Vietnamese securities firm, Vietcap Securities, has notified the Securities Commission that the Netherlands’ Aegon Custody BV has failed to make payment on a trade completed on its behalf by Vietcap on December 17. Vietcap is currently footing the VND 4 billion bill.
For context, changes to the Securities Law via Circular 68, that kicked in at the start of November, overturned previous regulations that required foreign investors to make payment at time of purchase. The change has made it so that now the responsibility for the payment falls on the securities firm conducting the trade.
This was actually a significant change in that the former pre-pay requirement was one of several criteria preventing the local stock market from being upgraded from a frontier to a secondary emerging market. With this in mind, this latest development speaks to the practical outcomes on the ground and how the Securities Commission responds, if it chooses to do so, could speak to how further changes to the Securities Law might be made moving forward.
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