By Modupe Gbadeyanka
The Ibadan Zone Shareholders Association is organising a one-day seminar on the menace of unclaimed dividends in the Nigerian capital market, Business Post reports.
The workshop, according to details of the programme, will take place on Tuesday, April 30, 2019, at Premier Hotel, Mokola Hill, Ibadan, Oyo State.
The organisers said the theme of the seminar is ‘Reducing the Incidence of Unclaimed Dividends Through e-Dividend Registration.’
The sole aim of the seminar is to create awareness and reduce the rate of unclaimed dividends, particularly for grassroots shareholders within the southwest zone.
Also at the event, there would be the investiture of patrons of the association, which represents the interests of shareholders in Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti and Kwara States.
The programme, which starts by 10.30am, will have experts in the capital market addressing participants. Some of the speakers include Ms Mary Uduk, the Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); Mr Adewale Raji, the Group Managing Director of Odu’a Investment Company Ltd; amongst others.
SEC, the apex regulator in the nation’s capital market, has made several efforts to reduce the value of unclaimed dividends in the system.
At the moment, shareholders are yet to claimed dividends worth over N80 billion and this is having a negative impact on the economy.
At an event last year, Ms Uduk had said, “Unclaimed dividend is an undesirable feature of the Nigerian capital market which denies investors/shareholders the gains of participating in the capital market.
“It denies the economy access to the huge amount of money which should have accrued to shareholders and would have gone into circulation to oil the wheel of the economy.
“It is a consequence of the bottlenecks which are inherent in the erstwhile paper dividend warrant regime such as postal system inefficiency, change in investors’ addresses, poor fidelity and human fallibility in dividend payment processes, amongst others.”
