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©New Straits Times (Used by permission)
by Rupinder Singh

KUALA LUMPUR: Bursa Malaysia Bhd experienced the worst systems breakdown in its history when a faulty computer hard disk forced trading to be suspended for the whole of yesterday.

An early morning computer glitch, said to be a "hardware failure", affected trading on the equities market.

However, the derivatives and bond markets, clearing, settlement and depository system were unaffected, its chief chief executive officer Datuk Yusli Mohamed Yusoff told a packed press conference called at 5.30pm yesterday.

Yusli was confident that trading would resume today.

The last time the exchange experienced a trading system failure was in June 2000 when trading was halted for half a day. "Since then, and even before then, our system has been very reliable," he said.

Bursa Malaysia said it lost about RM450,000 in potential clearing fees yesterday, based on the average value of stocks traded for the last two weeks.

Asked if Bursa could guarantee that yesterday's incident would not happen gain, Yusli said: "I think you would find that no exchange in the world would guarantee that there would be no trading glitches.

"This will happen from time to time; it's part of the business," he added.

Yusli also denied that trading was suspended due to a directive.

"I will be very happy to deny that. I've just gone through with you what happened today and I don't think there was anything in there to show that there was any phone call coming from upstairs. It's purely a technical issue," he said.

Bursa's trading hardware is supplied by Hewlett-Packard Co, according to Yew Kim Keong, chief information officer of Bursa.

Bursa hopes to launch a new equities trading system in the next two months. It has been working on it with US-based Atos Euronext Market Solutions Ltd. It will commence trials in the coming weekend.

Yusli said the exchange would resume all its processes and procedures to ensure if such an event occurred again it would be able to rely on a back-up system a lot faster.

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