By Innocent Anaba
LAGOS — The Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Aloysus Katsina-Alu,  Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ms Arunma Oteh and the Managing Partner of PUNUKA Attorney & Solicitors law firm, Chief Anthony Idigbe, SAN, yesterday, called for a new regulatory frame work to  regulate the nation’s financial sector.

Justice Kastina-Alu, who was a special guest of honour at the 2011 PUNUKA lecture in Lagos, with the topic, “The challenges of Securities Regulation in Increasing Changing World” and represented by Justice Bode Rhodes-Vivour of the Supreme Court, said the new frame work was necessary to ensure that there were no abuses in the capital market and also preserve   investors’ confidence.

According to him,  since one of the tasks of securities regulation was to ensure the sanctity of information given to investors to enable them take market risk with their eyes fully open,  regulators such as SEC faces enormous challenges in ensuring  that abuses do not occur in the capital market and when they do, they are detected and addressed promptly in order to preserve the confidence of the investors.

Oteh, on her part, said the time had come for  a change in the approach to the regulation of the markets, because the old tools with which the financial system have been regulated had become obsolete and contributed to the global financial crises.

She said that the inevitability of change cannot be over stressed, since the global financial crisis has brought  to the fore,  the need for a paradigm shift in the ways, we think and perceive the financial markets.

She noted that the global crisis threw up systemic risks of universal dimension and the review  of the conceptual underpinnings of systemic risk, adding  that regulators had neglected  to take broader, longer term view  of new realities and the tools required to address them.

Chief Idigbe on his part said the choice of the topic for the lecture was influenced by topical issues the firm has been involved with,  especially  the fact that the law firm has for sometimes been involved with SEC in dealing with legal fallouts of their regulatory intervention with Ponzi schemes or wonder banks.

For the guest lecturer and European Union expert on financial services law, Jane Welch, financial misconduct has remained a big challenge in securities regulatory system in the world.