Cirrus Financing

Was reading my AOPA magazine last PM. Nice article discussing the recent capital infusion Cirrus Design received. Of particular interest was the LOC the company got from The Islamic Bank of Bahrain. What’s up? Can anyone shed some light on this? Is The Islamic Bank relationship a good thing, bad thing, or non-event in light of recent worldwide developments?

Was reading my AOPA magazine last PM. Nice article discussing the recent capital infusion Cirrus Design received. Of particular interest was the LOC the company got from The Islamic Bank of Bahrain. What’s up? Can anyone shed some light on this? Is The Islamic Bank relationship a good thing, bad thing, or non-event in light of recent worldwide developments?

My understanding is that the Islamic Bank of Bahrain, through its U.S. arm “Crescent Capital” or something of the sort, has a long established record as a passive, hands-off investor. Past performance is no guarantee of future policy, etc etc, but that is their record as I understand it.

Was reading my AOPA magazine last PM. Nice article discussing the recent capital infusion Cirrus Design received. Of particular interest was the LOC the company got from The Islamic Bank of Bahrain. What’s up? Can anyone shed some light on this? Is The Islamic Bank relationship a good thing, bad thing, or non-event in light of recent worldwide developments?

For what it’s worth, I spent quite a bit of time in Bahrain some time ago. I was stationed in Riyadh and would escape from time to time to Bahrain for a little R & R. I convinced my boss that that our flight crews needed to meet their minimums in “night-island landings”. I’m not sure he bought that, but he let us go anyway.

Bahrain is Arab and Islamic but in a very liberal way. It serves a necessary purpose in the Arab world as a sort of combination of Switzerland and New Orleans. Lots of banks, pearl merchants and lovely bars. I found the people of Bahrain to be consistently friendly, enlightened, relatively free-thinking and great fans of the United States. They quite happily allow our Navy to be based there.

While I have no idea as to the investment policies of the bank, I would have no more concern about its chartering country than I would about France. Actually, much less concern.

My understanding is that the Islamic Bank of Bahrain, through its U.S. arm “Crescent Capital” or something of the sort, has a long established record as a passive, hands-off investor.

Other Crescent Capital transactions include: Caribou Coffee Company, Inc., the second leading non-franchised coffeehouse in the United States; Lee Industries, the number-one manufacturer of commercial paving equipment; DVT Corporation, a provider of technology-based machine vision systems; WaterMark, the leading water paddle sports manufacturer; Yakima, a leading manufacturer of sports-related racks and rack accessories for vehicles; and MediFAX-EDI, a leading provider of health care information services.

The WaterMark and Yakima Rack products are both high quality and extremely succesful. Yakima (where the rack was born) is my home town and having purchased several of their rack systems over the years I had no idea that they were partially owned by Bahrain. Nor would the events two weeks ago make me pause if I was in the market for another one.

My $.02