The Acting Director General, Securities and Exchange Commission, Ms. Mary Uduk, in this interview spoke about development in the capital market in 2019. She also expressed optimism that the Finance Act 2020 will stimulate activities in the capital market, even as she urged the power distribution and generation companies to take advantage of the market to raise long term financing to enable them address their funding needs.
You don’t have to wait for government or National Assembly to repeal some bills or come up with new ones, it will take years, but now with the Finance Bill which as we learnt is going to be annual, we will start again to work towards next year. The focus is on driving investments and for us to do that we must bring capital into key areas, the issue of tax incentives is very critical. In terms of infrastructure funds, government can’t fund infrastructure so private sector would do that.
At the time the shareholders invested their money there was no BVN number, so we have now directed the brokers to update their information. This information will be sent to the registrars and CSCS and the issues will be addressed. We believe that if that is concluded, the issue of unclaimed dividends will be addressed. So, most of the issues we are having are with legacy issues and the only way we can solve it is if we update our own records and the stock broking firms update their records.
A number of other sectors are recapitalising and so we are asking capital market operators to think about it because sooner than later it would have to happen.For investor protection, we ensure that no one takes your money away in an illegal manner and the protection is not that somebody will compensate you.
The problem of Ponzi schemes continued last year and unfortunately Nigerians still invest in these scams. Last year we identified and closed a lot of them, we thank the police, the EFCC and all the authorities that cooperated with us in closing these schemes. They still remain attractive and that is why we are intensifying efforts to educate the public. They are just there to defraud Nigerians and that is why we keep enlightening the public.
Investors are also protected through the National Investors Protection Fund Risk Based supervision that enables the SEC to supervise the operators to ensure that they do not do what they are not supposed to do. The Complaints Management Framework enables investors to know where to complain to and how long it takes for such complaints to be resolved. For those of the investors that are averse to risk, they should get their financial advisers to advise them properly on where to invest.