Question about Standard Life shares

NowhereManatee

Me and my wife were long-time customers of Standard Life and received a windfall of 890 shares when they went public in 2006, and a year later a bonus of another 44 shares. This was reduced to 764 ordinary shares as a result of the consolidation in 2015. As a small shareholder we've lost about £615 in share value, and we never received a cheque to cover this loss in value, or a new certificate for the 764 shares.

Would appreciate some advice on what the next step should be, and apologies if this has been answered thousands of times before.

bowlhead99

When you say you have never received a cheque for this loss of value, how have you calculated this loss of value? And have you not been receiving dividend cheques at all?

If you had 934 shares in 2015 before the consolidation, you should have been sent some special proceeds of 73p a share which is about £682, either taxable as a dividend or a capital return (it would be the income option if you did not make a choice).

Then as a result of the fact that they had just paid out a special big chunk of cash out of the company assets which were represented by all the shares in issue, each of the old shares were not worth as much as they used to be. Investors who were used to seeing a share price of £x would see that price being 73p lower (because they had the 73p back in their own pocket) but a sudden drop like that could be confusing when trying to measure the success of the company from month to month on where its share price was.

So what the company did was consolidate the shares so that you only had 9/11ths as many shares which should mean the value of the shares would be 11/9ths higher than it would have been if the 73p had just been lopped off the price of the shares. An investor, as long as they received their £682 dividend distribution, would be neutral on the whole deal and would not need any further cash payments to maintain their overall value.

Since that point, the company's post-consolidation share price has dropped for unrelated reasons from about a fiver to about 3.60. That's not something they are going to write you a cheque for.

So, not sure what you are missing. Are you saying you never got the 73p/share payout? If so, follow up with standard life's registrar, via the investor relations pages of their website. A FAQ on the share consolidation process is here http://www.standardlife.com/sites/dotcom/library/UKQA15.pdf

You don't really need a new share certificate to replace the old one, because everyone knows that 11 'old' shares are worth 9 'new' ones. A share certificate is just to certify how many shares are shown in your name on the company register at the point the certificate is printed, but the company register maintained by SL's registrar will be the actual true record. The maths to say how many 'new' shares has already been done at SL's end for the purposes of paying you ongoing dividends and giving you the correct voting rights, and so the discrepancy on your certificate will just get fixed next time you sell some.