Smart money talks

It had to be one of Lebanon’s top resolutions for 2016 when Banque du Liban Governor Riad Salameh pledged at the BDL Accelerate event in December to see to the establishment of an electronic stock exchange for small and medium enterprises. “Our aim for the year 2016 is to succeed in the launching of an electronic trading platform,” Salameh said in his speech to open the event, and told Executive after his speech that the prospectus for the new exchange will be circulated in January. The creation of the electronic exchange for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is an important proposition and one that deserves to be monitored religiously, particularly after announcements for realizing the project within 2015 came to a quiet demise – possibly because the BDL governor had vocalized the project idea last year without any regulatory groundwork having been implemented by the Capital Markets Authority. This is