Well that’s it. It’s been a turbulent ride, but for the time being the team at The Islamic Globe are putting away their pens and shutting down their laptops. Like many businesses across the world, we’ve been credit crunched. It seems that despite the regular announcements about how buoyant the global Islamic finance industry is this positive sentiment doesn’t seem to have followed through into marketing budgets as – if we’re to believe the senior execs at the Islamic banks we’ve been talking to – there’s no money for marketing and advertising.

This is a great shame, as now is the time for the Islamic finance industry really topush the envelope and cross over into the mainstream, with skepticism, mistrust and hostility towards the conventional banking industry at an all-time high. When we started The Islamic Globe a year ago, there weren’t any tent-cities of angry proletarians camped out in protest at the greed and excess of the conventional financial system. Now you’ll find perma-protestors in the City of London, Wall Street, Athens, Dublin, Toronto and all points of the compass of western capitalism.

But if not now, when? We founded The Islamic Globe because we sincerely believed in the potential of the Islamic finance industry. We’ve been tireless in bringing news from the exciting, far-flung emerging markets of Islamic finance in North America, Europe, Africa and Central Asia. We’ve had anon-the-ground presence in the GCC and Malaysia, the traditional hubs of the industry and the thirst for information on the growth and development of the industry – as our 27,000 regular readers stands testament – is insatiable.

As far as bringing the people news, we’ve been more than successful, starting out with 5,000 readers a year ago and increasing that by more than five times in 12 months. We’ve approached things from a different angle – embracing multi-media through the development of Apps on all major platforms and offering regular podcasts, commentary and opinion. We’ve also been driven by an agenda to bring real news, not reprinted press releases, advertorials and powder-puff CEO interviews, even if that means we will ask the tough questions, and print stories that will hurt the sensitivities of some of those featured, as the management of UM Financial Inc. will testify.

There’s still a lot of malpractice in the industry to root out, and our editorial team has the inside track on a number of car crashes waiting to happen. But there’s also a lot to herald, there are industry champions quietly working in an ethical, entrepreneurial and imaginative way that will be the champions of the industry as it emerges onto a wider global scene, and we hoped to promote these guys and gals in Majlis.

However, the industry still has a long way to go. It needs to mature, and its leaders need to take a professional and intelligent approach, stop believing their own PR, move forward in a collegiate and inclusive manner and confront criticism head on – not through spin and the burying of heads in the sand.

We hope the good guys win through, as we still believe that Islamic finance has a significant role to play in global economic development. The industry isn’t going to go away, and neither are we, we’re just taking a bit of a rest. We’ll continue to update the website and keep our blogs fresh and exciting, so it’s not goodbye, but more of a ‘see you later’, we hope.

The issue of The Islamic Globe that was published on Wednesday 22nd February is the last one that will be published for a while. We are not so much closing down as taking a break. Right up until the day of publication we had been promised the support of three major advertisers but as had happened so many times over the past year, these promises proved to be hollow.

We had always believed that the newspaper had to be free to the reader otherwise we would have ended up with a tiny niche publication that talked only to itself. We believe there is a massive audience out there hungry for insight and information on what is going on in the name of Islamic finance. That is why we toiled seven days a week, often 12 hours a day, to bring The Globe to readers.

Launching a publication like The Islamic Globe in the face of the most ferocious recession in recent memory could be seen as either brave or daft but we believed that the time was right for Islamic finance to have its own newspaper. We had not factored in the savage cutbacks to the marketing budgets of Islamic finance institutions the world over and that is where we inevitably came unstuck. We needed advertising support to survive and we did not get it.

In readership terms, ironically, The Islamic Globe has never been so popular. We launched with a readership of 5,000 that grew to 22,000. More recently we introduced some improvements in the form of the Gumshoe section and Majlis magazine that saw the readership leap to almost 27,000 – but it still wasn’t enough.

So we have been forced to take a breather and wait for market sentiment to improve and Islamic finance institutions to have enough spare cash to market themselves to a global audience that goes beyond the market players themselves.

One CEO of an Islamic bank summed it up when he told me, “What a pity that we are letting die of a prodigy. I too am of the same accursed lot and have done nothing to support the noble initiative. So, I render my apologies, they are but worth two cents.”

Anyway, it is not so much an Au Revoir as an ÀBientôt and we hope to be back before too long to carry on where we left off. In the meantime there are some words from a Steely Dan song called Everything Must Go that fits how we are feeling right now:

“Talk about your major pain and suffering
Now our self-esteem is shattered
Show the world our mighty hidey-ho face
As we go sliding down the ladder
It was sweet up at the top
'Til that ill wind started blowing
Now it's cozy down below
'Cause we're goin' out of business
Everything must go

We gave it our best shot
But keep in mind we got a lot
The sky, the moon, good food and the weather
First-run movies - does anybody get lucky twice?
Wouldn't it be nice...”

One could call 2012 ‘The Year of the Sukuk refinance’ with nigh on $10bn in large Sukuk maturing during the year according to Zawya. 

Dana Gas’ $1bn Sukuk, due October, has attracted attention as it has traded down sharply since September, reflecting doubts about the company’s ability to repay the Sukuk when it becomes due. 

The biggest worry for Dana Gas is its difficulty in converting receivables into cash, particularly in Egypt, where the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation has had difficulties paying foreign oil and gas producers in the wake of the Arab Spring.  An Egyptian oil and gas information provider reported that Dana Gas filed an official request for payment early last year, though it is still struggling with slow repayment from the EGPC and the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS). Both EGPC and EGAS face their own collection problems with the electricity sector and the general public.

