LIBOR (London Interbank Overnight Rate) is a rather recent concept, even if English banks had been in banking business for many decades before the invention of LIBOR as the world's favorite benchmark for cost of money. LIBOR emerged in the 1980s to serve as a benchmark to account for interest rate risk when a surge in the use of futures contracts began to trouble lending decisions. Futures have been offered since 1972, and by the 1980s had become a major risk-hedging instrument in the developed countries. Due to the absence of a reliable benchmark back then, a solution was sought from the Bank of England. The banking industry trade group, the British Bankers' Association, launched LIBOR with the dollar, the yen and the pound sterling to have LIBOR serve as the benchmark.

This paper aims to assess the ethical disclosure of Islamic banks (IBs) under different accounting regimes and to ascertain whether the adoption of an Islamic accounting standards (Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions [AAOIFI]) promotes the practice of ethical disclosure. An ethical identity disclosure index was developed to serve as a benchmark to assess the level of the communicated ethical identity disclosure (CEID) of 47 IBs over 18 countries using annual reports. The findings suggest that, overall, there is poor ethical disclosure practices and even banks that had some initiatives towards disclosures had no proper reference to benchmark for effective implementation of ethical reporting standards and had no plans for ethical and socially responsible schemes. There was no evidence to suggest that IBs that adapted the religious-based accounting regime (AAOIFI) had better levels of ethical disclosure. Though poor practices of CEID are expected to increase reputational risks and the likelihood of loss of religious conscious customers and investors' confidence and therefore market share and performance in the long-term, the current practice does not concur with this expectation. Furthermore, since there is no evidence to support the notion that the adoption of AAOIFI standards would support greater initiatives towards level of ethical identity disclosures, a mandatory requirement for effective disclosure through enforcement of AAOIFI's financial reporting standards, specifically with regard to ethics and social and environmental commitment is needed.

The importance of ethics in the corporate world has received much attention in the 21st century, after a series of major financial fiascos. In fact, most of the performance of companies in the market have a new dimension of qualitative analysis besides the usual financial analysis that generate quantitative information to ascertain their performance (Guthrie and Farneti, 2008). Dhaliwal et al. (2011) point out that greater disclosure and transparency alighned with non-financial disclosures (social, ethical and environmental) play a complimentary role to financial transparency, leading to lower analyst forecaset errors. Therefore, a more objective assessment of expected financial performance is achieved.