January 3, 2003	Friday	Shawwal 29, 1423

LAHORE, Jan 2: Muslim Commercial Bank (MCB) intends to set up a subsidiary bank with a capital of $15 million in Canada, say senior bank executives.

Initially the bank plans to open one branch in Toronto. “We’ll expand the branch network to three later on,” the bank executives told Dawn here on Thursday.

“Although the MCB management has already initiated the process required for setting up the bank in Canada, it is confronting all those problems that any bank or institution from a Muslim country has to face since the fateful events of 9/11,” an official said.

However, he said, “all obstacles would be overcome and we hope that the bank would become operational this year”.

With its three branches in Sri Lanka and one in Bahrain, the bank has no exposure in North America or Europe or elsewhere in the world. It has recently sold its three branches in Bangladesh after its government raised the capital requirement for the banks operating in that country.

Besides Canada, MCB is also seriously studying the possibility of either opening up its branch or establishing a new bank in the neighbouring Afghanistan after March.

“We need to focus on Afghanistan because a big amount of money is going to be invested in the reconstruction of that war-ravaged country. The process of reconstruction will start by April. Initially, the whole process may be painfully slow, but Afghanistan is destined to become a prosperous nation in the next one decade or so. We cannot afford to miss this opportunity. We got to be there before others,” the MCB executive said.