The Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) has urged the finance ministry to widen the tax gap between listed and non-listed firms to at least 10%, aiming to revive the IPO (initial public offering) market, which has experienced a prolonged dry spell with no new approvals since March of last year.
BSEC Chairman Khondoker Rashed Maqsood on 24 April wrote a letter to finance ministry’s Financial Institutions Division Secretary Nazma Mobarek in this regard.
In the letter, the BSEC chairman pointed out that the capital market has long been suffering from a shortage of fundamentally strong, profitable, and transparent companies. As a result, the market’s depth remains extremely limited, posing a major obstacle to building an effective and stable capital market in the long term. In this situation, the country’s capital market has failed to attract investors, particularly institutional and foreign investors.
The letter further noted that Bangladesh is home to many profitable local and multinational companies. However, most of these companies remain outside the stock market. The primary reason for this is the lack of a significant difference in tax rates between listed and non-listed companies.বিস্তারিত