By Babajide Komolafe

Profitable investment in shares also requires knowledge of the organisations that regulate investment in shares. These organisations set the rules that must be followed by investors and operators, and also ensure that the rules are observed through monitoring and enforcement. They also punish anybody found to have disobeyed any of these rules.

When it comes to investment in shares, the Securities and Exchange Commission is the number one regulator, and you need to be familiar with its address and operations. Among other things, it is the duty of SEC to protect investors from fraudulent operators.

To achieve this, the Commission informs and educates investors about investment in shares and also request for complaints from them. As an investor, you may not need to know everything about SEC, but you need to know the protection you and your investment can enjoy from it.

For example, on the website of the commission (www.sec.gov.ng), there is a segment on Investor Protection, where you can learn so many basic things about investment in shares. Most importantly, it also has a segment that requests investors to file complaints.

Explaining the step to filing complaints, the commission said, “We can best respond to you if we receive accurate and complete information. Though you are not required to furnish any more information than you wish; critical information for us to completely evaluate your complaint or tip includes:

Your name, mail and email addresses, and telephone numbers.  The name, mail and email addresses, telephone numbers, and website address of any individual or company you mention in the complaint.

“If you have a complaint about a security or a securities salesperson (i.e. a stock broker), specific details of how, why, and when you were defrauded or encountered problems with investments or your broker or adviser.  You can send this information via email to sec@sec.gov.ng; alternatively you can send a letter or call one of our offices.

“We thoroughly review and evaluate your information so that we may refer it to the appropriate SEC office. The Office of Enforcement & Compliance will handle certain general questions about the securities laws and complaints relating to financial professionals or a complainant’s personal financial matters.”

In the two previous editions, we said that some stock brokers and registrars can be dubious or inefficient. But they get away with this most of the time because they know that the average investor is ignorant about the existence of a regulator like SEC, and that he/she can not report any incidence of malpractice to the regulator.

Once a broker or registrar knows that you are informed about SEC and that you can complain to the commission, he/she would think twice before attempting anything illegal. Why? Because the broker knows that if you complain to SEC and it investigates and establishes the occurrence of fraud, that operator would be sanctioned.

But it is pertinent to note that SEC is a government agency, and is also not free from the slow ways of doing business in government. Hence, if you contact the commission for anything, you must keep on knocking, pressing, complaining until your case is resolved.