The chief executive officer of Dhaka Stock Exchange, Musharraf M Hussain, on Wednesday resigned after the board of directors grilled the management team led by
Musharraf on the day before over repeated ‘operational failures’.
‘I have decided to resign as the board’s approach towards the management had hurt my dignity,’ Musharraf told New Age when asked about the issue.
He said that the DSE lacked proper corporate culture which is a major barrier to the development of the capital market.
‘Although the DSE regulation provides the management full independence, in reality the board intervenes while making almost every decision,’ he said.
DSE officials said the bourse’s board, a body elected by brokerage houses, came down heavily on the management in a meeting on Tuesday and the CEO of the bourse Musharraf faced all the heat following a system failure of the new trading software MSA-Plus.
‘The board has received the CEO’s resignation but he had not mentioned any allegation against the board in the letter,’ DSE senior vice-president Ahmed Rashid Lali told New Age.
Ahmed, however, declined to make further comments on the issue.
The DSE CEO in the last two months had faced three show-cause notices from the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission for different operational failures.
In December, the DSE management was served two show-cause notices as the bourse’s new trading software MSA-Plus witnessed repeated system failures.
Trading on the DSE was delayed for one hour on two separate occasions when Envoy Textile and Generation Next Fashion made their debuts on the bourse.
In the recent system failure, trading of 12 brokerage firms was suspended
last month as the MSA-Plus failed to provide
trading terminals to those firms.
DSE officials, however, said that MSA-Plus software and vendor were selected by the DSE board and the board should take responsibility for any failure of the software.
In November, the BSEC served a show-cause notice on Musharraf after a DSE investigation report, on United Airways anomalies, was leaked to the media before it was submitted to the commission.
The DSE investigation report claimed that the earning per share of United Airways showed misleading earning per share calculation in 2010 as it did not adjust deferred tax properly in its revenues.
The row between the DSE and the BSEC intensified further after the United Airways had submitted an application seeking
steps from BSEC about the leakage, which was
carried by a number of newspapers.
At the same time, the DSE board also faced a show-cause notice for questioning the BSEC decision to approve Orion Pharma’s initial public offerings at a price of Tk 60, which the DSE claimed ‘unreasonably high’.
Later, some DSE board members led by its president Rakibur Rahman met the BSEC chairman M Khairul Hoassain and resolved the disputes surfaced on Orion Pharma.
The board members also shifted the responsibility to the management saying that both the reports were prepared and handled by the management.
The previous CEO of the bourse, Shatipati Moytra, also resigned under the pressure from the board of directors.
As per the procedure, the resignation has to be approved by the board and then sent for the BSEC consent.
Courtesy of New Age
