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Johannesburg - The share price of Africa’s biggest mobile network MTN had its biggest intraday fall on Friday amid a Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) probe announcement.
The JSE on Friday confirmed at 12:57 via an email statement that it’s investigating MTN for the timing of a SENS announcement on October 26.
On Monday, MTN issued a SENS announcement concerning a $5.2bn fine in Nigeria for the alleged failure to disconnect five million unregistered SIM cards in that country.
However, MTN drew fire from some analyst quarters for not disclosing the market update soon enough to shareholders.
Subsequently, the JSE’s senior technical advisor for market regulation, Peter Redman, said in a Friday announcement that the stock exchange is now “looking into trades that took place before the announcement in order to determine if there is any evidence of possible insider trading”.
READ: JSE to investigate MTN for possible insider trading
At 13:00 MTN shares were trading at R158.98, but by by 13:38 the price had fallen to R156.71. By 14:08 on Friday, the price rebounded to R157.65. On the day, MTN's share price was still up by over 2% after 14:00.
Ever since MTN’s announcement of the Nigerian fine on Monday October 26, the share price fell about 20% from its five day trading peak of R192.45 on Friday October 23 at 13:30 to a close of R155.39 on October 29, wiping over R60bn off its market value.
On Friday morning, ratings agencies such as Standard & Poor's had downgraded MTN's ratings.
MTN was not willing to comment yet on the JSE announcement and instead pointed to an earlier SENS announcement in which it said it was cooperating with the stock exchange.
