Shares and inheritance

[Red Devil]

Oakey said:

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.

All these different company names with Scottish in them is confusing matters.

See my earlier post. Thus has no connection to SSE. It was demerged from Scottish Power. The subsequent trail is:
Thus -> Cable & Wireless plc which then split into Cable and Wireless Worldwide plc & Cable & Wireless Communications plc
Cable and Wireless Worldwide plc -> Vodafone. Cable & Wireless Communications plc -> Liberty Global.

Southern Electric plc + Scottish Hydro plc -> Scottish and Southern Energy plc -> SSE plc

Scottish Power -> Iberdrola (in 2006).

HTH.

Since deregulation the UK energy and telecoms industries resemble an elaborate game of musical chairs.

[Simpo Two]

Oakey said:

We only know about the Diageo ones because there was recent paperwork for a dividend.

I'm no expert at share matters but would it be safe to assume that if he had shares in something, he'd receive such a statement from all of them every six months? In other words, even if destroyed everything before he died, in six months you'd have the set again, as it were.

[TooMany2cvs]

Simpo Two said:

Oakey said:

We only know about the Diageo ones because there was recent paperwork for a dividend.

I'm no expert at share matters but would it be safe to assume that if he had shares in something, he'd receive such a statement from all of them every six months? In other words, even if destroyed everything before he died, in six months you'd have the set again, as it were.

Not all shares pay a dividend every six months.

But there should certainly be annual communications, relating to the AGM as well as annual reports etc.

[Ozzie Osmond]

A couple of further comments,

• Often people move house, fail to notify their change of address and lose touch with investments,
• following dematerialisation some people opt out of receiving the hard copy report and accounts etc to save costs.

[Jockman]

What's dematerialisation, Ozzie?

[Ozzie Osmond]

Jockman said:

What's dematerialisation, Ozzie?

Nowadays all major public company share registers are fully electronic. When paper share certificates ceased to be valid 20 years ago the process was known as dematerialisation into CREST (Certificateless Registry for Electronic Share Transfer). So even if some oldster still has share certificates in a drawer those certificates are no longer "valid legal title" to the shares. The legal title is to an equivalent dematerialised share represented by an entry in the Registrar's electronic database.

Typically a modern shareholder will be a client of a broker or platform. That broker or platform runs its own electronic system (a sub-register you might say) and from time to time they exchange information with the main Registrar to make sure the main register held by the Registrar is up-to-date for dividend payments, shareholder circulars etc.

Some outline information on this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CREST_(securities_de...

In a way it's a bit like the MOT system becoming fully computerised, except it's in the private sector. The print-out you get after an MOT is no longer "the MOT certificate" and any print-out of your shareholdings is no longer a "Share Certificate".

For the avoidance of doubt none of this applies to small private companies. It's just big ones like Barclays, Tesco etc on the Stock Exchange.

[Ozzie Osmond]

....well either that, or this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDFI87zn9t0