Meezan Bank’s Shariah Supervisory Board approves guidelines for conducting Commodity Murabaha at Pakistan Mercantile Exchange (PMEX)

March 10th, 2017

The 30th meeting of Meezan Bank’s Shariah Supervisory Board (SSB) was recently held at DarulUloom, Karachi, under the Chairmanship of Justice (Retd.) Muhammad Taqi Usmani.

The SSB has approved guidelines for developing a local Commodity Murabaha platform at Pakistan Mercantile Exchange while ensuring that all the requirements for a Shariah-compliant genuine sale transaction are met. The guidelines shall facilitate real sale and purchase of commodities in the ready market while ensuring that a proper delivery mechanism is in place. This shall further enable PMEX customers to avail physical delivery easily.

The SSB also carefully reviewed and discussed various solutions for solving excess liquidity situation for Islamic banks and evaluated the working procedures of three major international commodity Murabaha platforms including Bursa Malaysia, DMCC Dubai and London Metal Exchange used by International Islamic banks for managing their excess liquidity.

Restricted investment avenues for Islamic banks has been a major challenge, putting the IFIs at a competitive disadvantageous position. Moreover, Islamic banking industry is looking to find solution for excess liquidity management while the government is looking for Shariah based financing solution to move away from interest based borrowing.