SEC begins phasing out of printing Annual Reports before March 2018

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has said that it would begin the phasing out of printing annual reports of companies from March 2018, saying that more than N1 billion will be saved annually by listed companies as a result of the planned stoppage of the printing of Annual Reports and Accounts.
The Director General of SEC, Mounir Gwarzo, who disclosed this at the post third quarter Capital Market Committee (CMC) press briefing in Lagos on Wednesday informed that besides institutional investors, 98 per cent of other shareholders do not get their Annual Reports before the Annual General Meeting, AGM, of their companies.
He, however, said that electronic version and hard copy of the Reports would be issued concurrently at the initial stage of phasing out the hard copy version of Annual Reports before the first quarter CMC meeting in March, 2018 when the progress made would be assessed.
Gwarzo said that in order to carry every minority shareholder along, company secretaries still have the responsibility of depositing the Annual Report and Accounts with shareholder groups to help their members who might have limitation accessing them online do so through their various groups.
He stated: “Presently, some companies have more than one million shareholders and you can imagine the cost of printing annual reports for them. We think it is better for the investors because he is going to have access to the electronic copy and also on the part of the company. How should we be doing something for the past 50 years and it is not adding value to the investors and the companies. Even for the benefit of change, let’s change and see how it is going to help us.”
Gwarzo stated that in line with the Commission’s resolve to ensure seamless operation of capital market, the Commission has come up with e-capital market registration system form, which would integrate direct cash settlement and e-dividend mandate form into one.
Going forward, he said that Know Your Customer, KYC, initiative in the capital market would include BVN, even as he said that the Commission is committed to using BVN as ultimate means of identification in the market.
He restated that 2.1 million investors have mandated their accounts through e-dividend as at July 31, 2017, while 432,000 out of the number have unique BVN numbers.
“A total of 2.1 million investors that have mandated their accounts have not changed. What has changed is that we have made progress in terms of getting the unique BVN numbers, which is very central. The 2.1 million investors are those that have mandated their accounts; not necessarily those that have BVN.
“What we have been doing from the last CMC till today is working so hard to extract those unique ones, which is ultimately what we are going to work with, but we have to start from asking people to mandate their accounts and then go to the next stage of extracting the vital data. That is the progress we have made,” he said.