Capital Market Hearing: Committee Invites Cecilia Ibru, Soludo, Akingbola, Others

The House of Representatives Adhoc Committee Investigating the Near Collapse of the Capital Markets has summoned the former Central Bank Governor, Professor Charles Soludo, former Director-General of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, Prof. Ndi Okereke-Onyuike and former bank MD’s including Mrs. Cecilia Ibru, Mr. Erastus Akingbola, Mr. Francis Atuche and Mr. Barth Ebong amongst others.

The committee headed by Mr. Ibrahim El-Sudi has called on the witnesses to appear on or before April 20^th in order to give their perspectives on what led to the crash of the equity capital markets in 2008.

The former bank chiefs were relieved of their positions by the current CBN governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido and were accused of speculating with depositors’ funds leading to the unsustainable equity bubble that burst in 2008 and erased trillions of Naira worth of investors’ wealth.

Former CBN governor, was accused in some quarters of not doing enough to regulate the banking industry, and thus was held partly responsible for the crash. No disciplinary measures were ever taken against him.

Speaker of the House, Aminu Tambuwal declared the hearing open yesterday.

He said, “Let us put whatever happened before behind us and start from a new beginning for great expectations. The focus of the hearing is to find out why the market is in a sorry state today. We should dig and find out where we went wrong. We are looking for answers on how the market can bounce back to business.”

Committee leader, El-Sudi, in his opening address said, ““It is common knowledge that the market capitalisation of the NSE fell from a height of N13.5tn to N4.6tn within 10 months in 2008. The situation up to now has not improved much.”

“We are not here to play the blame game or embark on witch hunt of anybody”, he added, insisting that the goal of the hearing was to get to the root cause of the problem.

He said the only reason the summons for the ex-bank chiefs and others were made public was so no one would have an excuse not to show up.

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One Comment

1. 

   Ossyomar

   April 20, 2012 at 12:50 am

   Still looking for where there is no case. Respect those who worked to develop this country