The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced that considerable progress has been made in the implementation of its consolidation of multiple shareholder accounts and the electronic Dividend Mandate Management System (e-DMMS) so far as about 3.4bn shares have been consolidated.
Both measures were introduced as part of checking the growth and possibly eliminating the unclaimed dividends menace in the nation’s capital market.
The announcement was made by Acting Director General of SEC, Ms. Mary Uduk, while addressing the press at the end of the Second Quarter Capital Market Committee meeting (CMC) in Lagos, weekend.
Uduk told reporters that a total of 2.7m share accounts have so far been captured under the e-DMMS.
She expressed satisfaction with the regularization of multiple shareholders accounts since it was launched last year, describing investor response as very impressive.
According to her, with the help of the Multiple Subscription Committee, 3.4bn shares have so far been effectively consolidated.
The committee “informed the meeting that the Committee of Heads of Banking Operations had agreed to collaborate with the commission to display banners in (their) banking halls all over the country, sensitizing the public on the regularization of multiple subscriptions of shares,” she said.
Similarly, stockbrokers and registrars are requested “to make available to the Committee on Multiple Subscription Account, on a periodic basis, the number of regularized accounts.”
Company Secretaries of listed companies, she continued, “have also agreed to display similar information on their websites and offices.”
The meeting resolved that the SEC should engage relevant stakeholders on the e-Dividend and Multiple Subscription Accounts to ensure that “complete investor data are transferred among operators such as brokers, registrars and the Central Securities Clearing System (CSCS).
SEC is also to help discourage unclaimed dividends from building up from securities of newly-listed companies, and modalities be developed for validating shareholders’ registers, such that “registrars are furnished with incomplete information such as missing account numbers.”
