Turkey’s main opposition party filed a criminal complaint against top market regulators, alleging they failed to fulfill their duties by refusing to halt trading on the nation’s main stock exchange following the Feb. 6 earthquakes.
(Bloomberg) — Turkey’s main opposition party filed a criminal complaint against top market regulators, alleging they failed to fulfill their duties by refusing to halt trading on the nation’s main stock exchange following the Feb. 6 earthquakes.
Officials at the Capital Markets Board and Borsa Istanbul have engaged in malpractice for not shutting down the exchange, as it was evident there would be high volatility and unpredictability, according to the complaint by Murat Bakan, a lawmaker of the Republican People’s Party, CHP.
The two institutions declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg on Friday.
About 382,000 investors were living in the earthquake zone, Bakan pointed out, citing custodian data. That makes up about 10% of all investor accounts nationally. Trading was halted after a massive earthquake that hit areas around Istanbul in 1999, Bakan said.
“Trading should have been suspended immediately” after the disaster struck, said Hakan Atilla, the previous chief executive of the stock exchange. “Healthy price formations are impossible in such a national calamity.”
Borsa Istanbul suspended trading until Feb. 15 on Wednesday, a decision that came only after three days of frantic action that saw the benchmark Borsa Istanbul 100 index slump 16%. Transactions on Feb. 8 were canceled, but even so, the main index erased $21 billion in market value.
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