The whole thing is a joke. And the joke is on us.
Gerald Celente1
It is important to note that the structured finance methods of Sharia arbitrage – which were copied from Western regulatory arbitrage methods aiming to reduce tax burdens on high net worth individuals – have already had a chequered history. Indeed, American regulators and accountants were slow to uncover some of the abuses of those structures, which later featured prominently in corporate scandals, such as Enron’s. In this regard, regulators and enforcement officials in the countries wherein Islamic finance has thrived are clearly less sophisticated than their Western counterparts, and hence less likely to uncover devious intentions underneath complicated financial structures. Given the industry’s young age and fragility, it would be wise to move to simpler and more transparent modes of operation, to minimize the risks of abuse by criminal elements.2
Strong words, and not those of an outsider or a layman, but a respected expert, Mahmoud El-Gamal, Professor of Economics and Statistics at Rice University in the United States. An outspoken critic of an industry he views as a sham, Professor El-Gamal has a problem with Sharia arbitrage. Although financial arbitrage is generally the practice of exploiting profitable discrepancies between markets – usually by buying a financial product in one market and selling it at a higher price in another – Sharia arbitrage is a form of regulatory arbitrage – that is, the act of restructuring a financial product that is available in one market in order to make it tradeable in another. And El-Gamal believes that the practice of Sharia arbitrage is the reason why Islamic finance is merely mimicking the culture of an investment banking industry rocked by a failure to manage risk adequately.
In a conference room in Paris, global desk heads at a large French bank are gathering to contemplate their entry into the Islamic finance space. The backdrop is grim. In late 2011, angry crowds are gathering in Wall Street, and in other cities around the world, to protest the injustice of a capitalist system that rewards those who take excessive risks with others’ money, then watch smugly as taxpayers bail out their indiscretions. The Greeks are about to go to a shock referendum on austerity measures, threatening the collapse of the Eurozone. Liquidity is drying up around the world and the threat of financial Armageddon seems to be ever present. Can these French bankers afford the luxury of considering an entirely new line of products, so alien to their core business, at a time when shareholders are demanding immediate solutions to increase the bank’s liquidity and boost the bottom line?
Just three years earlier, at rival bank Société Générale, trader Jérôme Kerviel was accused of losing the bank €4.9 billion in unauthorized trades, apparently arbitraging discrepancies in the pricing between equities and their derivatives. Only two months earlier, in September 2011, UBS trader Kweku Adoboli lost the Swiss bank $2.3 billion as a result of unauthorized trades by speculating on stock indices. The resultant investigation claimed the jobs of the UBS CEO, two co-heads of the equities division (one of them the charismatic Swiss Algerian, Yassine Bouhara, Deutsche’s former Godfather of the Middle East), and eight suspended members of staff.
In a climate of fear and mistrust, the desk heads in the conference room want to know more about Sharia risk. What legal, financial and reputational impact would the risk of entering into Sharia-compliant contracts have for them? How could they work that arbitrage to their advantage without tripping over it?
Some in the room can barely hide their disdain for mixing business with religion, a curious French aversion to allowing religion to intrude in matters of daily life, as if a connection to morality and ethics should only be of relevance once a week in Church. Others are concerned that trading with Islamic financial institutions might somehow taint their own reputation, as if those institutions must by definition have a greater degree of exposure to laundered terrorist money.
It is a new era of Sharia scrutiny by scholars, punctuated by declarations from leading figures such as Mufti Taqi Usmani who, at a stroke, can radically alter the landscape of the industry. There is money to be made, but there are risks in doing so, and the French bank is about to embark on a Rumsfeldian journey of ‘unknown unknowns’.
But while our French friends are taking the time to understand the nuances of Islamic finance before dipping their toes, the same cannot be said for Goldman Sachs, the institution famously described as ‘a great vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming their blood funnel into anything that smells like money’.3 In the search for liquidity, the vampire squid has discovered that Islamic institutions are sitting on piles of cash, waiting to deploy them on blue chip investments. The time has come to tap this liquidity. The time has come for Goldman Sachs, the hedonistic poster boy of the boom years of investment banking, to find God.
The smell of money led Goldman Sachs to my door in the summer of 2011 to discuss a sukuk issuance. ‘We’re looking at a commodity murabaha for a conventional financial institution’, they told me. Could they not consider an alternative structure? There were plenty of options out there, we would undoubtedly find something that works, I suggested. Best not to make it look overtly like an interest-bearing bond and attach Arabic words to it. It doesn’t look good.
