 01-07 November 2000 |
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Shareholder information difficult to obtain, admits MFSC chairman
The Chairman of the Malta Financial Services Centre yesterday admitted that anomalies in the legislation governing the Malta Stock Exchange and current working procedures made it very difficult for members of the public to access up-to-date lists of company shareholders. Professor Joe Bannister was reacting to an interview with John Borg Bartolo, a spokesman for the newly-formed Malta Minority Shareholders’ Association, which appeared in last week’s edition of The Business Times. In the interview, Mr Borg Bartolo said that when he came to contest the election of directors in the HSBC Bank, the list of shareholders, which should be available, at a fee, to the general public from the Registrar of Companies within The Malta Financial Services Centre, was unavailable. "This put me at a great disadvantage with the other contestants for the post," he said. "Suffice it to say that I even filed an official protest at the law courts on this issue. Finance Minister, John Dalli, shared my concern but did nothing about it to spare me the disadvantage and admitted that there exists a flaw in the legislation which ‘divested’ the MFSC from its obligations." Prof. Bannister said that in theory, the information should have been available to Mr Borg Bartolo. The problem, he continued, was more to do with "mechanics" caused by anomalies in the legislation governing the Stock Exchange than anything else. "The problem is that when there is a transfer of shares, the company secretary has 15 days in which to inform the MFSC," he said. "The information goes into the file and the public is free to see this, but the difficulty is that the file is only brought up to date once a year with the annual returns, so it is a long time before the information is readily available for perusal. Theoretically, the public is able to go through the file – it’s just that it would take a long time to gather the information." Prof. Bannister stressed that both the MFSC and the Stock Exchange are aware of the problem and are looking at ways of improving procedures. "One line of thought is whether the Stock Exchange should remove the secrecy clause from the legislation governing it," he said. "The best way forward would then be for the share registration to be made available daily at 6pm when it is updated." | |||||||
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