Twenty thousand pounds buys ten thousand bars of traditional Aleppo laurel soap across two shipments. We import them, make them legally compliant for the UK market, and sell them wholesale to mosques and community organisations, who resell them and keep the margin for their own funds.
The structure is a mudaraba. You provide the capital, we do the work, and we split the realised profit 70/30 in your favour. Losses fall on the capital unless they come from our negligence. No interest, no debt, no lien on anything.
UK sanctions on Syrian trade came off in April 2025, the Caesar Act was repealed in December 2025, and the US rescinded Syria's terrorism designation in August 2026. The EU imported €94m of Syrian food last year, up 60%. UK imports from Syria are effectively zero. The route exists on paper and nobody has built it.
Soap is a cosmetic rather than a food, so there is no phytosanitary certificate, no food safety regime and no shelf life to race. UK duty on Syrian-origin soap is 0%. Olive oil, spices and nuts all carry testing or perishability problems that would sink a first shipment. Soap does not.
Mosques and community organisations, at £3.00 wholesale against a typical £8.00 retail. A case of 144 bars is £720 of unrestricted income for them, from a product their congregation wants and a story that sells itself in a Friday announcement. We already have these relationships, so there is no cold start.
Zaytoun CIC has run this model with Palestinian olive oil since 2004 and now holds over £1m in net assets. Nobody has run it for Syria.
A 200g bar at 12 to 20% laurel lands at £1.32 after freight, insurance, clearance and delivery. Labelling, repack, breakage and warehousing take cost of goods to £1.67. With compliance and overhead amortised over ten thousand bars, the fully loaded cost is £2.37 against a £3.00 wholesale price.
Total deployed is £22,480 across two orders, with the second part-funded from first-cycle receipts. Peak cash requirement is about £17,200. A cycle runs nine to twelve months.
| Scenario | Ex-works price | Investor share of profit | Return on £20,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Downside | £1.45 | £714 | 3.6% |
| Base | £0.95 | £4,214 | 21.1% |
| Upside | £0.75 | £6,944 | 34.7% |
For reference, a one-year fixed deposit at QIB UK pays 4.45% with FSCS protection. This has no protection, no liquidity and real counterparty risk, so the base case has to clear that benchmark by a wide margin to be worth doing.
The ex-works price of £0.95 is inferred from German retail pricing. It has not been quoted. It is the single assumption that moves the return most, and it is the weakest number in this document. Nothing has been quoted yet. Every figure above is modelled.
A traditional Aleppo workshop may not be able to produce the quantitative formulation and certificate of analysis the UK safety assessment requires. Syrian-family producers operating from Gaziantep and Hatay already hold EU-format paperwork, which costs some of the origin story but keeps the shipment legal. UK banks may refuse Syria payments regardless of the law, in which case we route through a UAE or Turkish intermediary. Total loss of capital is possible.
By the end of one cycle we will have a screened Syrian supplier, a payment rail documented end to end, a UK customs and compliance playbook, a live wholesale channel, and real landed costs instead of modelled ones. That is the foundation for the business this is pointed at, which is Syrian olive oil financed at the harvest through salam contracts, at a scale soap will never reach. Nobody funds that on a spreadsheet. They fund it on a shipment that already happened.
None of the following has been started. All of it comes before any money is raised or spent.
Subject to the above, £20,000, minimum participation £2,500, one trading cycle of roughly twelve months, 70/30 on realised profit with a full accounting at the end.
Capital is not called until three supplier quotes are in hand and the bank has confirmed it will process the payment. If either fails, nothing is deployed and nothing is spent.