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Nigeria To Sell Abuja Securities & Commodities Exchange By Mid Year

Nigeria To Sell Abuja Securities & Commodities Exchange By Mid Year

From Bloomberg

Nigeria’s government plans to sell its ownership of the Abuja Securities & Commodities Exchange by the middle of the year after missing an initial deadline in a plan to revive trading.

“The government wants to privatize the only commodity exchange and it had committed to doing it by the end of last year,” Securities and Exchange Commission Director General Arunma Oteh said in a Jan. 15 interview at the regulator’s headquarters in the capital, Abuja. “It didn’t meet that deadline, but it’s planning to do something by the middle of 2014.”

Companies including Nigeria’s Heirs Holdings Ltd., a Lagos-based investor with interests across Africa in banking, energy, real estate and agriculture, plan to acquire or set up a commodities exchange in the continent’s most populous nation of about 170 million people. Nigeria had Africa’s third-biggest cocoa harvest last year and produces crops such as cotton and sugar.

The Abuja bourse was converted from a stock exchange to a commodities market in 2001, according to its website, which last posted a news story in November 2010 and has information on crops traded dated January 2008.

Written by Chris Kay | Read more at Bloomberg