No wrong doing in SECP: Chairman

ISLAMABAD—The allegations made in the media and the claim made by former Chairman SECP Dr. Tariq, are totally incorrect, without any factual basis, and hence refuted.
Chairman Security and Exchange Corporation of Pakistan (SECP) Razi ur Rehman Khan stated this in a statement issued here on Thursday. He said "The factual position is being given in detail as under to clarify the situation". He said the news reports appearing in a section of press contained a number of serious factual errors and hence warrant a correction of record by SECP. It had been incorrectly reported that the data of bid and offer pertaining to March 2005 was available with SECP prior to January 2006 and that it had `disappeared' from the records of SECP thereafter, he added.
Furthermore, he said, in his December 14 statement before the National Assembly Standing Committee on Finance & Revenue, Dr. Tariq Hasan claimed that the complete trading data for March 2005 period was available with SECP before he left. The statement said an abnormal level of activity was witnessed at theKarachi Stock Exchange (KSE) in March 2005 and thereafter KSE was directed by SECP to provide complete trading data including order data (bid and offer) vide its correspondence dated April 11, 2005 and April 19, 2005, for the months of January, February, March and April of 2005. However, KSE only provided data relating to executed trades whereas the data containing bid and offer was never provided to SECP by KSE. The non-maintenance of order data by KSE was also highlighted in the
Report by the Task Force (page 34 - para 108) which had been constituted to investigate factors which had led to the March 2005 stock market situation. Pursuant to the recommendation of the Task Force to conduct a Forensic Investigation, SECP once again in August 2005 by virtue of its powers under section 21 of the Securities and Exchange Ordinance, 1969, directed KSE to provide complete trading record of trading activities at KSE for the period January-April 2005.
Subsequently, KSE (vide its letter dated August 12, 2005) provided theexecuted trade data. However, in respect of bid and offer data, the Managing Director of KSE submitted a self explanatory note written by the Deputy General Manager & Head of IT Division and addressed to KSE Managing Director regarding the "Data Retention practice at KSE".
The said note, dated: August 12, 2005, stated that considering the limited data resources of the exchange, the historical data retained by the exchange was limited to the extent of executed trades only. This note confirms that KSE only had year wise data of the executed trades for five years and that the exchange simply did not possess such level of storage resources whereby the massive data of bid and offer could be stored within the exchange.
This self-explanatory note by the Head of IT also stated that the management had proposed to the Board of Directors of KSE to have an independent data warehousing capacity in order to enable the exchange to retain the complete data of bid and offer. —Agencies