Emomotimi Agama, Director-General, SEC, said this at a news conference to highlight the outcome of the second Capital Market Committee (CMC) meeting held in Lagos.
Agama, who is also the Chairman of CMC, noted that the commission had put in place mechanisms to ensure that the unclaimed dividends were cleared. He stated that the amount of the unclaimed dividends was not rising, but adding up every quarter because they were yet to be claimed.
“These dividends would continue to add up because as at December the dividends were not claimed, and in March, a new dividend was declared and would be added to the one not claimed.
“Hence, it appears as if the unclaimed dividend is rising, but it is still the same thing and not until they are claimed, it will continue to add up,” he said.
According to him, the update on e-dividend and direct cash settlement implementation revealed progress in Application Programming Interface(API) integration among registrars, with four already actively integrated and two nearing completion.
The SEC boss revealed that seven registrars were yet to start the process, and this raised concerns about their capabilities. Regarding the payment of outstanding dividends for mandated accounts, Agama said that compliance remained significantly low.
He explained that issues such as failed payments, dormant or closed accounts, and insufficient funding by public companies after reaching the 90 per cent return threshold had been identified as contributing factors.
Agama assured that SEC was collaborating with stakeholders to reduce the volume of unclaimed dividends in the country and report progress to the Senate Committee within the next six months.