July 28, 2006	Friday	Rajab 1, 1427

KARACHI, July 27: Pakistan International Element Islamic Fund (PIIF) — an open-end fund managed by Arif Habib Investments made foreign portfolio investment, which it claimed to be the first such investment.

The company said in a statement that the investment had been made in three different US-run Islamic mutual funds, one representing large-cap US (blue chip) companies, one representing diverse investments in European companies and one representing investment in the leading Far Eastern (Japanese, Korean and Chinese) companies. The mutual fund were said to be of the Alfanar Fund series managed by the Permal Group. The group has a history of over 32 years in managing funds and has over $22 billion of assets under management.

The company noted that PIIF, was an open-end Shariah-compliant mutual fund launched about three months ago. The fund is the first to have a specific permission from the State Bank to invest outside the country.

While the fund is permitted to invest up to 30pc of its assets abroad, the present investment represents 3pc of the assets.

Earlier in the year, PIIF’s IPO was launched which received good response demonstrating growing interest of investors in the mutual funds industry in Pakistan.

Over 5,000 individual investors contributed about Rs1.4 billion to the IPO of PIIF, the company observed.