Emomotimi Agama, Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
Nigeria’s securities regulator moved to halt promotions linked to the planned initial public offering of Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals FZE after concluding that advance marketing campaigns risked misleading investors, damaging market integrity and tarnishing one of the country’s most closely watched corporate assets.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s intervention was triggered by a surge in advertisements, social media campaigns, flyers, digital banners and targeted emails encouraging investors to position for a refinery share sale that has not been filed with or approved by the regulator.
The SEC said some registered capital market operators had gone beyond merely discussing a potential future listing and were actively soliciting advance subscriptions, encouraging investors to create accounts, pre-fund investments and seek guaranteed allocations in a transaction that does not yet exist in approved form.
That raised alarm within the regulator, which viewed the activity as creating information asymmetry, distorting investor expectations and potentially exposing retail investors to losses.
