Following the reported financial deficit in its operation in the last three years, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosed that as of the end of June 2021 the commission remitted about N1.5billion to the federations account.
In a statement by the Director General, Mr. Lamido Yugudato, he clarified that 25 percent of its gross revenue was remitted, assured the Senators that the Commission would return to profitability in two years following cost-cutting measures put in place by the management.
He explained: “I ask the Committee to really look at the SEC because even the numbers that we are calling out, since June of 2020 the SEC has been paying 25 percent of its gross revenue to the treasury and this I understand is an arrangement that only a few agencies of government have been paying.
“We have been paying 25 percent of gross revenues and the total so far paid to the treasury as at the end of June 2021 is about N1.5 billion”.
He also explained that SEC is a fully self-financing institution that does not draw any expenditure from the government.
According to him, “The SEC is a fully self-financed agency of government; we do not receive a single kobo from the government. So we are fully self-financing and we have to have a complement of staff that is fit for purpose to regulate the capital market. Now because of the vagaries of the capital market, it is not possible
“This arrangement has had the blessing of the government and this is an arrangement that we inherited in 2020 when we came into office. This has not been created by this management; the SEC has been allowed to keep these investments that have been absolving that deficit”.
Yuguda who acknowledge that the Commission has been operating under very difficult circumstance due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Capital Market and the economy, said steps have already been taken to turn-around the fortune of the regulator.
“If we go through the MTEF which we started last year, if we look at 2022 and 2023, you will see that we have worked on our expenditure so that by 2023, the deficit will actually turn into a surplus of N1.235 billion and by 2024 we should have N2.5 billion surplus.
“We therefore need the support of all to engineer the kind of transition we are thinking of at the SEC and that 30 percent which is taking most of the staff cost is part of the set we are targeting for the early retirement programme. There is a lot of interest within the Commission to do it but we are really short of the funds to do it now. We have done a lot of revenue rising drives just to ensure that the Commission stays on track. This is something we are mindful of and we have the intent and capacity to deliver on this”, he added.
