An advice has gone out to the Federal Government to woe multinational firms doing business in Nigeria to list on the floor of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE).
Director –General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Munir Gwarzo made this statement in a meeting with honourable members of the House of Representatives Committee on Capital Market.
For Gwarzo, Nigerians would benefit immensely if these multinational companies are allowed to invest on the floor of the NSE.
According to the D-G: “There is a need for the government to encourage them (companies) there are so many options on how to get there. Some of us are of the opinion that you can use certain incentives, for instance I personally think you can use certain incentives to say that if government is to award a contract, unless a company is listed, other than that that company will not enjoy that contract.”
“If Julius Berger and Setraco are bidding for construction work, Julius Berger should have an advantage because whatever income Julius Berger makes, Nigerian shareholders will also benefit. On the very low level, you can say if government is doing an evaluation of the companies that they will be giving contract, the company that is listed will get a higher percentage, 5-20%. SEC is very keen for companies to be listed, the more listed companies, the deeper the market.”
Gwarzo further hinted that SEC is at present running a very tight budget, given that the market has gone down and given that there are aspirations to move the market up we have to set aside some amount of money.”
He said “The budget of 2015, we had projection of N6.9 billion as our income but we were only able to make N4.9 billion because of the state of the market. We no longer take our staff on overseas and local training and our earning are now 30-40% less than we had in the past.”
The Director-General announced that the commission was working on bringing in more retail investors into the Nigerian capital market for the purpose of market expansion in the Nigerian economy.