The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has appointed audit firm, Akintola Williams Deloitte, to lead the team of experts to undertake the audit of Oando.
Other experts appointed by SEC are registrar, United Securities Limited; the law firm, SPA Ajibade & Co; Tjadap Consulting and Associates; and Nasiru Muhammad & Co.
This is just as the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has announced suspension of trading in the company’s shares on the Johannesburg bourse.
SEC had On Wednesday directed the NSE to place Oando’s shares on full suspension for two days and place them on a technical suspension with effect from Friday, following its probe into two petitions received from two shareholders of the company – Alhaji Dahiru Barau Mangal and Ansbury Inc.
The suspension, according to SEC, was to enable it to conduct a forensic audit into the affairs of Oando, which has dual listing on the NSE and JSE.
“To ensure the independence and transparency of the exercise, the forensic audit will be conducted by a consortium of experts made up of auditors, lawyers, stockbrokers and registrars,” SEC said in a statement.
Providing more information on its probe of Oando, a senior executive of SEC, who preferred not to be named, said Thursday that the commission has appointed Deloitte to lead the team of experts to handle the forensic audit of the energy firm.
He informed THISDAY in a phone interview that Deloitte and the other firms that make up the forensic team were being brought in to validate the probe already done by SEC for the past three months, adding that it is only after the audit by external experts that the commission would take a final decision on Oando.
“We have been carrying out our investigation into Oando for three months and a lot of work has been done by SEC in this regard.
But even as the forensic audit was being awaited, the Johannesburg bourse said Thursday that it had suspended trading in Oando shares, pending clarification from the NSE on the matter.
According to Johannesburg-based Business Day newspaper, a statement was issued via the JSE’s Sens service Thursday morning saying Oando’s listing had been suspended “pending clarification following the review of subsequent correspondence received on October 18 from the Nigerian Stock Exchange and SEC”.
Since the suspension on the NSE, Oando has said it will provide a full statement of the company’s position as soon as possible.
The shares of Oando closed at N5.99 on Tuesday on the NSE. The stock had hit a year high of N9.57 before negative reactions by investors to the petitions led to a drop in the share price to the current level.
Mangal and Ansbury had petitioned SEC early this year, claiming majority ownership in Oando. They had also warned that the company was being mismanaged by the management led by Mr. Wale Tinubu.
They had pushed for the removal of Tinubu and his deputy so as to save it from going under.
One of the petitioners, Ansbury, had in its petition urged SEC to stop Oando from holding its Annual General Meeting (AGM), which still went ahead on September 11, 2017.
Ansbury had alleged serious financial abuse and accused the management of Oando of gross abuse of corporate governance tenets in its running of the company.
The petition titled, “Serious Concern to Corporate Governance Existence, Gross Abuse of Corporate Governance and Financial Management in Oando Plc – Request for Urgent Regulatory Intervention,” cited page eight of the company’s annual report of 2016, stating that “strong uncertainty regarding the going concern status of the group had already arisen in 2015 and strengthened in 2016 as clearly pointed out by the auditors in their report”.
However, SEC allowed the AGM to hold, saying that after the conclusion of its investigations, decisions taken at the AGM could be reversed.
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