January 24, 2007	Wednesday	Muharram 04, 1428

KARACHI, Jan 23: The first executive meeting of the South Asian Federation of Exchanges (Safe) would be held at the Karachi Stock Exchange on Jan 24 and 25.

Safe comprises 19 member entities of eight South Asian countries. It is a “Not for Profit” organisation, established in January 2000 in Bangladesh on the initiative of the Chittagong Stock Exchange.

The objective of Safe is to provide a forum for regional cooperation and to facilitate development of securities market in the South Asian Region for mutual economic growth and development.

Seven members from various member countries sit on the Safe executive committee.

A press release, issued by the KSE on Tuesday, stated that the upcoming EC meeting of Safe would include representatives from India (Mr Rajnikant Patel, chairman, Safe, and MD and CEO, BSE and Mr Sanjay Saksena, GM International Relations, BSE), Bangladesh (Mr Ahmad Rashid, vice chairman Safe and SVP, Dhaka Stock Exchange), Nepal (Mr Rewat Bahadur Karki, GM, Nepal Stock Exchange) and Pakistan (Mr M A Lodhi, MD, KSE).

The meeting would forward the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Safe and its member countries regarding the South Asian Index. The meeting would serve as a platform to bring together securities market, securities regulators and other stakeholders of the region to examine the importance of regional cooperation in terms of the launch of South Asian Index, the KSE release said.

It stated that Safe had been endeavouring to initiate cross border listing and trading amongst the regional countries. “The development of a South Asian Index is a key project which will serve to represent the investment potential of the region”, the bourse stated and added that a regional Index had been developed in collaboration with Dow Jones Index, aimed at measuring and reflecting the performance of leading stocks of the prominent market sectors, listed at the Safe member exchanges. The Index was aimed at providing an overview of the performance of Safe equity markets as a regional grouping and also serve as an underlying tool for developing new investment products in the region.

On the agenda of the two-day meeting, was also the discussion on c2Demutualisation experience of BSEc2 to be presided over by Mr Rajikant Patel, Managing Director (MD), and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). It would be attended by the brokerage community, board of directors of KSE and regulators from the SECP.

Bombay Stock Exchange Limited (BSE) is the oldest stock exchange in Asia, established in 1875. The demutualisation experience of BSE is the latest in South Asian region and the newly-found Bombay Stock Exchange incorporated under the BSE (Corporatisation and Demutualisation) Scheme, 2005 was said to be attracting a lot of international interest.