e-Dividend Mandate Gets June 30 Deadline

• e-Dividend Mandate Gets June 30 Deadline

Shareholders have until June 30 next year to mandate registrars of quoted companies to pay their dividends using electronic platform. From this date, registrars of companies will stop issuing physical dividend warrants to shareholders.

The Director-General, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mounir Gwarzo, disclosed this during an interactive session with journalists in Lagos while speaking on the third and last Capital Market Committee Meeting for the year 2016 and the performance of the market in the past three months.

He said investors now had enough time to embrace the e-Dividend scheme, adding that so far, the platform had recorded a lot of positive changes as against what it was before now.

Registrars of companies in the Nigerian capital market, he said, had paid over N29bn to investors that had not been able to claim their dividends before now.

Gwarzo explained that the total payment of N29.27bn was made between November last year till date, pointing out that the commission was able to achieve the milestone through the advocacy work of all the stakeholders in the market, that was taken to all the nooks and crannies of the country.

He said, “This is the best the industry has done”, and commended the contributions of the banking sector and the registrars in ensuring the success of the platform.

He noted that the e- Dividend platform was for the good of retail investors and the industry operators in general, assuring that the commission remained poised to end the story of unclaimed dividend in the Nigerian capital market.