Shortly after the second Capital Market Committee Meeting this year, Lamido Yuguda, Director General, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) spoke to journalists including Iheanyi Nwachukwu. Excerpts.
What has the SEC been doing about unclaimed dividend?
The Commission has done a lot about the unclaimed dividend, by working with the registrars to be sure that dividends are now distributed by electronically through the bank accounts of investors rather than through dividend warrants that used to be the case. The problem is that people need to mandate their accounts, that is you need to provide your accounts details to the registrars so that the registrars can credit your account directly with these dividends. We observed that there are issues with that process, right now unfortunately you will still need to go to each and every registrar that you deal with to give the same information. Right now what we are doing is to try to get one point of supplying that information because you give it to one registrar you do not need to provide that information across all the other registrars and these registrars of course will automatically get your details.
The second thing we have done is enlightenment, people need to be enlightened, a lot of changes has happened in the market and the fact that many people have not mandated their accounts means that many people are un aware of this e-dividend management mandate system.
Also companies have changed their names, companies…
