Matara Investors Association on ‘Who is responsible for bringing the stock market down?’

Following is a statement issued by an entity styling itself as Matara Investors Association on the current state of the Colombo stock market:

Even after the meeting with Dr. P.B. Jayasundera, where it was assured that the SEC would not be giving information/articles to the media, articles scaring the public are still appearing.

Hence, we investors have decided to write to the print media to create awareness.

The SEC and CSE are taking the moral high ground writing articles after articles and inserting in the media stating that it is catching wrongdoers, although there is no evidence to charge anyone as they cannot be defended in court. Actually what they are doing is trying to defend themselves for wiping out Rs. 300 billion from the stock market by issuing 14 anti-investor Directives and sending thousands of letters to investors while attacking investors by putting mud on them continuously.

The SEC Commission members are divided due to the way in which activities of the SEC Secretariat and SEC Commission have been handled in the last two years. All were silent in the past but will not be so in the future.

Dr. Dissa Bandara has an invalid post – ‘Acting Director General SEC’. According to the Attorney General’s Department, there cannot be an Acting Director General when there is no Director General. However, over 1,000 letters have been sent by the Acting Director General to investors who have bought five stocks nearly one year ago, whereby a fear psychosis has been created in the minds of investors who were making the market lively. Simply, the investors do not have to reply these letters as the letters are null and void. All this damage to the net worth of investors and the economy has been inflicted as influenced by a handful of anti-Government financial activists.

The Chairman and the Secretariat have been continuously making statements officially and unofficially as ‘SEC source’ in the last two years to four newspapers about manipulators, insider traders, fundamentally weak, and mafia traders, thereby making it impossible for new investors to get convinced to enter the market and old investors to re-enter the market.

If a prospective foreign fund manager surfs the web, he would get hundreds of fearful articles that have originated from the SEC, and therefore almost no new fund manager would enter the Colombo Bourse. The Chairman of the SEC has conveniently said market promotion is not the task of the SEC, as it is probably the only SEC in the world which actively works to bring down the market.

When the CSE should create the rules with the stock brokers, the SEC has also taken over this function and gone further to almost daily inserting articles against investing in at least four newspapers.