General News of Wednesday, 16 October 2019
Source: citinewsroom.com
2019-10-16
The customers on Tuesday embarked on a protest to express their displeasure
The Securities and Exchange of Commission (SEC) has called for calm among aggrieved customers of Black Shield Fund Management, formerly called Gold Coast Fund Management.
It says it is working to ensure that the locked-up investments of clients are retrieved.
The customers on Tuesday embarked on a protest to express their displeasure over the failure of the management of the company to pay their monies.
Speaking to Citi News, Head of Policy and Research at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ashong Katai indicated that the Commission was committed to ensuring that customers of the Gold Coast Fund Management get back their cash.
“We can revoke the license of Gold Coast and do other things but will that solve the problem? The underlying problem is client money. That is the crust of the matter. We can arrest the directors but will they get the money? We want the clients to get their monies back because if investors lose their monies, market confidence will crash. And when confidence is crashed, the whole capital market will crash and we don’t want to get there.”
Customers will be settled by 2022 – Black Shield assures
Despite the pressure mounted on Black Shield management, it says it will be able to make complete payment of locked up monies to its remaining 59,000 customers within the next two to three years.
It has indicated that it has been able to pay off a little over 9,000 customers out of its 68,000 leaving 59,000 people who are yet to receive their monies.
The spokesperson for the company, Benjamin Afreh said that much effort is being done by the company to raise money to pay off its clients.
“I admit that it will not take less than two years to pay everybody off. I’m not sure it will go beyond three years. So far we’ve paid over GHc200 million to customers. And I so said, there is a lot of work we’re doing behind the scenes hopefully to raise a lot of money. So once we do that, I am sure a lot more customers will be paid and the pay will be much faster than we witness,” he said.
