Notwithstanding the determination to make the stock market profitable, the consistency in the conflicting comments from regulators in the market have been said to be the reason why the equities market is yet to rebound.The Chief Executive Officer of Maxifund Investment and Securities Plc, Mr Okechukwu Unegbu gave this declaration during an interview on the reason why investors are yet to heave a sigh of relief on investment, since the meltdown in 2008.According to him,the dwindling trend in busines which has led to loss of money by investors has been attributed to the low level of confidence in the NSSE. 'Central Bank would make a comment, Secu-rity and Exchange Commission would make a comment, NSE would make a comment'all of them would be contra-dicting one another. 'So people do not know where they are again; in that type of situation, people would not want to put their money in, since they have lost so much money already. Also, those who operate the market have lost confidence in approaching investors to come out, and instead of trying to urge local investors to come in, they are busy commen-ting on foreign investors whose money is not stable in our economy. All these combined to kill the morale of people in the market place and it is not going to be easy building investors' confidence. It is going to require a lot of time and strategic planning to be able to get investors back.'Speaking on the leadership in the market, Unegbu said: 'The only thing that I have found disturbing is the way the leadership was changed. It was not done in a proper and transparent manner. It was not done with regard to the interest of investors knowing that it is a sensitive institution, not just in this country, but outside. If anything happens, people will start reading meaning into it and they will start taking positions and which will lead to loss of confidence and investors' preference for dealing in the system. It is not that they do not like the current leadership, but things ought to have been done properly and trans-parently for people to see, but when things are not transparent, I don't see how people will be able to do business with such an institution.On the slow busi-ness pace at the beginning of the year, he noted that 'January of every year has always been a slow period for business. People are waiting to get the results of the National Budget so that they can plan with your own personal budget. So January has always been a period of 'wait and see'. The problem is that the confidence in the stock market is still low compared to what it used to be. In that case, you might say that this year, the statistics has not been as good as that of previous years.On the rating of the auditing firms especially in this part of the world he explained: 'I have always had problems with auditing firms, even when I was the Managing Director of a bank. I have always had quarrels with them because of the way they report their accounts and that is why I have two cases in court: the Cadbury case and a case against Auditors for some of the illegalities they perpetrate. I took this as a public interest litigation to challenge some of the reports which, for instance, say a bank is 100 per cent sound and the next day, the bank goes down. They might not be in charge of running the banks, but they are in charge of ensuring that when they report, people should have confidence in their report and that is one of the things that have caused a crisis in the capital market.
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