Malaysia’s commodity murabaha push still has a way to go

Academics and industry participants in Malaysia are advocating further developments of treasury and money market products, notably via a new exchange initiative. But commodity murabaha structures developed to facilitate liquidity management by banks based on palm oil have attracted criticism from some quarters.
That’s why the Malaysian authorities are pushing ahead with efforts to make the country a world-leading Islamic financial hub. One of its latest initiatives has been to establish interbank money market instruments based on palm oil to satisfy the treasury needs of Islamic financial institutions.