‘But how is that any different from the use of the commodity murabaha as an inter-bank financing instrument?’ they asked. After all, Islamic banks today fund their day-to-day activities in the inter-bank market by ‘borrowing’ privately through the use of this instrument.
It was a perfectly fair point – if they can do it, why can’t we? Why should a publicly listed instrument that works in the same way be considered any different? What they were effectively doing was creating a giant machine for inter-bank liquidity, ‘programmizing’ what was already in existence. This was the flow monsters at work in all their industrial glory.
‘Also, the institution wants to use the money however it sees fit,’ they said.
‘So let me get this straight’, I said. ‘You want to raise a public bond underpinned by the simultaneous buying and selling of metal warrants on an exchange, and you want a fatwa to certify this as compliant with Sharia? Then you want the institution to use the money raised from Islamic investors to fund its conventional activities – like lending with interest, trading of debt and intangible contracts, shorting of stock?’
We parted ways and Goldman Sachs found themselves an advisory firm willing to take on the deal. It seemed the mighty Goldman Sachs had learnt little from the debacle of the subprime mortgage disaster and consequent economic tsunami, as has been well documented in numerous books and journals.4 Though publicly sensitive to criticism of its role – and that of its alumni – in the global financial crisis, its institutional thick skin remained apparently impenetrable to reputational considerations.
Although I did not know it at the time, Goldman Sachs had been talking about raising money for itself. Its $2 billion sukuk programme was doomed to failure the moment it was launched. In theory, this new debt issuance would squirt a refreshingly different type of liquidity into a balance sheet still rebounding from the depths of the financial crisis. Islamic investors, offering their hard-earned, clean, socially responsible cash, would be the new saviours.
But in practice it was a compromised solution, created for a bank more used to closing deals fast and furiously. The alternative was too participative, too real economy, too Islamic, too far removed from the reality of modern conventional finance. The deal team did not have the time or the inclination to learn how to do business in a way that met the spirit and letter of the law. What they needed was a Sharia advisory firm who would give them a solution that looked like their day-to-day money-market transactions, and that all important fatwa. Ironically, an industry predicated on ethical, real economy solutions was excluding the ethical advisors.
And although the programme had not yet been launched, the French bankers gathering in a Parisian boardroom to contemplate their entry into the Islamic world were sitting up and taking notice. ‘How is it possible that a conventional financial institution like Goldman can fund itself with Islamic money?’ asks one of the desk heads around the conference table.
It is an excellent question. How indeed? The answer is that Goldman Sachs was playing the Sharia arbitrage card. Whether Islamic investors would in fact buy the paper would be another matter.
In Saudi Arabia, an unknown former journalist and student of Islamic finance by the name of Mohammed Khnifer was preparing to answer the question. As the debate over Goldman’s sukuk gathered momentum in private circles, the young Saudi pored over the sukuk prospectus and was disturbed by what he found. In a blog that quickly became viral among the Islamic finance community,5 Khnifer claimed that Goldman’s debt issuance desk had opted for the tawarruq, the simultaneous purchase and resale of commodities on a metals exchange, the modern incarnation of El Diwany’s derided medieval construct, the contractum trinius. In order to get their credit traders, risk management committee, legal team and compliance department onside, the Goldman bankers had followed the path of least resistance – a product they could instantly compare to an interest-bearing bond.
But this was not the only thing bothering Khnifer. The monies raised were not specified for any ostensibly ‘Islamic’ purpose: no funding of a separate Islamic ‘window’ that served only customers wishing to buy Sharia-compliant products, no financing of Sharia-compliant trading activities or assets.6 No mention of socially responsible investing, or ethical business. Just the good old day-to-day ordinary business activities of the Goldman Sachs that the media loves to hate, the giant vampire squid. If that money raised from Islamic investors was used to facilitate the shorting of the subprime mortgage market, there was nothing in the legal documentation preventing the bank from doing so.
And finally, there was the question of tradeability. This was a security listed on the Irish Stock Exchange. Although the official prospectus advised investors that the instrument could not be considered Sharia compliant if it were traded at any value other than its par (face) value,7 there was nothing to stop traders on the exchange trading it at a value set by the market. In other words, it represented the trading of a debt or a cash flow – impermissible in Islam – and not the exchange of a debt at its face value, which would be considered acceptable.
