Friday, 5 Nov 2010

The Nigerian Stock Exchange has said that quoted companies, which fail to submit their financial statements will be delisted at the end of this month.

This was part of NSE‘s continued attempt to ensure that listed companies adhere strictly to all the rules regarding their operations, and promote increase of investor confidence in the market.

The Interim Administrator of the NSE, Mr. Emmanuel Ikazaboh, disclosed this in an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday.

According to him, ”We suspended trading in the shares of 48 companies because they did not submit their financial statements and any company that fails to do this by the end of this month will be delisted from the Exchange.”

He noted that the decision was also part of measures the stock exchange had been taking to restore credibility to the market.

The meltdown in the Nigerian capital market began towards the end of March 2008, with a continuous downward trend in the indices of corporate performance of the NSE.

The market capitalisation of the listed equities on the NSE had opened on January 1, 2008 at N10.18tn. It later appreciated to an all time high of N12.395tn in March that year.

It, however, suffered its highest fall in the 48-year history of the NSE, depreciating by N5.438tn or 44 per cent to N6.957tn by the end of 2008. By December 2009, the losses had grown to N7.434tn or 60 per cent to close at N4.961tn.

The NSE‘s All-Share Index also suffered a similar fate, dropping by 67 per cent from 63,016.60 in January 2008, to 20,722.64.

Ikazaboh had, on Tuesday, said, ”It is gratifying to note that investor-confidence is fully back in our market, because of the fact that the NSE has in one week, listed three important companies.”

According to him, it is important for more firms to bring their issues into the market, adding that through that, investors‘ funds, which were trapped during private placement offers, will be released into the market.

He added that stakeholders must put things in place to ensure that the market grew to its full capacity.

He said, ”Our market is steadily growing fast and the NSE is using this medium to call on other companies who are in this category and are yet to list their shares, to do so urgently. We urge all stakeholders in our market to continue to endeavour to do what is right to bring back the lost glory of our market.

”We want to ensure that only fundamentally sound companies will be listed on our Exchange. And we want to ensure that global standards are kept in running our Exchange.”

Expert had said, “It also appears that the Federal Government is now determined more than ever before, to increase the competitiveness on the Nigerian economy by transferring the ownership of power generation in the country to private sector in order to boost electricity generation to meet domestic needs.”

Source: Punch