Angola delays stock market to 2017

Published Jul 25, 2014

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Angola, sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest economy, won’t start equities trading until at least 2017 because companies need to improve their accounting, the country’s markets regulator said.

Inadequate corporate-governance practices, a lack of a competitive fiscal regime, educated financial culture and proper negotiations systems are delaying the development of the shares market, Patricio Vilar, executive administrator of the Capital Markets Commission, said at a conference today in the capital, Luanda.

Government bond trading will begin this year, corporate debt in 2015 and futures trading will follow the stock market, he said.

“Companies are not prepared and they have to organise their accounting,” Vilar said.

“Some need to be privatised and to be more transparent to go public.”

African markets from Johannesburg to Nairobi rallied this year as investors sought returns in emerging markets.

Angola’s equities trading was slated for 2016 after an earlier target of next year, Archer Mangueira, chairman of the CMC, said in a June 2013 interview.

The southwest African country, the continent’s second-largest crude-oil producer, expects its stock exchange to have a market value of 10 percent of gross domestic product within 18 months of its start up, Mangueira said last year.

Angola’s $122 billion economy is forecast to expand 5.3 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. - Bloomberg News

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