It wasn’t just the purists frothing at the mouth. In an unguarded moment over an informal coffee, one head of bond markets at a rival European institution described the deal as ‘a pile of shit’. Although a non-Muslim, he felt the target market had been cheated. In playing the Sharia arbitrage card, Goldman Sachs had tripped up on Sharia risk: the risk that one man’s Sharia compliant was another man’s pile of shit.
As the Goldman sukuk controversy raged in the blogosphere and at coffee houses in Dubai, I arrived at the World Islamic Banking Conference in Bahrain to moderate a panel on Sharia. In advance of the session, I asked the panellists – all active participants in the Islamic finance industry – if they would mind discussing the sukuk. The answer was unanimous: they would mind, and can we talk about something else please. Not a single one of the five panellists was willing to go on the record to analyse the Sharia issues. Taking on one of the world’s most powerful banks in public at the WIBC was not a risk worth taking.
One of the panellists had been involved in the Sharia board review of the Goldman Sachs sukuk. In private, he described a scene of tension to me. At the Sharia review meeting, only a few of the eight named scholars were able to attend the meeting in person. The commercial pressures were enormous. One of the great banking institutions was turning to Islamic finance, a milestone achievement for the industry. To turn down this structure would be to destroy several months of work, hamper the opportunity for the industry to leverage its future off the best and brightest minds, and ruin carefully cultivated relationships.
The group of jurists was divided. One specified the proviso that the money raised would only be used for Sharia-compliant purposes, in the same way that Islamic banks are bound to do in their inter-bank funding instruments. This would have at least made the instrument acceptable to a portion of the market, but this proviso had not been relayed to investors or made public. The very fact that the deal was public and listed on an exchange – rather than a private bilateral funding – meant, according to that scholar, that it should be held up to higher standards. Another scholar had not seen the legal documents underpinning the sukuk but was willing to sign on the basis of the bankers’ oral communications with him.
At the WIBC, another attendee in the audience that day had been named in the prospectus as one of the eight members of the Sharia board of the advisory firm who had procured the fatwa for the product. And yet he had not attended that final review meeting. In classic legalese, the sukuk prospectus had hinted that a fatwa would be procured but did not specify when, and which of the named scholars would actually sign the fatwa.8 When I asked him in a private moment to clarify his view on the sukuk, the scholar denied he was aware of the contents of the sukuk documentation, denied that he was still a member of the Sharia board of the advisory firm listed in the prospectus, and denied that he had ever signed any associated fatwa. His name had simply been used.
Despite my own attempts to procure the signed document from the scholars who had attended that Sharia board review, no lawyer, banker or scholar was able to offer it to me. The fatwa had not been published in the prospectus and appeared to be a protected document. Perhaps it would not have been seemly to publicize a schism in scholarly ranks, but somehow the press had picked up on the tension. Euroweek, for example, went as far as describing the scholars as ‘surprised and upset to find their names listed’ when the prospectus was released.9
When the panel session ended, I met up with Khnifer to discuss his publicized articles. With a keen intellect, the advantage of youth and a feeling of invincibility on his side, he had embraced the debate with gusto when he opened it up to public consumption. But now, a few weeks later, he was shifting uncomfortably. Still a freelance consultant looking for a permanent position in the industry, he was worried about the threat of legal action, and the response to his article from all corners of the market.
‘They are saying horrible things about me’, he told me nervously, his customary broad smile now absent. ‘First I started getting emails, then messages on LinkedIn [a social networking site for professionals]. They tell me I will never find work in this industry.’
Through media contacts, Khnifer was hearing the news that his nascent career was in jeopardy. Labelled an ‘ignorant industry outsider’ with ‘crackpot ideas’, bankers – both insiders and others – suggested his intention was merely to make a name for himself. Ad hominem attacks in online forums and private emails became a daily ritual, most of them focusing on his lack of hands-on experience in the industry, and few were prepared to go on the record to defend his views.
But when an internal memo from Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank was leaked to the market, warning how the sukuk was not compliant with its own Sharia board’s guidelines,10 Khnifer started to breathe a little more easily. At last, a prominent market player agreed with him.
