SEC can’t pay investors now: Over GH¢4bn claim discrepancy

While depositors of savings and loans companies and microfinance institutions have been paid their deposits in part or full, investors of the 53 collapsed fund management companies, on the other hand, will have to wait a little longer to be able to access their funds.

This is because of some significant discrepancies detected between the value of claims filed by investors and the records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by the affected fund management companies.

For instance, it has emerged that claims filed by investors of the fund management firms are in excess of GH¢12 billion.

This is 50 per cent more than the GH¢8 billion in assets under management that the affected companies reported to SEC at the time their licences were revoked.

The latest development, which is expected to cause some anxiety among the affected investors, has necessitated a more rigorous validation of claims made to ensure that the right investors are paid the right amounts.

It was anticipated that after the customers of the collapsed savings and loans and micro finance companies were paid their due, investors of the fund management firms would have also received their locked-up funds.

The Director-General of the SEC, Rev. Daniel Ogbarmey Tetteh, in an interview with the Graphic Business in Accra alluded to the reasons for the delay in the release of the funds as he shared few updates on the state of release of funds to pay the investors of the defunct fund management firms.

Rev. Ogbarmey Tetteh said, “After the revocation of the licences, what we did was to ask the affected investors to file claims with our agent. We appointed an agent to do that for us as the first step in the process of validating the claims of investors.

“So what happened some weeks back was essentially just receiving claims, so individuals come and say I have X amount with this fund manager and so on,” he said.

The SEC boss stated categorically that “what happened some weeks back was not validation; we are now at the stage of validation and until the validation has been done, payments would have to be on hold”.

“You will agree with me that the government is making a commitment to make some payments which will cost the taxpayer, so care must be taken to ensure that the payments are going to the right investors, as well as the right amounts also,” he added.

Minimum validation starts

Rev. Ogbarmey Tetteh said “unfortunately, payment to the investors affected by the revocation action we took has not started because the claims filed would have to be subjected to validation, so the agent has started some level of validation.

“I say some level of validation because to do a thorough validation, it will require having access to the source documents in addition to the system balances. The validation which is ongoing is limited to the system balances”.

He said the commission was working with its agent to expedite the validation process in order to pave the way for payments promised by the government to be made accordingly.