By Dipo Olowookere
The trio of Deap Capital Management & Trust Plc, Greif Nigeria Plc and Thomas Wyatt Nigeria Plc, all listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), have been fined a cummulative sum of N5 million.
In a regulatory document, Deap Capital suffered the heaviest fine from the three companies; N3.8 million, from the total amount they were all fined.
The reason for this heavy fine on Deap Capital was because of its refusal to submit the company’s audited financial statements for the 2019 fiscal year as at when due.
The company’s runs a financial year that ends September and instead of filing the results to the NSE within 90 days, December, the firm submitted the statements on February 5, 2020.
On its part, Thomas Wyatt Nigeria was slammed with N700,000 for its failure to file the third quarter results for the period ended September 30, 2019 within the required time.
According to the stock exchange management, this firm submitted its Q3 earnings on February 6, 2020 and for this unnecessary delay, it received the above sanction.
In the same document, it was revealed that Greif Nigeria was fined N500,000 by the exchange over its delay in filing the full year audited results for the year ended October 31, 2019. The organisation submitted the earnings on February 3, 2020.
The NSE explained that it applies sanctions in accordance with the Rules for Filing of Accounts and Treatment of Default Filing, Rulebook of The Exchange (Issuers’ Rules).
This move was put in place to make companies listed on the exchange file their financial results on time and maintain high standards so as to keep the integrity of the stock market high.
In recent times, there had been calls for NSE to begin to make directors of the companies to pay these fines and not passed to the shareholders, who were not behind the reason for the sanctions. It has been argued that these directors put the companies in trouble because they know the fines would not be paid from their pockets, but from the firms’ purses.
