Moody's assigns BLME US$ Income Fund single A rating

The Fund is for professional investors only and is structured as a Luxembourg domiciled SICAV-SIF. It aims to provide a competitive level of income together with daily liquidity. The fund seeks to achieve this by investing in a diversified portfolio of high quality Islamic money market instruments and Sukuk.

Nigel Denison, Director and Head of Wealth Management at BLME, said: "The A rating demonstrates that Islamic funds can compete with their conventional counterparts, a view that is supported by our top percentile performance ranking from Lipper Hindsight since the launch of the fund in 2009. This should also provide Islamic financial institutions with an additional highly rated instrument with which to manage their liquidity ."

Jason Kabel, Head of Fixed Income, BLME added:
"Moody's rating brings international visability to the US$ Income Fund. The Fund has consistently maintained an above benchmark return and we expect this performance, coupled with the rating, should bring a wider range of professional investors into the fund."

Waleed Al Omar, Head of Insitutional coverage added said:"We expect this announcement of to be of particular interest to institutional investors as it will provide an investment grade Sharia'a-compliant asset liability product."

BLME's US$ Income Fund is an unregulated collective investment scheme and only available to professional clients or eligible counterparties. Shares in this fund should only be purchased by persons with experience of participating in unregulated schemes or through a qualified professional adviser.