Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) has found recruitment anomalies including unnecessary staffing at lower level while sufficient manpower in the important departments hindering development of innovative ideas for the bourse. The team led by an independent director suggests implementation of potential plans for diversifying the market.
The team has no doubt made a good assessment of internal staffing and whether lot of appointments at lower levels were justified. It appears the DSE board is detracting attention from the main issue why the bourse is failing and what structural changes it needs to increase the flow of investment and trust deficit. The problem in the bourse is much above staff evaluation issues at a time when it plunged over the years losing almost half of its market capital.
We must say the problem in the capital market must be resolved at higher political decision making level whether they want a free capital market away from intervention of powerful people in political and business circles. Unscrupulous business syndicates dominate the stock market, elect board members and jointly work with its regulatory body. It is unimaginable how the immediate past chairman of Securities and Exchange Commission could continue in his post for nine long years ignoring protest of small investors and the government didn’t feel his removal urgent. Surely he was nominee of powerful quarters.
It appears most wealthy men and prominent leaders now in the government were once in the list of suspects and accused in several cases for stock market scandal in 1996 and 2010 and at some other times. They made enormous fortune on those occasions from underhand sales and buy of shares when small investors were unaware of such manipulation and lost everything to become baggers. Now old ones have gone but new manipulators are destroying the market as the stock market drama is roiling in every day media report.
We must say the DSE authorities must investigate why the market is still failing despite the buying of 25 percent stake of DSE by a Chinese consortium. DSE is now in the brink like the state owned bank banks sinking with default loans. It needs decisive action to revive.
