for Islamic finance outside of the Muslim world.
This year’s Islamic landmark in the UK market involved the redevelopment of the Battersea Power Station on the south bank of the River Thames in London. The iconic building is being redeveloped by Malaysian interests, and in October the financing was put together for Battersea Phase 3 Holding Company.
It is a vast overall project – the backers say it has a gross development value of £7.7 billion and will be completed over 12 years through seven separate phases – and not all of it will be funded Islamically. But it was clearly important to the three Malaysian partners to do part of it on a Shariah compliant basis.
Two of them, Sime Darby and SP Setia, are well-known corporate names, but perhaps it is the third that is most interesting in this context: the Employees’ Provident Fund, the dominant Malaysian government pension fund, and the source of much of the initial capital for the Shariah-compliant asset managers who operate within the Malaysian International Islamic Financial Centre.