21/12/22

AFRICA: ‘Beneficial ownership disclosure will help fight corruption, illicit trade’.

As published on guardian.ng, Wednesday 21 December, 2022.

The Compliance Institute, Nigeria (CIN) said making beneficial ownership disclosure a requirement for company registration is critical to the success of the fight against corruption, banditry, terrorism and illicit trade.

The President of the institute, Pattison Boleigha, said this in Kano during a one-day Corporate Affairs Commission’s (CAC) customers and stakeholders training on the beneficial ownership disclosure principles and electronic filing system for financial statement filling by registered entities.

Boleigha stressed that Nigeria’s fight against different crimes would be won by leveraging the opportunities in the CAC reform initiatives.

Speaking on the beneficial ownership disclosure principle, the Registrar-General and Chief Executive Officer of CAC, Garba Abubakar, said the initiative was to support the fight against corruption.

He said the system would be made available to other regulatory bodies in the country to ensure synergy.

Damilola Awe of GMD Centrifuge Information Technology Limited, a software development firm in the financial technology space, described it as an online account-filling system by CAC supported by EU-ACT for regulated entities such as integrated trustees and private limited liability companies.

He said EFS is a module or feature addition of the parent software Company Registration Portal (CRP) that allows the electronic filling of yearly financial statements.
Deputy Director, Academics, Nigerian Law School, Kano, Femi Olorunyomi, applauded the initiatives and urged that the commission visit the law school campuses across the country to highlight some of the reforms.

Olorunyomi said that the call was necessary for view of the various innovations introduced by the Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) 2020 and the ever-increasing complex nature of company law.