Banking on success

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What financial targets do you have for growth?

I wouldn't want to give numbers. The thing I would say is that as a licensed Islamic investment bank we have to publish our quarterly figures. So next year and the year after you will see what we are achieving and how we are achieving it. It is looking encouraging so far.

We are working on two deals we hope to complete this year and we are working on several for next year in both the real estate and private equity fields.

I can't go into more detail on those but we can give that detail in January when we announce our results and provide more details about how we are doing overall.

They would be worth in the range of US$100million to US$500million dollars so would be major deals.

How do you plan to grow your investment portfolio?

Our strategy is that each of the activities that we have should feed off each other.So let's say you have a piece of land in Jordan and you want to build a power station, that power station will need financing and then eventually it may have an IPO.

So we'd like to be involved at each stage of the deal and not just doing the IPO or just doing structured finance, we're involved at each stage of the projects. This year we're involved in two real estate deals around the region. They would be mixed use developments.

At the end of January when we announce our results we can give far more details about the past, the present and the future of our organisation.

Can you tell me about the private equity related activities that GBCORP will be involved in?

It's not so much private equity in the region. We're more looking at Europe.

It could be in the service sector, it could be in utilities, power and water.

It could be a brand name.

We have however seen examples of several private equity deals going on in the Middle East.

As an Islamic investment bank you can only invest in Sharia compliant interests - can you describe the types of interests you could not invest in and whether there are enough Sharia compliant interests available for investors?

If you look at the things you can't invest in it's very simple - its either alcohol or the hotel industry or pork for example.

But apart from that it leaves the rest of the field open.It could be a company involved in tourism for example and that could be Sharia compliant.

There's been a high demand in the Arab world for these kinds of opportunities ot invest in Sharia compliant interests.

To give one example where it would be Sharia compliant is the new water park in Bahrain.

That is in the service industry but it's a water park.

And there's the Banyan Tree hotel group which is managed in a Sharia compliant way.

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