Enter Ibrahim Mardam-Bey, now chief executive of Siraj Capital but then an adviser to Lebanon's BSEC, an investment bank specializing in sharia-compliant structures.
The result has been that SCF utilizes all sorts of Shariah-compliant transactional structures to convert the exact same income stream (including its variability by pegging it to an index such as the LIBOR) from interest to something else, such as lease payments.