‘Hopefully this fatwa will remove them from my back’, he told me. But Khnifer continued to watch his back, afraid that a promising career would end almost before it had started. Had he persisted, it would not have been a fair fight. The ambitious young Saudi dared not take the risk of being swallowed whole. He withdrew quietly from the debate and let others run with it.
Khnifer was not the only one treading carefully. One journalist interviewing a New York-based Goldman Sachs employee after the sukuk programme was launched found herself being quizzed about her own credentials to report on the structure.11
‘“How come the Islamic guys talk to you?”’ she described him as asking her, incredulous that a woman should be granted access to a clandestine clique of bearded chauvinists. As she asked him a series of technical questions to clarify the use of the proceeds from the sukuk, and the Sharia certification procedure, his composure broke.
‘“Look, I don’t care about that, honey. I don’t give a shit about the little guy”,’ she relayed. ‘“I just want to make sure you get the facts straight.”’ As far as he was concerned, the press and the blogosphere were misstating the facts, and their overemphasis on the flow of money – the ethics of the deal – were an unimportant sideshow.
Whether the Middle East was too insignificant for the bond trader from New York to exercise simple manners, or whether he considered Islamic investors dumb enough to be fobbed off without a clear analysis of the matter, the journalist didn’t know. But she, too, was learning to tread carefully, and her peers at other news agencies were being asked by their bosses to avoid an open war with the world’s most celebrated – or infamous – bank.
To date, no official sale of the sukuk has taken place even though the programme has been ‘launched’, by which is meant that the legal documents underpinning the issuance programme have been published. Rumours abound of financial institutions willing to buy privately placed tranches of the sukuk, but no one knows who these institutions are, nor whether in fact a single dollar has been sold. At a time when other financial institutions, including conventional ones, have achieved spectacular oversubscriptions for their own public sukuk issuances, investors appear to have sent a clear signal on the subject of Sharia arbitrage.
Commenting generally on the subject of arbitrage, Professor El-Gamal is unequivocal on the subject. For him, layering transactions with a series of complex steps to provide comfort to Islamic investors is merely form over substance: ‘[The] addition of trading parties as buffers between Islamic financial institutions and transactions deemed to be forbidden (interest-based loans, option and future trading, etc.) must be seen fundamentally as a means of exploiting Sharia arbitrage opportunities.’12
Although these comments were published well before the Goldman Sachs sukuk, they nevertheless were directly relevant. The obvious red flag – financing of the bank’s conventional day-to-day activities – had been ignored in the pursuit of juristic opinions on the individual legs of the transaction. By refusing to buy this paper, finally Islamic investors were starting to push back. It seemed that there simply weren’t any takers for the Goldman paper, at any price level. Surely this was a good thing for the Islamic finance industry? On the one hand, the market viewed the investment instrument as contractually dubious and issued by a conventional financial services institution with a reputation for playing fast and loose with the capital markets. The market had sent a clear signal that both spirit and letter of Sharia were important to it. Goldman Sachs’s response to criticism had been hostile and lacked empathy. It responded aggressively to vulnerable individuals in private with the intention of quashing debate and had little interest in righting alleged wrongs. It was easy to equate Goldman Sachs with its popular public image. At least that’s what I thought until I delved deeper.
Not surprisingly, Goldman Sachs is not the kind of institution willing to go on the record about the structure of sukuk and less so the failure of one of its deals. I did speak to someone ‘close to the transaction’, however, an advisor who had a hand in the structuring.
I met my mystery insider in the Dubai International Financial Centre, the financial zone in the heart of the United Arab Emirates modelled on the City of London’s Square Mile, a cluster of futuristic office blocks housing brand-name investment banks, Magic Circle law firms and ancillary service providers. In the shadow of its iconic cubic structure, The Gate – imitating Paris’s Grande Arche in La Défense – we sip qahwa, Arabic coffee served with dates.
My contact is intense and passionate about the deal, but unhappy. He is reflecting the sense of frustration that the bankers at Goldman are feeling right now. There is an irony in his dapper dress sense. He sports a tailored suit with a fancy striped lining and a bright pink double-cuff shirt, echoing everything that Dubai stands for: brash, ambitious, confident. But his manifest ebullience is tempered by the frustration felt by deal insiders at the perceived unfair comments from the media, an organized effort he describes as a whispering campaign. Given the context of Goldman Sachs as an apparently unsuitable participant in the Islamic market, I find it initially strange that he quotes a Quranic chapter that reminds the believer to be steadfast and seek refuge in Allah from the power of whispers, ‘from the evil of the retreating whisperer who whispers into the hearts of mankind’.13 This witch hunt against Goldman Sachs was never about the deal itself, he contends. It was about Goldman Sachs. And his client and colleagues on the deal feel hard done by.
