Yemisi Izuora
The Director-General, Securities and Exchange Commission, Mounir Gwarzo has emphasised the need for strict compliance with Corporate Governance codes by companies operating in the country.
The Commission has also expressed its readiness to collaborate with relevant bodies to ensure good Corporate Governance in the nation’s Capital Market.
Gwarzo who made the remarks when executives of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Nigeria (ICSAN) paid him a courtesy visit said that as an institute that is vital in the promotion of corporate governance in Nigeria, ICSAN has a major role to play in safeguarding the rights of shareholders.
He said, “We have very onerous responsibilities to enforce the Corporate Governance and in doing this, collaboration is very important.
When you look at the market, our scope is wide, apart from the quoted companies you are also looking at about 800 or 1000 operators. When we finish with the quoted companies we also want to extend the code and the compliance to all registered operators.
“What we started some few years ago was to say that any operator that is to be registered in the market must have a compliance officer however excellent the sponsored individual has done, once your compliance officer has not met our minimum requirement that fund will not be registered and the compliance officer has a lot of responsibilities apart from the normal requirements in terms of returns to other regulatory institutions it is also to ensure that the right Corporate Governance practice is being implemented.
He said a new corporate governance code for the capital market would soon be launched by the commission.
“We don’t want to launch this code and there would be difficulties and so we need to put deliverables in place. One of the things that we have done is training and so far over 70 per cent of quoted companies have attended that training.”