Khaleej Finance and Investment presents KFI-Optimum a Sharia'h-compliant Fund

This fund comprises Dow Jones Islamic Equity Index, Crude Oil and Copper and offers the investors the opportunity to gain from some of the best performing Islamic assets in the world and allow them to benefit from its performance without any risk to their initial capital.

Hasan Habib, Director, Treasury & Financial Institutions at KFI, said, "We received the award for "Deal of the Year-2005" from the "Banker" magazine for the fund we launched last year and we are glad to introduce, in 2006, our new and unique product to our clients."

While KFI is the arranger, promoter & placement agent for this Fund, Deutche Bank is the provider of both the Capital Protection and the minimum absolute return to KFI.

The Capital Protected Fund is a 3 & 4 years investment, with a minimum initial subscription of US$ 2,000,000 with an exit option on a monthly basis at market levels. At the end of the investment period, the investors will receive 100% of their initial capital, with a minimum additional 10% (3 years) & 12% (4 years) return on investment, and 100% participation of the average monthly performance.

The fund allocates highest weight to the best performing asset and lowest to the asset which has the least performance. Performance is captured every month to reduce possibility of last-minute downturn in markets close to maturity.

Mr. Habib noted that the Fund's underlying three assets have enjoyed one of the strongest bull runs in recent times. These are driven by strong economic fundamentals, rather than by a mere asset bubble speculative positioning.

The emergence of resource consuming, high growth economies like India, China, Brazil, Russia etc. has sparked a major demand for commodities especially in the industrial and energy space. The huge inter-linkages between global economies has also resulted in the developed economies generating growth by supplying to the developing world - case in point being the fact that the largest US corporations today are those which supply goods and services to countries like India and China as opposed to domestic consumers.

Keeping the above in mind, KFI chose its 3 assets - Copper as a representative of the Industrial Metals space which is seeing huge demand from fast growing global economies, Crude Oil as a representative of the energy fueled high growth economies and the Dow Jones Islamic Equity Index which represents some of the largest global corporations in the world.

KFI plays a key role in serving the asset management and investment needs of shareholders throughout the region with its portfolio of high performance Sharia'h-compliant investment products for its strong, diversified shareholder base.