March 25, 2006 Abu Dhabi UAE
Abu Dhabi UAE, Saturday March 25, 2006 – Abu Dhabi Oil Corporation Limited has received the award for “Islamic Finance Deal of the Year 2005” for Europe, Middle East and North Africa (EMEA) from Euromoney Group’s authoritative Project Finance magazine at a ceremony in London, UK.
During the ceremony, the award was presented by Sean Keating, Managing Editor of Project Finance Magazine, to Fahad Al Raqbani, a lead member of Dolphin’s Project Finance team that worked on the deal.
The award relates to the substantial and innovative $1 billion Islamic Finance Facility signed in September 2005 between Dolphin and 14 financing institutions: the largest Shari’a compliant deal in the oil and gas sector to date.
The Islamic facility was established to finance a portion of the forthcoming ADOC Project – which involves the production and processing of gas from Qatar for supply to utility customers in the UAE and Oman at the end of 2006. The Islamic facility was organized alongside a conventional facility for $2.45 billion, which enabled Dolphin to take out its original bridge financing of $1.36 billion in 2004.
In its report on what it terms the “EMEA Islamic Deal of the Year 2005” Project Finance said that the deal had “…raised perceptions of the project volume that can be financed in the Sharia compliant market and at what price.” It noted that “…the deal has broadened perceptions of what constitutes the Islamic lending base – a number of the participants have never participated in an Islamic project.”
The magazine commented: “The single most important aspect of the Dolphin facility is economic and risk equivalence between the commercial and Islamic tranches – something not seen before…
“The facility is an Istisna’a transaction… the norm for Islamic greenfield projects: the critical difference on Dolphin is that, for the first time, Sharia scholars have concluded that an advanced rental payment can be effectively linked to a floating rate rather than fixed.”