Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Rev. Daniel Ogbarmey Tetteh says the commission will protect investors in the capital market to contribute to the economic development agenda of the country.
He said here on Thursday during a day’s training workshop under the theme: “Enhancing the capacity of financial journalists on the capital market” organized by the United States Agency Financing Ghanaian Agriculture Project (USAID FinGAP) in collaboration with the Institute of Financial and Economic Journalists (IFEJ).
Rev. Ogbarmey Tetteh observed the capital market plays critical a role in the economic development of the country and assured the readiness of the SEC to put in place the necessary regulations to govern the industry.
“The capital market plays a critical role to the economic and growth agenda of the country and we are committed in ensuring that we play the role of both protecting investors and also achieving the goal of market development,” he said.
The SEC boss outlined a number of measures being put in place by the regulator to maintain sanity.
He said, “We are currently in a process of coming up with a number of regulations, guidelines that will help get our market operators to operate their business; for example, we have the corporate governance code, code of business conduct, we are setting new capital requirement, some guidelines on private funds and very soon, we can talk about commodity exchange etc, because all these guidelines must be in place to ensure the private sector can also play their role.
We are also very soon going to implement and operate a regulatory compliance portal to make it easy for our market operators to provide information and through that we are going to be able to create a database that will be easily accessible by many people so that they can get information on companies.”
The Director General for the SEC disclosed the commission would commencing middle of 2018 introduce a quarterly press briefing to put information on happenings in the industry.
“We will introduce a quarterly press briefing and we want to position it like how the Monetary Committee Policy of the Bank of Ghana meets the press every two months and issue a statement, so every quarter we will put out our search or what is going on in the industry; if there are some red flags that we think people must be aware of, we are going to flag them.
It will also be the time for naming and shaming because people need to know the operators who are not doing well or who are engaged in all kinds of questionable practices so it’s going to be an important platform for the media to report on the happenings in the capital market to the wider public,” Rev. Ogbarmey Tetteh stated.
Manager for the Ghana Alternative Market (GAX) at the Ghana Stock Exchange, David Tetteh bemoaned the situation where few companies had listed on the GAX since introduction in 2014 to access funding to improve their businesses.
He urged local companies to take advantage and access funding from the GAX to expand their businesses since there was so much money available for companies who were willing to make their presence on the GAX platform through listing equities or debt securities.
The training program, organizers say was geared towards improving agriculture reporting as well as sensitize journalists to alternative financing sources. Enditem
By Francis Tandoh
