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Omnibus accounts to give way to separate BO accounts

Gazi Towhid Ahmed
The omnibus accounts of merchant banks will be replaced with separate beneficiary owner accounts, merchant bankers said yesterday.
“We have agreed to open new separate BO [beneficiary owner! accounts for our clients, replacing omnibus accounts, for the best interests of the market,” said Mohammad A Hafiz, the president of Bangladesh Merchant Bankers Association.
The merchant banks will proceed with the plan of action after receiving the green light from the securities regulator, Hafiz said.
An omnibus account is a specific kind of stock holding account in which the transactions of multiple individual account holders are combined for easier management.
The use of such accounts is common practice among merchant banks the world over due to quicker distribution of dividends and information regarding the stock.
Following the stock market crash of early last year many vested par-
ties recommended closure of the omnibus accounts, which the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) took on board.
Earlier, the merchant bankers told the SEC it would not be possible
to provide the individual client information needed to open separate BO accounts.
Some SEC officials, too, are not in favour of discontinuing with the practice of omnibus accounts, a SEC official who preferred to remain
unnamed said.
But the merchant bankers' position changed upon insistence from SEC following report from the probe committee on the stockmarket crash headed by Bangladesh Krishi Bank Chairman Khondkar Ibrahim Khaled, the official said.
“The merchant banks should keep their clients' shares in separate BO accounts in compliance with the related securities rules for the sake of transparency and accountability,” the probe committee said.
In a new proposal submitted to the SEC, the merchant bankers asked for a waiver of the initial cost of transferring the shares to separate BO accounts, along with authorising them as custodians of the clients' shares.
The stockmarket regulator has acquiesced to the merchant bankers' conditions, the BMBA president said, adding that the merchant bankers would work to ensure transparency and accountability in the market.
gazitowhid@gmail.com