The Regional Council of Public Savings and Financial Markets (Crepmf) organized an awareness session on the uniform law on stock exchange offences within the West African Monetary Union (Umoa). This workshop held on Friday, July 15, 2022, at Azalaï hotel gathered the actors of the legal sector of Benin.

The establishment of this mechanism aims at providing the community space with a consensual legal framework for the repression of criminal behaviors on the regional financial market of the WAMU through the through the enactment of a set of sanctions that are both dissuasive and proportionate to the seriousness of the offenses in order to guarantee investors a transparent and honest market. This text, adopted by the WAMU Council of Ministers during its session held in September 2021, provides the Union with a set of specific criminal rules common to all eight countries.cific and common to the eight member countries that can repress and punish behaviors likely to disrupt the normal functioning and therefore the development of the regional financial market.

For Ripert BOSSOUKPE, Secretary of Crepmf, the workshop marks the first stage of awareness raising days on the Uniform Law on stock market offences within WAMU. According to him, this workshop aims at familiarizing market players as well as justice professionals with the provisions of the Uniform Law. Thus, the types of offences that can be committed on the financial market as well as the measures applicable to stock market offences were presented to the participants.

"In view of the role that this market plays in the financing of our economies and the changes underway, it was imperative to have this legal instrument to strengthen its credibility, prevent financial crime and punish offenders.It was imperative to have this legal instrument in order to reinforce its credibility, prevent financial delinquency and punish offenders if necessary, in a context of recrudescence of investment offers in various forms and often illusory addressed to the populations", declared the Minister of Sports, Oswald HOMEKY, representing the Minister of Justice and Legislation, Sévérin QUENUM. It was therefore an opportunity for legal professionals, market players and members of the judiciary to become aware of this Uniform Act and to be its ambassadors with a view to promoting the emergence of a stock exchange criminal law for our financial market.