In his opinion, this sukuk would have been the first step towards ‘programmizing’ Islamic inter-bank liquidity. It would have moved the industry forward in the same way that Deutsche Bank once moved the game on for Islamic derivatives. As one of the biggest and richest equity trading houses in the world, Goldman Sachs’s traders can ‘warehouse’ massive amounts of equities and sell them to Islamic investors in initial public offerings, ‘doing funky things with them’ as he put it, like providing financing to holders of the shares, using the shares as collateral. The enormous public offering of Facebook shares could have been a perfect opportunity to set aside a portion of the billions of dollars raised, just for Islamic investors. Imagine that, says my insider. The start of an incredible, gigantic move forwards for Islamic equities activity in the world, which up until now hasn’t been realized.
But before they get to that stage, Goldman needs to do the simple stuff: programmizing the inter-bank lending market through commodity murabaha, something that happens every day, every minute by Islamic banks. And yet, when done in public by a firm like Goldman, it is met with the most severe whispering campaign designed to kill the idea and the transaction.
The Goldman bankers feel that friends and former colleagues in the industry have deserted them, says my insider. Badmouthed them in public and hung them out to dry. Why did no one discuss the issue directly with them, why a witch hunt through the media? He reels off a list of names of Islamic banks. ‘I want them all to look me in the eye and tell me they don’t do this stuff on a daily basis. They do! So now who’s being hypocritical?’
He has a point, I tell myself. After all, the vast majority of Islamic banks fund their Islamic activities with the commodity murabaha, a simultaneous buying and selling of metals on an exchange to simulate inter-bank deposits. Perhaps it might be argued in mitigation that the wholly Sharia-compliant institutions have no non-compliant avenues to deploy those funds, and therefore cannot be accused of profiting immorally from Islamic money. However, if the Qatar Central Bank’s decision to ban conventional institutions from selling Islamic products is any indicator, then it might be argued that allowing the likes of HSBC and Standard Chartered (both international conventional banks like Goldman Sachs) to profit from Islamic depositors is tantamount to the same thing.
The bankers are palpably frustrated and under pressure. ‘They’re just waiting for that phone call from HR and their line manager, and get asked to come into a meeting room to discuss the terms of their termination.’
It’s another PR mess at a time in the economic cycle when the bank can ill afford bad publicity. Somehow, despite Goldman’s many talents, public relations does not seem to be one of them. Even their leased offices in a quiet corner of the DIFC are denied a simple plaque in the foyer to signify their presence in the building, as if the key to success is simply to remain low key even when doing bad stuff, hoping that no one notices.
‘They need help. What do they do? They’re trying to move the industry from here [he gestures at one side of the table] to here [he gestures to the other side]. They want to move from standardizing liquidity management to creating complex structures in Sharia-compliant private equity, and that’s what will really turn those guys on. They’re Goldman Sachs. I’ve seen the other big banks, and I can tell you that these guys are absolutely the best. Every one of the 440 partners of this firm is a real equity holder, massively incentivized to be the very best in the industry. But they need to see genuinely game-changing P&L – for now, Islamic finance is just the stone in the groove of the sole of the shoe of the janitor who’s ankle deep in water, cleaning the latrines. We, the Islamic finance industry, are considered insignificant. Unless we can introduce game-changing concepts, we’re never gonna get noticed by these people. Right now, we’re worthless to these guys. We have to make something happen, otherwise we get moved on. If this industry is gonna move on, it needs to move on in a revolutionary way.’
Maybe the simple answer is PR, I suggest. It’s not a structuring issue. Those people who invest using the commodity murabaha structure are not the sort to worry too much about Sharia arbitrage. They’ve already accepted that form over substance is the nature of the industry, and perhaps they have little interest in changing the status quo. So, instead, perhaps it’s about showing people that Goldman Sachs doesn’t kidnap babies, pollute rivers and torture bunny rabbits. Maybe Goldman should set up a think tank, which then becomes Goldman’s independent PR agent, a gift to the industry, if you like. It could then begin moving the industry radically into its next phase of development, just as Deutsche Bank once revolutionized the industry by leveraging off its own think tank.
