FILE PHOTO: Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) President and CEO Koichiro Miyahara attends a news conference after trading in all shares was suspended due to a technical problem, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Tokyo, Japan October 1, 2020. REUTERS/Issei Kato
November 30, 2020
TOKYO (Reuters) – Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) President and Chief Executive Officer Koichiro Miyahara has decided to resign over a system failure that caused an unprecedented all-day suspension on the bourse last month, the Nikkei business daily reported on Monday.
Japan’s financial regulator said it had issued a business improvement order to TSE and its operator Japan Exchange Group (JPX) over the disruption.
The outage on Oct. 1 cast a shadow on the exchange’s credibility as Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga prioritised digitalisation, and dented Tokyo’s hopes of boosting the country’s standing as a global financial centre.
“The all-day trading halt at Tokyo bourse significantly undermines investors’ trust,” the Financial Services Agency said in a statement, noting the exchange needs to clarify where responsibility lies.
The Nikkei business daily earlier on Monday reported Miyahara would resign and that Akira Kiyota, Chief Executive of JPX, would stay on and serve as president of the Tokyo bourse.
JPX declined to comment. Kiyota is due to hold a news conference at 3:30 p.m. (0630 GMT).
Financial regulators last month conducted an on-site inspection on the exchange to investigate the causes behind the outage.
The all-day trading halt was the worst-ever outage since the world’s third-largest equity market switched to all-electronic trading in 1999. The exchange previously said the glitch was the result of a hardware problem at the bourse’s “Arrowhead” trading system and a subsequent failure to switch to a back-up.
The exchange had also said a newly formed committee would draw up fresh guidelines by next March on how to restart trading following a system failure.
(Reporting by Takashi Umekawa; Writing by Chang-Ran Kim; Editing by Kim Coghill and Sam Holmes)
