Daily Guide – Foreign investors in the Nigerian capital market withdrew some $4 billion from the Nigeria Stock Exchange and precipitated its steep decline, the Exchange’s Director General, Professor Ndidi Okereke-Onyiuke has said.

Appearing  before the joint Senate Committees on Finance, Capital Market, Banking, Insurance and other financial institutions investigating the economic crisis facing the country, Mrs Okereke-Onyiuke said in 2008, foreign hedge fund managers went out and withdrew their investment of N556 billion due to the financial crisis in their countries.

Okereke, who was responding to questions posed to her by Senators as to the reasons why share prices in the stock market kept crashing despite assurances by financial managers that the fundamentals of the nation’s economy are strong, said hedge fund managers were shocked by the global financial crisis and quickly withdrew their investments from Nigeria and took it back to their countries.

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Bloomberg – Salida Capital Corp., a Toronto-based hedge-fund manager with assets of about C$900 million ($834 million), halted redemptions on three of its funds after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Lehman acted as prime broker for Salida’s C$157 million Global Opportunity Fund, the C$85 million Global Prospector Fund and the C$64 million Global Arbitrage Fund, Managing Director Courtenay Wolfe said in an interview.

Salida is one of dozens of investment managers worldwide whose Lehman prime-brokerage accounts were frozen when the New York-based company filed for protection from creditors on Sept. 15. Large securities firms such as Lehman typically offer prime brokerage services to hedge funds and professional investors that borrow stock and cash to invest.

“The Lehman issue is something we are navigating through,” Wolfe said today in a telephone interview from Toronto. “We are working very hard to get the securities back for our firm and our investors because we believe they are rightfully and legally ours.”

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