Tag Archives: green
India Shariah Market Tested With Property Funds
Taqwaa Advisory is setting up a Rs. 250 crore real estate fund to give Indian muslims a Shariah investment option Liau Y-Sing Yudith Ho A file photo of BSE. India has two Shariah equity funds and BSE introduced a new Islamic share index on 2 May. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint Taqwaa Advisory and Shariah Investment Solutions Pvt. Ltd, a Mumbai-based consultancy, is setting up the Rs. 250 crore fund on behalf of a company backed by the Kerala government, director Shariq Nisar said in an interview on Wednesday. Secura Investment Management (India) Pvt. Ltd manages the country’s only other such real estate vehicle. India has two Shariah equity funds and BSE Ltd, the stock exchange operator, introduced a new Islamic share index on 2 May. “Islamic finance is in a nascent stage in India and definitely any new product will create more awareness and opportunity,” Taqwaa’s Nisar said. “There’s a lack of awareness and interest, which will take some time to be removed.” In 2008, a 13-member panel of experts led by Raghuram Rajan , a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now the top adviser in India’s finance ministry, recommended that the country allow banking that complies with Islam’s ban on interest. The government did not take any action, and central bank governor D. Subbarao said this month that Shariah-compliant banking is inconsistent with the nation’s laws. Political barrier India’s 10-year sovereign bonds yield 7.15%, well ahead of 5.97% in Indonesia, the next highest in the region, data compiled by Bloomberg show. “The challenge is that every time India tries to offer Islamic banking, the tendency is to politicize this product,” Raj Mohamad, managing director at consulting company Five Pillars Pte, said in an interview from Singapore on Wednesday. “India should look at non-traditional Islamic finance markets and see how they have done it.” Stock funds Internationally, an increasing amount of Shariah-compliant financial assets has buoyed demand for sukuk, with worldwide sales reaching a record $46.5 billion last year. Issuance has risen 7% so far in 2013 to $18 billion, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The average yield on Islamic debt rose 10 basis points, or 0.1 percentage point, to 3.38% on Wednesday, the HSBC/Nasdaq Dubai US Dollar Sukuk Index shows. Borrowing costs have climbed 57 basis points this year, after reaching a record low of 2.67% in January. The yield premium over the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, widened five basis points to 181. Some 13% of India’s 1.2 billion people are Muslim, according to the CIA World Factbook, the third-biggest population behind Indonesia and Pakistan. Those two countries have 209.6 trillion rupiah and 837 billion Pakistani rupees of Islamic banking assets, the latest central bank data show. In Malaysia, a global pioneer in Shariah-compliant finance, holdings total 399 billion ringgit. Bloomberg Continue reading
New EU Climate Policy Unlikely Before 2015: Poland
May 23, 2013 Poland’s Minister of the Environment Marcin Korolec is pictured in Rio de Janeiro, on June 22, 2012. The European Union is unlikely to hammer out its new policy on global warming ahead of a global climate deal that could be clinched in 2015, … more The European Union is unlikely to hammer out its new policy on global warming ahead of a global climate deal that could be clinched in 2015, Poland’s environment minister said Wednesday. “A long discussion on climate change is getting underway. There’s no chance that new measures will be adopted during the current terms of the European Parliament and the European Commission,” minister Marcin Korolec told Poland’s PAP news agency. In its efforts to reduce global warming, the international community is to draw up new, universal climate pact by 2015, which should come into effect by 2020. Korolec’s comments come after UN climate chief Christiana Figueres warned last week that the world had entered a “new danger zone”, with record levels of Earth-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Korolec believes Brussels could soon propose cutting EU fossil fuel imports by 30 percent by 2030, and back production of electric cars. The 27-member EU—struggling to overcome recession sparked by the eurozone’s lumbering debt crisis—should also ban costly and inefficient energy subsidies as a means of forcing the development of new, economically viable, power solutions, he said. Korolec also slammed a European Commission proposal to freeze a portion of carbon emission quotas under the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) in order to drive up the price of those on the market. “It raises doubts when the European Commission itself proposes to intervene in a market system which it set up in the first place,” he said. “Poland has opposed this from the start and I’m confident that the European Parliament will reject it again,” he added. The parliament refused to raise the price on greenhouse gas emission quotas in April to avoid further burdening heavy industries in Europe already feeling the effects of the eurozone crisis. The European Commission revealed last week that the EU’s emissions were down 2.0 percent in 2012, reflecting the economic slowdown . The ETS covers more than 12,000 power plants and manufacturing installations across the EU plus Norway and Liechtenstein, according to the Commission. It is a key part of EU efforts to reduce its CO2 emissions by some 20 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels. Read more at: http://phys.org/news…poland.html#jCp Continue reading
UK To Vote Against 2030 EU Renewable Target – Davey
Wednesday, 29 May 2013 UK to vote against 2030 EU renewable target – Davey The UK government is likely to oppose an EU renewables target for 2030 which is considered “inflexible and unnecessary”, energy secretary Ed Davey said. He made the comment after the European Parliament on Monday extended a deadline for the submission of amendments to a proposal to intervene in the carbon market. “Whilst we strongly support renewables to 2020 and beyond, the uncertainties at this time are too large to set hard numbers in a binding EU Renewables target, which we do not believe would be cost effective or fit well with our electricity market reforms,” Davey said. Britain would, however, will continue to support a 40% cut in the emissions 2030 target, from 1990 levels, and would even endorse increasing that target to 50% -– if the UN was to adopt an ambitious global reduction in emissions target by 2015. The EU currently has a 2020 target to both cut emissions by 20% and increase renewables by the same amount. The European Parliament on Monday extended a deadline for the submission of amendments to a proposal to intervene in the carbon market by six hours, giving MEPs six hours more time to submit amendments to the proposal on backloading. The proposal, tabled by the European Commission, is intended to provide a short-term boost to carbon prices on the EU ETS by delaying the release of 900m allowances until the end of the decade. The extension of the vote was intended to support efforts of independent observers to broker a potential compromise on the proposal, which the parliament rejected in April. Ultimately, the backloading proposal is set to be voted on in the Parliament’s environment committee on 19 June. Read more: http://gastopowerjou…y#ixzz2Uh9j9k9P Continue reading
