DELOITTE CHOOSES MALAYSIA AS ISLAMIC FINANCE HUB

Deloitte has set up an Islamic finance centre of excellence in Malaysia to provide consultation on Islamic finance for the Asia Pacific region.

This is the professional services firm's only such centre in the region and one of its three globally together with London and Dubai.

Deloitte's Asia Pacific chief executive officer Chaly Mah Chee Kheong said the company had started to build a team of between eight and 10 professionals to be based in the Kuala Lumpur office and would continue to recruit more.

"The concept of a centre of excellence will be a core of people to understand Islamic finance and all the complexities around this product," Mah said at a media conference here today.

"We have similar teams in the Middle East and London as well," he said.

Deloitte's Islamic finance specialist Daud Vicary Abdullah said the centre of excellence was complementary to Islamic banking services.

"We are not a training centre although we are prepared to train. We do business directly with clients at our level of expertise," Daud said.

"Generally we work together with them (Islamic banks). We can provide services to them because we have some expertise which banks don't have or perhaps strategically don't want to focus on and don't want to create a specialised team to do things internally," he said.

Daud also said that many traditional non-Muslim countries such as Singapore, the United Kingdom, Japan and Hong Kong have expressed interest in becoming major players in the Islamic finance industry.

"Some have even gone as far as to amend their legislations and tax regimes to accommodate requirements unique to Islamic finance," he said.