Angola steps up efforts to set up stock exchange http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticleSearch.aspx?storyID=196758+01-Mar-2006+RTRS&srch=angola
Wed Mar 1, 2006
JOHANNESBURG, March 1 (Reuters) - Angola moved closer to setting up its first stock exchange on Wednesday as bourse experts from around the globe gathered in Luanda for the first capital markets forum ever held in the oil-rich country.
Angola's Capital Market Commission called the meeting to assess the technical and material conditions necessary to create the Stock and Derivatives Exchange of Angola (BVDA), the official news agency Angop reported.
Angola is one of only three countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) without a stock exchange despite being the fastest growing economy in the region.
Earlier this year, the coordinator of the Capital Market Commission, Antonio Cruz Lima, said the BVDA would likely be launched in the third quarter of this year with an initial capitalisation of $6 billion. It will be located in Luanda.
This week's meeting will analyse capital market supervision, financial intervention, taxation in free market societies as well as securities and pension funds as investments.
Among those attending the event will be the director of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the former chairman of Brazil's Sao Paulo Stock Exchange, chairmen of several U.S.commercial banks, administrators of Euronext (ENXT.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) and representatives of Latin America's professional certification institutes.
Cruz Lima has said that the government can expect to raise around $940 million in taxes from stock market activities. It would bring Angola's biggest companies under one umbrella and is expected to significantly boost foreign direct investment.
Angola is now the second largest oil producer in Sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria, pumping 1.3 million barrels per day.
Although the IMF expects the economy to grow at 27.6 percent this year, the majority of Angola's estimated 13 million people remain impoverished after a devastating 27-year civil war which ended in 2002.
Angola's government has embarked on a programme of liberalisation, moving away from its former Marxist principles and toward free markets, although critics say the country's finances remain opaque and regulation is arbitrary.
(Additional reporting by Karen Iley in Luanda)
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