Capital Market to Suffer

The long drawn sword between the National Assembly and the Director General (DG), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Aruma Oteh is capable to have an adverse effect on the nation’s capital market if not resolved timely.

This observation cum caution was sounded by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Oscar Onyema in Lagos during a world press conference to review the performance of the Nigerian stock market in 2012 and outlook for 2013.

According to him, “we believe the

capital market as a whole will be affected if SEC cannot fund its operations because we have rules we will be submitting to them for approval, we have a lot of other things we are working on, we are working on the broker-dealer community”.

Onyema noted that going after an individual was quite different from going after the entire organisation, adding that SEC was a statutorily established institution which carries out its responsibility according to the law establishing it.  Therefore, any attempt to weaken the apex regulator’s ability to discharge its duties by starving it of necessary funding would affect the nation’s capital market as a whole.

According to him, “all the players in the market place including the registrars, NSE have to go back to the statutory regulator; so it is important that the issues are quickly resolved so that SEC would be a strong regulator to be able to do its job according to the act that has set it up.

It would be recalled that the relationship between SEC DG and the National Assembly turned sour last year when she openly accused Herman Hembe, who was chairman of the Ad-Hoc committee that was probing the near collapse of the Capital Market, of bribe.

Only recently, her team was walked out of a meeting by the Senate Committee on Capital Market SWF.  The protracted battle took a dangerous turn when the Senate declined to include the SEC budget in the 2013 Appropriation bill.  Their action was in keeping with earlier threat that Oteh would no more be accorded recognition as SEC DG, insisting she be sacked. 

According to a source at the Committee, the allocation to SEC was merely withdrawn and kept out of the books, pending compliance with demands for her sack, and would be promptly facilitated for a new leadership at the commission. “The money for SEC was budgeted for, but kept out pending when a new director general is engaged”, the source disclosed.