Be mindful of unregistered investment schemes, SEC tells investors

Lamido Yuguda, director-general of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has advised Nigerians to be mindful of unregistered investment schemes.

He said this at the post-capital market committee (CMC) virtual press briefing on Thursday.

Yuguda said any investment scheme not registered with the commission was not a bonafide capital market operator.

He asked investors to always verify with SEC to know the licensed operators before investing.

“SEC can register a capital market operator, and that operator in the cause of his business begins to show signs of distress, the SEC has an adequate mechanism to deal with this through our monitoring and enforcement arm,” he said.

Yuguda expressed concern over the high level of unclaimed dividends.

He said, although dividends were currently distributed electronically, there were so many unclaimed ones in the market.

He attributed the unclaimed dividends to multiple subscriptions whereby some investors use various means to subscribe for more than the permitted number of shares during public offers.

He added that the number of unclaimed dividends would reduce drastically if everyone mandated their accounts.

According to him, SEC has invested a lot of resources and embarked on a number of investor education to ensure that people mandate their accounts.

“This process is still open, you can do that with the registrar, from commercial banks,” he said.

“We also have on our website, a tool which helps you to determine any unclaimed dividend that you may have and I will encourage everyone to take advantage of these tools.”

Yuguda said dividends that had not been claimed over a certain period were being transferred into a trust fund.

According to him, if anyone comes forward at any given time to claim their unclaimed dividend, the fund will be able to repay those dividends without any problems.

The CMC is a platform for capital market stakeholders to discuss issues pertaining to the development and orderly conduct of market activities.