SEC has come up with a new rule that dividend would be returned  to the company to start up a new business outside its original business after one year of release without claim from shareholders. In this interview, shareholders disapprove of such rule. They argue that companies do not release the dividend warrant until after four months and that the dividend warrant would also go through other processes, therefore the directive cannot work unless the Companies and Allied Matters Act is ammended.

BY PROVIDENC OBUH

Mr Boniface Okezie: President at Progressive Shareholders Association of Nigeria,

That directive cannot work unless the CAMA is amended. This is because if you are going by status bar which is already in existence, that says after 12 years the money returns back to the company unclaimed. So anything that is still remaining within a year cannot be termed unclaimed because they are running concurrently and it belongs to the shareholders, so you cannot return that money until it falls in line with the status bar. As long as there is no status bar there is no way they can return that money to the company.

What the company should do is that, that money should reside with the registrar of that company and there must be a of reconciliation between the registrar of the company and the company secretary. Quarterly, they can agree or look at how much is left that is not yet received by the shareholders. So you cannot use shareholders’ money that has not fallen into status bar and that is still within their own collection. It may be because of one logistics problem or the other that it was not given to them or posted. It may also be that the address has been changed or some have smaller units and do not have current account.

We have advocated for a longtime that they should allow savings account to contain dividend warrant, which SEC should also liaise with CBN to effect that and stop the foot dragging. All along what they have been contemplating is to establish a Trust Fund, which we fought them headlong and since that time they have soft-pedalled. They want every means to establish that and we wouldn’t allow it because that is another way of stealing people’s money.

If that money returns to the company and the shareholders come forth because it is not declared status bar, they will start asking people to write letter to the registrar and the registrar will say “we don’t have money, we will write the company to forward the money back to us.” If they return the money back to the company what happens? Has it been declared status bar that the company will take over the money or the shareholder would not have access to that money again? Is that what they are telling us? We must devise a means to ensure that shareholders get their money on time.