“Securities and Exchnage Commission’s Income Cannot Cover 50% of Its Cost” – Gwarzo

The Securities and Exchnage Commission, SEC, has stated that its income from the market cannot cover 50 per cent of its cost.

Director-General, Munir Gwarzo, who addressed members of the House of Representatives Committee on Capital Market on Tuesday, March 1,in Abuja,

Gwarzo also expressed concerns that the Treasury Single Account (TSA) has greatly reduced the capital market regulator’s ability to be flexible.

“What we generate from the market cannot cover more than 50 per cent of our cost, so, more often we have to dip into that fund (funds saved by past SEC administrations) but now with the TSA and other things, that flexibility is being cut off because some of the interest income that we derive from those investment, we don’t enjoy them any longer,” he lamented.

Gwarzo told the legislators SEC is now “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.”

The SEC chief also disclosed that for “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 earnings are now 30-40 per cent less than we had in the past.”

SEC also said it aims to attract more retail investors into the capital market to deepen and develop the market.

Gwarzo said: “As a country we have only less than two per cent participation of retail investors in our market. Malaysia has nine per cent, South Africa 19 per cent, US 43 per cent, and UK-13 per cent. So our market is less being participated by the retail investors. Due to the dominance of foreign investors, anytime they move out of the market, the market goes down. Our effort is to see that in the next five to 10 years we raise the level of involvement of the retail investor to at least five per cent.”