The Lemon Fool

Hi all,

New user here and while I have started to "dabble" in shares and investment, I am still relatively a baby hoping to learn!
However...my query is something unrelated to me but old certificates and their validity.

The story goes, back in the 90's, family had lots of issues and parents split up with the kids ending up with the mother. Fast forward to 2022 and a mass clean-up of mothers house produced a number of certificates.

Some addressed to the dad so these are most likely to be binned as a number of these seem to also have a "Sold" page with it though unknown whether they relate to the certificates or other.

1. Some address to the mother- these we are interested in
2. Some addressed to the mother mother - These we are interested in too as both parties are still alive.
3. Some addressed to one of the parents but then with reference to one of the children (ie parent 1 - Child 1, Parent 1, Child 2 etc). I assume these are probably no good without the parent in question
4. And of course those addressed to the father which we believe are sold or given he has been awol for 20+ years, no good.

The ones we are primarily interested in range over a number of companies:

1. Scottish Hydro-Electric plc (which I believe went to SSE and now OVO?)
2. British Telecommunications plc
3. Powergen plc (Now EON?)
4. London Electricity plc (Now EDF?)
5. Eastern Electricity plc (TXU Europe?)

All seem to be early 90's

Other information I seem to find is references to The Share Centre who I will contact tomorrow as they seem to be around and Westons Securities who I can't find reference to)

The only other reference seem to have a bunch of "Tax Vouchers" but these seem to be mostly in the dads name but would be good to know what they're for.

We know the dad was a master forger with signatures etc so chances are most/all are already sold under deceit but who then the sold pieces of paper only seem to be those under his name so maybe not.

Happy to go through an agent if the likes of Equiniti or similar can help either determine whether they're still valid/and can be "cashed in" or if the paperwork is good for the recycling gods - just really need a steer in the first instance.

Thanks in advance

If you have recent (last 3 or 4 years) correspondence (e.g. dividend tax vouchers) for any of them, then that's a good start. The best place to find out is probably the company share registrar (e.g. Equiniti or Computershare), but they can be awfully picky about data protection etc, if you are not the named person on the share register, they will not disclose anything.

Tax vouchers show the amount of tax deducted from a dividend. Deducting tax at source on dividends mostly stopped a few years ago. However, the tax vouchers will be useful to you as they may give a clue to the recent (or not!) existence/ownership of a shareholding. If you have a share certificate (or a recent tax voucher) with a named person on it, that's helpful, compared to a shareholding that's in a stockbroker (e.g. Share Centre) nominee, as the latter will probably be very hard to find on the share register, and you'll be reliant on the e.g. Share Centre's admin.

If you have a share certificate shown as parent / child1, this may be a holding for a child, as children under 18 cannot hold shares, but they are usually held by a parent "in trust" for the child. But that's just a guess.

HTH; IANAL.

We had a similar problem. I looked at bank account statements to see if divis had been coming in. They had from a successor company to ICI (AstraZeneca) and to British Telecommunications plc (BT Group).

Kantwebefriends wrote:I looked at bank account statements to see if divis had been coming in. .

As a general rule, if shares are owned, dividends are paid. So work backwards from payments received.

OIECS/Unit Trusts might be more problematic when the dividends are automatically reinvested, but even there the annual tax statement may be helpful.

Just FYI:
Share certificates are not bearer bonds. Shares are owned by the person on the register, NOT the person who holds the certificate. So share certificates are not, and have never been, “valid”. And frequently they are replaced during takeovers, consolidations etc. The companies never ask for the old ones back! So many shareholders have loads of old certificates lying around.

As other have said, you can look for recent dividend payments suggesting continued share ownership, or you can trace-forward from elderly certificates. But ultimately, the only way to know is to contact the registrar. Even for a share certificate issued yesterday!

Gryff

Half of my share holdings are in certificate form . I eventually opened a Stocks and Shares ISA with IWEB about 18 months ago . I suppose I will eventually transfer the certificates over to them , when I can be bothered . I would think that if you send proof of your ID and maybe death certificates to the Registrars you would be able to either sell the share holdings , or transfer them into your name free of charge .