PETALING JAYA: The Securities Commission Malaysia (SC) said it will provide temporary relief for selected Practice Note 17 (PN17) and General Note 3 (GN3) counters on Bursa Malaysia’s Main and ACE markets by suspending the status.
According to SC’s market and corporate supervision director, Kamarudin Hashim, the reprieve from the status will be contingent on their fulfilling the criteria set by the SC and Bursa Malaysia.
To qualify for the reprieve, he said, an affected company’s shareholders’ equity should be 25% or less of its share capital on a consolidated basis, and valued at less than RM40 million.
For companies which auditors have highlighted a material uncertainty or expressed a qualification on the listed issuer’s ability to continue as a going concern, shareholders’ equity should be 50% or less of share capital.
The third criterion is for affected issuers, their major subsidiaries or major associate companies that have defaulted on payments and are unable to provide a solvency declaration to the exchange.
“The period for the relaxation for the affected issuers are from April 17 to June 30, 2020,” said Kamarudin at a virtual press conference today.
SC chairman Datuk Syed Zaid Albar reiterated that the SC previously allowed an extended time frame for the submission of regularisation plan to 24 months from the date it was first announced, as well as a month’s extension for periodic reporting to listed entities.
Apart from that, he said the commission is exploring a debt issuance framework to assist micro, small and medium entrepreneurs (MSME) meet their capital needs.
SC chief regulatory officer Foo Lee Mei explained that the decision to explore such an avenue is encouraged by the positive development of the equity crowdfunding (ECF) and peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms.
She stated that since its establishment three years ago, the two platforms have successfully raised more than RM700 million, helping 1,943 MSMEs fund their businesses.
“We believe that further expansion in this area will greatly benefit our small and mid cap and MSMEs companies.
“Currently, we are looking at a greater source of funding for these small companies and are in the midst of conducting a feasibility study to see how we can enable these companies to issue debt in addition to what we have allowed on the ECF platform,” she added.
Additionally, Syed Zaid said the SC is planning to accelerate its digitisation transformation and offer more online products and services to investors, including guidelines for holding virtual general meetings.
It is also planning to review the rules on takeovers and mergers to facilitate e-service of documents and compliance with regulatory requirements for takeover and merger transactions.
Syed Zaid noted that these are unusual times, and so extraordinary measures are called for.
“We are deploying a wide range of regulatory tools to provide support to the market and relief to market participants,” he said.
