The Board of Directors of the Dhaka Stock Exchange has cancelled its extraordinary general meeting scheduled on Tuesday for passing the demutualisation scheme following a stay order from the High Court. The High Court bench of Justice Mamnoon Haque issued the order following a writ petition filed on Monday by DSE director Ahmed Iqbal Hasan due to complexity over four unclaimed memberships of the bourse.
‘We are also not properly informed about the matter yet as we were served a notice by the lawyer of Ahmed Iqbal Hasan few hours before the EGM,’ DSE president Ahsanul Islam told New Age when asked about the issue.
He said the DSE could only confirm the validity of the claim in the attorney general’s office within such short time and had no other way but to postpone the EGM.
‘We had announced the EGM date long before. If anyone had any problem he should have raised the issue earlier,’ he said.
The DSE chief said the bourse would apply to the court for withdrawing the order and let it carry on the proceedings of demutualisation as per the schedule.
Sources present in the EGM said the petitioner had termed selling shares of the four unclaimed licences, as per demutualisation condition, by the DSE unconstitutional as those were personal properties of the individual members.
‘As there is neither an expiry date of the licence nor did the DSE send any notice to the members in this regard, the bourse cannot decide the fate of any personal property despite having the consent of the majority of the members,’ said a stockbroker present at the meeting.
He said such move violated the Companies Law under which the DSE was registered.
‘According to the demutualisation process the issue has to be resolved before passing the scheme as transfer of shares is a part of the scheme. So, we had no other choice but to postpone the EGM for seven days,’ he said.
The four memberships were registered to the DSE under names of Late Abdul Ahad (membership number 36), Mohammad Hosain (member number 96), Ahsanur Rahman (membership number 103) and Late Md Idris (membership number 188).
DSE officials said the bourse did not have anything but the names of the members to contact them.
‘Those memberships had been remaining unused since 1975,’ a senior DSE official told New Age.
Earlier in the month, the DSE and the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission got involved in a dispute over the structure of the DSE board that would carry out the demutualisation process.
The demutualisation, which separates the management of an exchange from its ownership, of the bourses was recommended for ensuring better corporate governance by a government committee that investigated the 2010-11 stock market scam.
-With New Age input
