The CSE Council and the Association of Financial Service Providers (KEPEY) with the consent of the Securities & Exchange Commission agreed to allow the trading of the Laiki Bank rights in one batch and only after the process for the transfer of the rights to the respective trading accounts has been completed.
The CSE expects to complete the procedure by the end of the week, allowing for spot checks to be done over the weekend so that trading on the rights may begin on Monday, July 17. The CSE however, would not give an official date for the start of trading because a labour dispute on overtime ban was hampering the smooth processing of the titles.
A row broke out last week after the CSE allowed the batch filed from Laiki Investments to be processed, at a time when the batches involving all other KEPEY were not being processed.
The Association of KEPEY criticized the CSE for this action, claiming that this gave an unfair advantage to the specific brokerage clients, who after their rights were transferred to their trading accounts from the Global Accounts could trade in their shares (sell, if they wished to) while other investors could not.
The problem arose after the CSE staff decided to enforce an overtime ban for the third week to press their demands ahead of the launch of the common trading platform with the ASE by September/October.
The Association of KEPEYs blamed the CSE for the delay in the processing of the trades because they only allowed members to send in their client batches two days before the listing of the Laiki rights, which led to the delays.
A number of KEPEYs said the mess resembled the problem with the proper processing of share titles during the chaotic days of 1999, which led to many problems and the creation of bubble conditions as investors did not process their shares to sell as prices were advancing.
By allowing the transfer of the CPB rights to the Trading accounts of the clients, brokers are confident that no investor will enjoy an unfair advantage and hence the problem will be partially solved, even though they insist that the CSE staff should have agreed to overtime work in order to process the rights, as they did without any problems during the processing of the BOC rights.
