Christine of the Center for Vigilant Freedom makes that argument in this thoughtful piece:

Perhaps Kerviel, the man who broke the second largest bank in France, is just a lone rogue trader. He has cost Societe Generale over 4 billion euros in what papers are referring to as a completely unmotivated trading scheme in which he made no profits.

Or, maybe this is a tactic to weaken Western financial institutions so they can be purchased much more cheaply (”rescued”) by outside investors – particularly sovereign wealth funds. The Islamist countries – Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia etc. – are the most active investors using sovereign wealth funds these days.

As to the repercussions…according to today’s Washington Post, shareholders from the U.S., Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands filed lawsuits alleging fraud, breach of trust and receipt of stolen goods against Societe Generale.

If all these lawsuits emerge from a trifling 4 billion Euros, imagine the lawsuits that may be filed once the real material risks of Shariah finance are revealed, and the participating institutions are found to have failed to disclose – since the Shariah finance market exposure is closer to a trillion dollars. As Citigroup is finding, the “rule of deep pockets” is ever with us, like death and taxes.

No one yet knows exactly why Jerome Kerviel committed this massive fraud which seems to have not benefited him economically. We may never know, though the Daily Mail paints a picture of a man whose life was falling apart. But Christine makes a good point about the outcome of this sort of activity, Islamic regime owned banks buying up western financial institutions cheap and thus having untoward control on our economic lives. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that Kerviel was bought off by Sharia banking proponents to undercut the French bank he worked for?

The rise in Sharia banking is a boon for Islamist regimes and they have been pushing it as a profitable alternative to regular financial trading. Alyssa Lappen convincingly argues that Sharia finance will destabilize world markets, and indeed it may be the entire point of Sharia based finance. Islamic scholar Mahmoud el-Gamal calls Islamic banking Sharia arbitrage and points out that so called Islamic banking has no basis in Islamic tradition or law. Sharia finance is indeed fool’s gold as Lappen argued in Frontpage recently.

So Islamic bankers have an uphill battle to introduce their Muslim brotherhood created economic vision on the world markets. Kerviel just gave these same people a shortcut into the French market. Like the CVF, I’m a bit suspicious.