By Adedapo Adesanya
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has pledged to work with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to ensure a reduction in virtual trading manipulations.
According to a statement, the Director-General of SEC, Mr Emomotimi Agama, said this in Abuja when a team from the EFCC led by its Chairman, Mr Ola Olukoyede, visited him on a collaborative pursuit to achieve national objectives of making sure that the practice was not allowed to thrive in the country.
“We believe this will be the beginning of greater things to come. Our desire is for us to strengthen the existing Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) we have and ensure it is more effective in dealing with current issues.
“Only last week, we met the fintech community and we made it clear to them that the SEC will not condone illegal trading on any platform, especially Peer-to-Peer (P2P).
“It is a dangerous trend and we cannot allow it to continue, this collaboration is very necessary for us to get out of this forex crisis,” the SEC DG said.
He said the commission was planning an economic regulatory hub where requests would be uploaded and other regulators would respond immediately thereby reducing incidences of delay.
”We will do all we need to do to ensure our markets are free from manipulations. We will enforce where necessary to send a strong message that it is no longer business as usual.
“We are examining our virtual regulations to cover all areas and are open to reviews to have a better document and a well-regulated market.
”We are striving to close all the gaps and this cooperation will enable us to block every gap in our bid to regulate the virtual space and give comfort to Nigerians,” he added.
On his part, the EFCC executive chairman said that forex malpractices and crises were injurious to any economy and noted that the role virtual traders played in destroying the country’s economy through their activities needed to be checked.
“We are enforcers and not regulators and that is why we need the SEC to ensure people play by the rules.
”We have done a lot in discouraging people from forex malpractices. We need to ensure that people play by the rules and ensure compliance in a bid to attract Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) to our economy.
“If people have trust in us and know people play by the rules, it will attract them and the EFCC is working to ensure people play by the rules,” the EFCC chief stated.
Mr Olukoyede said that the fight against corruption was a collaborative effort, commending SEC’s guidelines on virtual assets and pledged the willingness of the EFCC to ensure compliance by stakeholders.