The adviser continues. ‘The guys that you and I deal with at the regional institutions have no interest in moving the game on – they just want to read the paper, have lunch, socialize with their friends, leave the office at 3 p.m., and do the bare minimum: a couple of commodity murabahas every now and then. I want to revolutionise the industry. I’m not interested in just existing.’
Anyone close to this deal, whether an adviser to the deal or a front office banker, has only a limited amount of time to make an impact, each in a race against the clock, against the patience of Goldman’s senior management. Once the traders in New York lose interest in the deal, the Islamic finance industry will have to turn to its next white knight.
In trying to standardize the most basic inter-bank liquidity product, the Goldman bankers ended up alienating their firm from the industry and, in turn, themselves from their beloved firm. And perhaps all because they went public on a structure that some people find dubious, and yet ironically continue to transact in private.
Despite a section of the market’s criticism of the structure, the most notable defence came from perhaps one of the industry’s most widely respected individuals, Sheikh Hussain Hamed Hassan, a scholar whose rejection of the tawarruq transaction is well known:
We have reviewed the structure and legal documents of the Goldman Sachs one year Sukuk Al Murabaha program, and after carefully reviewing the same found them to be in compliance with the AAOIFI standards and the generally accepted Sharia guidelines. I welcome well established conventional industry players such as Goldman Sachs in the Islamic finance world…and wish them every success with this product and their future Islamic financial initiatives.14
There can be few more solid endorsements in this industry. Technically it was difficult to argue that the sukuk held itself out as the outlawed tawarruq: that is, it did not require the presence of additional elements such as the immediate sale of commodities to a third party to generate cash (although it did not explicitly preclude this possibility, which prompted Khnifer’s suspicions), or Goldman Sachs to sell the commodities back to the original supplier. Nor did the sukuk prospectus fail to advise buyers that trading the security above or below par would render it non-compliant (though, of course, it could not prevent this from happening on the stock exchange). So, in some ways, it might be argued that it was a purer murabaha transaction than the ‘organized tawarruq’ conducted every day by Islamic institutions in Saudi Arabia to maintain their liquidity.
Even Sheikh Nizam Yaquby, the mysteriously robed Obi-Wan Kenobi whose carefully chosen words had persuaded me to join the industry many years ago, agreed: ‘It is a misunderstanding’, he said in reference to the media attack on the sukuk. ‘This sukuk was never issued – it was only in the development stage. Goldman Sachs is a very famous institution and it has a proper Sharia board that can guide and advise them.’15 Well, he was right about it never being issued, but it was only in development limbo because it had not received universal market acceptance.
The backing of industry heavyweights seems more nuanced than the Goldman story being played out in the media, but the clock is ticking. How much longer will the partners at Goldman indulge the concept of Islamic finance? For them, this sukuk has been an exploding nail bomb of scholar disputes and market whisperings. A rumour circulates the market that one of the named scholars has refused to sign the fatwa because of a dispute over his fee. Another attached a proviso to the fatwa, which has not been publicized. Another two say they have nothing to do with the Sharia board any more.16 One says he is on the board but never saw the documents.17
The lawyers to the deal and Goldman’s capital markets bankers have allowed the use of vague references to Sharia in the documentation and, not surprisingly, these have been highlighted by a suspicious market as opaque and obfuscatory. Perhaps the mismanaged Sharia certification process had not been given the importance it deserved. Or perhaps, given the reputation that preceded the bank, it was impossible for Goldman Sachs to play in the ethical space at all.
For the Sharia advisory firm that advised Goldman Sachs, it would turn out to be their last major deal. They folded a year after the programme was launched.18 Market rumours suggested that their reputation had been destroyed by just one deal, though market rumours were wrong in this case. The firm had always struggled to make money in a market where advice was not valued, and the firm’s management had always been in conflict with a closed group of shareholders. For shareholders, perhaps this latest episode was the last straw. The chief executive officer was not happy. His extraordinary ability to visualize the abstract and cut through the most complex problems had not been enough to save his job at his former employer, Deutsche Bank, who had shut down his beloved Islamic finance team. The firm was former Deutsche subsidiary, Dar Al Istithmar. The chief executive? Belgian rocket scientist, Geert Bossuyt.