By Asad Cheema
ISLAMABAD: A renowned company lacking ownership criteria for selling shares violating the rules sells shares. Rewind to 2014, a person that then owned 50% of the company’s shares selling a significant portion of holding to a foreign entity and retaining merely 30% of the company’s ownership.
Between 2014 and now the company also sold a major chunk of its shareholding retaining a smaller percentage. Now, as per recent events that we have been closely following, the share price of the company has shot up. It turns out that during this period companies increased their shareholding to around 10%.
Now a basic question arises: who should decide who would run the management of the company? The simple, logical and universally accepted answer is that the shareholders should decide by contesting the elections of the board either through nominees or voting in favour of persons who are contesting and they believe will serve the company in their best interests.
It would be important to note that the sections of PEMRA that have been quoted do not in any way prohibit a candidate from contesting. Rather, the spirit of the sections is that when an election is done, the names of directors are sent to PEMRA for clearance – a practice that is applicable in all regulated sectors.
To conclude, for now it appears as though temperatures could rise. However, we await how just and timely the regulator acts and concludes the matter in the best interest of all the concerned parties and for once decisions are merit based and not on creating public sentiments, publishing irrelevant maligning materials, sweeping statements, looping multiple parties to confuse matters and conjectures to name a few.
