Shares and inheritance

[Oakey]

My grandfather died recently, he left my brother all his stocks and shares (inc 200 or so Diageo shares at £21 a pop!). His paperwork is a mess so it's a nightmare finding anything. How do we go about transferring the shares to my brother?

And if anyone is wondering, I got his battered 1996 Ford Fiesta full of fag ash, for which I got the princely sum of £50 for scrap. #winning

[Oakey]

Right but who do we speak to in order to do that? We don't even know what other shares there are yet as he wasn't... organised. No idea how he originally bought them, whether he had a broker or what. We only know about the Diageo ones because there was recent paperwork for a dividend.

[Oakey]

Yeah, that poor sucker is me. His estate is under the IHT limit and he paid all his bills on time, he had no debts bar £300 on a credit card which is in the process of being paid off (his bank will just take it from the savings). There's only a handful of beneficiaries and the will is relatively straightforward. There's just things like utilities to resolve.

Unfortunately he didn't think to list what companies he'd invested in. We think there's some stock in Southern Electric and a Spanish energy company.

[Oakey]

We're pretty certain it's under £325,000, it's highly unlikely he's going to be one of these people who invested in MS or Apple back in the day and has been sat on millions of pounds.

I guess it's possible but it's a bit optimistic.

[Oakey]

He has a bungalow that he let fall into ruin, his neighbour died last year and that property sold for £69k at auction and that was in a better state. We'll get a valuation but I don't think it's going to be a concern valuewise!

Cheers for the other info, should be very helpful in helping track things down.

From what we've found so far it looks like there's

200ish shares in Diageo
100 shares in Southern Electric
A dividend cheque for about £5 from Iberdrola
Maybe some HBOS shares, no idea what's become of those now?

Some money in savings and the bank (again, well under the limit).

The battered Fiesta

A house full of junk (not unearthed any lost treasure unfortunately)

Yet to find evidence of other stocks and shares.

He's sort of thrown me in at the deep end!

[Oakey]

I thought this might be the case, should be fun trying to find out if he has a Lloyds cert instead

[Oakey]

They came by cheque it appears, at least that's how the Diageo and Iberdrola ones were paid. I found some paperwork for a company called Thus which I'll have to look in to, don't know if these are existing or something that's been cashed in already.

[Oakey]

Yeah it's SSE as far as I can tell, I don't know if the Thus Group stuff is related to any of that or something else entirely.

His wife died 10 years ago speedyguy.

[Oakey]

Thanks, might come in handy if we find anything that turns out to be worth thousands