The
Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), managers of the nation’s
Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) has expressed interest in reviving the
country’s Commodity Exchange, a process which government authorities estimate could cost as much as $20 million.
The government has scheduled the
comatose Abuja Securities and Commodity Exchange (ASCE) for
privatisation, but the NSIA and industry experts fear that selling the
company at its present state would come at a loss, since the assets are
almost worthless.
 |
| NSIA Manager |
The NSIA’s interest is therefore in
pre-privatisation investments which would mean fixing the software to
drive an efficient trading platform and putting proper processes and procedures in place, till a point that the Exchange can start trading.
The Abuja Securities Commodity Exchange
(ASCE) is no longer functional, having stopped trading several years
back, but it has up to 60 staff who do nothing but collect salaries at
the end of each month, BusinessDay discovered.
NSIA authorities are already in early
talks with the government to allow them make that very important
pre-privatisation investment and bring the Commodity Exchange to an
operational level, in exchange for shares in the company before it is
finally privatised.
