Lost BT Share Certs.

alandav123

Hi all, I have moved a a lot in and out the country, lived in Norway 10 years and to cut a long story short I now find myself with a 347 share holding in BT but cannot find all the certs but have lots of the yearly additional share allocation which I opted for. The original batch of almost 200 shares was documented in 2000 but equitini tell me that share cert which I still have is worthless as new ones were issued in 2001 when I was living in Norway. I have contacted equitini and registered on their web site. Can someone offer up the cheapest easiet way to sell my complete holding and draw a line under it. I have tried to look round but there seem to be so many different ways to do things, its confusing to a novice share seller like myself. Regards Alan

xylophone

http://www.shareview.co.uk/4/Info/Portfolio/Default/en/Home/Shareholders/Pages/LostCerts.aspx

alandav123

Hi there thanks again..... do I really need to pay for missing certs, then pay for a letter of indemnity, then pay for countersignature, then dealing costs? It seems inordinately complicted expensive and long winded. perhaps this is the only way buts its a long way from the stereo typical image of a share dealer buying and selling on a whim....this is long way from that lol
Alan

bowlhead99

alandav123 wrote: »

Hi there thanks again..... do I really need to pay for missing certs, then pay for a letter of indemnity, then pay for countersignature, then dealing costs? It seems inordinately complicted expensive and long winded.

The short answer to the above is "yes"!

You claim to still be the owner of the shares but you don't have all your paperwork and hadn't given a forwarding address to the registrar for them to keep your certificates up to date when you were out of the country, so you don't have current versions of the certificates for the latest shares that are actually in issue by the company.

So you are left in a position where you say you own the shares and perhaps the company's share register also says you own the shares, but perhaps the shares have already been sold to someone else in some sort of fraudulent transaction, or you yourself have have transferred them to a friend and there is a timing difference between that happening and documentation reaching the registrar, creating a risk for any broker selling shares now under your say-so. Therefore there is administration and indemnity insurance involved with someone letting you deal without your paperwork that says you're allowed to deal.

And once you have the paperwork and are practically able to deal, you can't deal without dealing costs - someone has to handle the transaction and match your sell order with someone elses' buy order on the stock market that moves several times in a fraction of a second, and do the related admin.

perhaps this is the only way buts its a long way from the stereo typical image of a share dealer buying and selling on a whim....this is long way from that lol
Alan

The people who buy and sell on a whim, maybe multiple times a minute, have already transferred all their shares to their brokers, and the broker holds them electronically in his own name on behalf of the customer. So if they need to dump 100 shares onto the market they can do that instantly because the broker knows they're good for the shares - he already has them! Or perhaps he will say you can mail him the certificates which you already have, and he'll set up the transaction to clear in 5 days giving you time to mail him the certificates.

Likewise they can buy on a whim and have the broker deal for them, adding the shares to the virtual account with him and deducting cash he's already holding for them (or else, he'll extend them credit if they have that relationship, to avoid having so much cash on hand).

In your case you don't have certificates that you can send in to a broker. You can get the registrar to issue them to you again properly (after paying all the admin / indemnity fees/ insurances etc) and then you could go set up an account with a broker who might have lower fees than what the registrar is quoting you. But the simplest way to just 'draw a line under it' is to just follow the registrar's standard process for whatever they do for people in your position, and pay whatever fees they want to charge.

Now you know how it works, you'll probably take care not to lose the paperwork or remember to keep your details updated, to stop it happening with other shares in the future - or just go electronic like most of us. Not much comfort for you right now but a good lesson for others