Saudi Arabia’s Capital Markets Authority (CMA) is instructing international banks to publicly disclose financial statements for the first time as the kingdom seeks to boost transparency, according to a report in Bloomberg.
The Bloomberg report says that companies under the regulation of the CMA in Saudi Arabia must publish the financial information on their websites beginning April 1st. That policy change was made in a response to emailed questions to the CMA by Bloomberg.
As Saudi leaders push toward opening up the Kingdom’s economy to wider foreign investment, fighting corruption and providing greater transparency for foreign investors is a high priority. Transparency was a theme mentioned twice by HRH Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in an interview with the Economist in January.
It is also a theme at the top of the priority list of Mohammed Al-Jadaan, the chairman of the CMA. Al-Jadaan was appointed by Saudi Arabia’s King Salman last year as part of a shake up of agency heads in the Kingdom.
“One of our objectives is to ensure we are included in international indices, and we will obviously, in a prudent way, look to ways to ensure we convince them that the market is ready to be placed in their indices,” Mr Al-Jadaan told Reuters in an interview at the market regulator’s offices in Riyadh.
“We will do whatever is needed from a regulatory point of view to be ready.”
Al-Jadaan will address the Euromoney conference in Riyadh in May this year.
