The Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) has officially listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange following the successful completion of its Initial Public Offer (IPO) on December 5.
The bank’s listing makes it the 40th company and the fourth local bank to be listed on the Ghanaian bourse.
The Agricultural Development Bank successfully raised about GHC325 million in its IPO, making it one of the largest IPOs ever undertaken on the Ghana Stock Exchange.
Retail applicant’s total shares bought represents 98.77% of the shares sold out while five institutional applicants represented 1.23%.
The five institutional investors paid a little above GHC312.1 million, receiving a total of a little above 117.8 million shares.
The official listing ceremony followed the Bank’s initial trading on the Exchange on December 13 at GHc2.65 per share and closed at GHc 2.93 per share and has since remained steady.“Indeed this represents an impressive 10.57 per cent appreciation of the first day of trading and we hope the value will keep soaring,” Managing Director of the Bank, Daniel Asiedu said.
“Furthermore we are very hopeful that the ADB shares will eventually become a golden choice of investors on the Ghana Stock Exchange because of the huge potential of the bank.
“We are confident that our participation in the stock market will help deepen the market and provide investors asset options to deploy their investable funds,” he added.
The board chairman of ADB, Soglo Alloh IV said he is delighted the Bank has finally successfully listed on the GSE.
“Investors are therefore making sure that the most of our investments will come to Ghana and ADB being on the market now, we hope to strengthen the growth of the market and also we encourage more investment on the market. This is the beginning of greater things to come” he said.
The Managing Director of the Ghana Stock Exchange, Kofi Yamoah called on the incoming government to consider scraping the capital gains tax, which came with the income tax of 2015.
“In our west African sub region, Nigeria has free zero tax on capital gains. Cote d’Ivoire, which is the market for eight West African francophone countries, has a zero tax on capital gains and then there are many African markets that also do have this zero tax,” he observed.
Mr Yamoah said the high capital gain tax paid in Ghana is “very much uncompetitive as far as the Ghana market is concerned”.
Government retained a majority stake of some 32.3 percent of the bank’s shares while 20 % is owned by an American-based financial firm, Belstar Capital Limited.
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