What, if anything, can I do?

Malthusian

konark wrote: »

Oh and you should have received the money when you were 18, whoever the trustee was law wasn't his specialist subject.

Not at all. If the OP had been precociously clued up about trust law he could have claimed the money at 18. He didn't.

Malthusian

SevenOfNine wrote: »

15 years doesn't seem that long for records to be destroyed, microfilm & all that.

Six years is how long the Financial Conduct Authority requires you to keep the records of the investment side of things (the legal / trust side is another). Microfilm is not the problem - the problem is circumstances like these when the practice has been taken over by another. Trying to find a 15-year-old file in some other firm's archive is no easy task.

£20,000 invested in the FTSE All Share Index in 1991 with dividends reinvested would have been worth £48,240 in 2002, despite the horrific timing of the OP's 21st birthday (it would have been about £71,000 a couple of years earlier). Of course the trustees wouldn't have invested 100% in a FTSE All Share Index tracker and it's possible the trustees might have made a loss in that time, if they were exceedingly incompetent - but that potentially would have given rise to a different claim.

But either way it is too long ago and without evidence to the contrary the current incarnation of the solicitors can simply say that it was a long time ago and the OP probably did get everything that was due (one way or another) and has forgotten.

When I was a child I inherited some money from my grandfather which was held in trust - the whole lot was (in accordance with the terms of the trust) spent by my parents on school fees. Given the choice I might have preferred to go to the local comp and take the money, but I was a minor, so I wasn't.