With receivables building up in Egypt, home to nearly 60% of Dana Gas’ production, and the company being limited by agreements that force it to sell into the domestic market, the company decided to curtail its investments in its gas fields in the country. This has led to a stagnation of production in Egypt as Dana Gas conserves cash. Fortunately for Dana Gas, its production in Kurdistan through the Pearl Petroleum Co., of which it owns 40%, has continued to grow, although there is a problem collecting receivables there as well, albeit less severe than in Egypt. 

Investors are notably skeptical about Dana Gas’ ability to refinance its Sukuk. The Middle East head at frontier market debt-focused investment bank Exotix, Ahmad Alanani, told Bloomberg that Dana Gas is “running out of time. The liquidity situation is very, very poor.”  Both Alanani and other distressed debt investors we spoke to believe that the eventual outcome will be an amendment to the Sukuk to extend its maturity, though there is no consensus on how long it would need to be extended.

While investors are expressing doubt about the ability of Dana Gas to repay its Sukuk when it matures, they may allow an extend-and-amend if the company monetizes some of its assets. The most liquid is its 3% stake in the Hungarian oil & gas company MOL, which it acquired in exchange in a sale of a part of the Pearl Petroleum.  Also on the table as a way to raise cash is an IPO of Dana Gas’ Egyptian subsidiary or its 40% stake in Pearl Petroleum.   

Having been on both sides of the fence, I understand the stresses and strains of working in the financial industry and in the media.

Both have long hours, tight deadlines, create stress and disharmony on the home front and encourage insomnia, alcoholism (in the west), heart palpitations, eating disorders and an explosive temper. That said, one is incredibly highly rewarded in financial terms, the other isn’t – I just thought I’d get that in there for any journalists reading this.

A recent study by the University of Southern California into the health and longevity of Wall Street workers confirmed what we already knew, that you don’t find many old investment bankers. One former London-based investment banker who had stints at ABN Amro and Société Générale among others spoke of the way that the investment banking culture of the City of London ruined him physically and psychologically over his 12 year career.

He said: “Cityboys slave away for 70 to 80 hours a week, living to work, not working to live. It destroyed my relationship with my spouse and my parents saw me develop addictions to alcohol and illegal pharmaceuticals and left me psychologically scarred. However, we don’t walk away as ‘the life’ is too addictive. We keep accumulating more wealth and ‘though we could retire, we stay in the game because of greed and its bedfellow, materialism.”

He has since left to become an author and environmental activist.

For some bankers there isn’t an exit strategy and pressure and hypertension kill them before they reach their biblically-allotted life expectancy of three-score years and 10, or 70. Two of my former bosses at the first asset management firm I worked at in City died at 50 – both ex-marathon runners, both in highly stressful jobs.

But does this impairment in life expectancy also crossover to the Islamic finance industry? To start with the rewards (except for perhaps the very few) are lower than those available in the conventional investment banking industry. However, given the restrictions imposed by Shari’ah, the work is also arguably much less. But that said, the pool of talent – especially at the top of the industry in the ‘C-suite’ – is much less than the conventional industry. It takes a very special kind of person to choose from college to go into Islamic banking, over conventional banking.

This limited pool means that the top men (and women) are very much in demand, increasingly so as the industry consolidates and globalizes. It’s frustrating as a journalist to repeatedly get rebuffed by the CEOs and chairmen of Islamic banks who, their PR people say, are ‘too busy for interviews.’ Often the cynic would believe this is just a tactic used to avoid the press, but in some cases these guys and girls are literally too busy jumping from ‘plane to hotel to conference center.

Looking down the list of the speakers at a conference on Islamic finance here in London today it reads as a list of the great and good of the Islamic finance industry. With familiar faces from Malaysia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and new faces from Turkey, Egypt and Africa the fare was a lot of the old school tried and tested material, with a few kernels of new insight. However, the top tier aren’t letting grass grow beneath their feet as they’re off on a jet ‘plane as soon as the conference hall gets cleared to Luxembourg, Paris, Istanbul, Dubai, to more conferences and board meetings.

One red-rimmed eyed Malaysian frequent flyer told this newspaper: “I’m just so tired. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I feel like I’m living in a departure lounge. I do all these presentations and it’s become like rote. Even when I’m at home with the wife and kids, I’m not relaxed as I’m constantly checking my BlackBerry or tinkering with presentations on my iPad.”

It’s not just this CEO who is feeling the strain. As the global economy contracts, Islamic finance also suffers, and it’s becoming very dog-eats-dog with chairmen and CEOs at the beck and call of short-term, politically powerful, impatient shareholders mystified why their investments are no longer offering the double digit returns they had enjoyed in the past. As a result the C-suite is putting in even more hours at the office and trying every trick in the book to win that next mandate. However, there is always the argument that today’s bankers are not drafted, and they choose their career path and are richly rewarded for it.

Although, to date, none of our top executives has died of stress-related illness whilst on the job, the Islamic finance industry can’t stay immune forever. This means we as a collective group need to look out for the health and welfare of our peers and if we’re worried about someone – say something. And some of the leaders of the industry should drop the machismo and take a leaf out of AntónioHortaOsório of Lloyds Bank’s book, and step away when things get too much. After all money isn’t everything.