UAE bourses ban insider trading until Q1 results

Dubai - Dubai Financial Market and Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange asked shareholding and brokerage companies to implement the ban.

The UAE bourses have stopped insider trading from Tuesday, March 17, until the listed companies declare their first-quarter financial results.
Dubai Financial Market and Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange asked shareholding and brokerage companies to implement the ban.
The UAE's Securities and Commodities Authority's Article 14 prohibits company officials such as chairperson, board members or company employees who have insider information to trade shares for 15 days before disclosing the financial statement of the company. The law doesn't allow company's employees to trade shares even in the parent company's subsidiaries, affiliate or allied companies if any one of them is listed on the local bourses.
On Sunday, Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansouri, Minister of Economy and Chairman of Securities and Commodities Authority, chaired a meeting of the Authority where the officials discussed postponing general assemblies of the listed companies due to coronavirus.
In addition, reducing the circuit breaker limit on local bourses was also highlighted during the meeting due to selling pressure witnessed by the markets this month.
Moreover, the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange on Sunday announced temporarily closure of all its trading halls until further notice due to the global coronavirus outbreak.
The bourse said it was closing trading halls at its main offices in Abu Dhabi and in other emirates as a precautionary measure to protect public health in the UAE. The UAE has registered 86 cases of the new coronavirus so far, of which 17 have recovered.
"Trading operations will not be affected by the closure of the trading halls as ADX offers various channels traditional as well as digital from which investors can trade. We recommend that our clients use digital investor service integrated platform 'Sahmi' to carry out all daily operations online," said Khalifa Al Mansouri, ehief executive of Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange.
The Dubai Financial Market (DFM) on Sunday announced that it implemented the largest technology upgrade through its entire history by migrating to the Nasdaq Financial Framework (NFF) from March 15, 2020.
Developed by Nasdaq, the system is designed to provide exchanges with the necessary resilience to run multi-asset platforms, hence it creates a solid foundation to realize DFM's strategic objectives on the long-term by accommodating numerous trading platforms for stocks, derivatives, debt instruments of bonds and Sukuk, investment funds, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and others, noting that the DFM is planning to launch new trading platforms during the coming period including; the first of its kind platform for trading of securities of free zone companies and the REITs platform.
-waheedabbas@khaleejtimes.com